Jane Masons Creations
Jane aims to create intimate theatrical spaces in time where both fragility and strength are manifest, where the personal becomes enlarged, objects operate as metaphor, multiple narratives emerge and where the unexpected happens.
Drawing on a personalised movement vocabulary, Jane’s solo practice is about finding connections in both improvised and structured performance. By deliberately confronting the unknown she challenges herself to remain as much as possible in real-time intuitive contact with her dancing, finding information in the detail of moment-to-moment discovery.
Life Forces (2012-2015)
Duet created in collaboration with Phil Smith.
Dramaturg David Williams.
Researched and developed with funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Supported by Swindon Dance, The Place, ICIA University of Bath, Pavilion Dance South West, The Point, South East Dance, Exeter City Council and Kaleider.
"Jane Mason is an artist of rare and quiet originality. Life Forces her powerfully intimate new work is brimming with invention, secrets and play. It is a deeply affecting and masterful theatrical miniature."
Wayne McGregor CBE
With its initial trigger in some boxes of photographic slides taken by her father some years ago, LIFE FORCES develops this work of mining, uncovering, transposing and inviting, and opens up new landscapes of be/longing. Developed in close collaboration with film maker Magali Charrier, writer-performer Phil Smith, visual artist Sophia Clist and dramaturg David Williams, Life Forces offers a meditation on memory’s place in the face of uncertain futures, on place and home and their resilient fragilities, on the utopian impulse to ‘build’ together and to let (it) go, on the arcing electricity of connection and the drift of dispersal, and on transformation and change as the core ground of being, the ‘life force’ that links everything and everyone.
David Willams
Download the Life Forces Tour Pack here
Life Forces has received funding from Arts Council England and is supported by Swindon Dance, The Place, ICIA University of Bath, Pavilion Dance South West, The Point, South East Dance, Exeter City Council, Exeter University and Kaleider
Singer (2011-2012)
Solo created and performed by Jane Mason.
Dramaturg David Williams.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Created at the Centre Chorégraphique National du Havre/Haute-Normandie and the Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen/Basse-Normandie in the context of the DanSCe Dialogues Project.
…I dream about the sewing machine, it was my mother’s. The weight of it, the rattle sound when she carried it, the sound of the lock. I want to open it up, to take it into a room and to make something with it....
Created in two prestigious choreographic centres in France, Jane Mason's new solo Singer unfolds, using the most minimal of means. Paying close attention to the intricate possibilities of environment, materials and structures, Jane constructs ephemeral and fragile 'homes' and 'worlds' inhabited by fragments of arrival and displacement, connection and separation, love and longing. Mysteriously, her components are organised in ways that produce feelings and suggest narratives that reverberate within us. For somehow we recognise these structures of feeling - they move us, perceptually and emotionally - and as she moves, memory stirs, and gently 'sings' us.
Singer was supported by:
Find This (2009)
Solo created and performed by Jane Mason.
Music by Karim Hadad.
Lighting by Guy Dickens.
Lone Dances II
Solo for Daniel Webb and his skate board, one of three contrasting solos created for young men.
Commissioned by South East Dance.
The Back Road (2008)
Solo adaptation of Deborah Hay’s ‘The Runner’ created and performed by Jane Mason.
Supported by Swindon Dance and Dance South West.
Come on Sun (2007) Full evening
Solo created and performed by Jane Mason.
Live music by Jules Maxwell and trombonist Hilary Jefferey.
Lighting by Lucy Carter.
Originally commissioned by The Place Prize.
Baby (2006)
Solo created and performed by Jane Mason.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Lighting by Guy Dickens.
Come on Sun (2006)
Solo created and performed by Jane Mason.
Live music by Jules Maxwell and trombonist Hilary Jefferey.
Lighting by Lucy Carter.
Commissioned by The Place Price.
The Brow (2005)
Solo created and performed by Jane Mason.
Live Piano by Jules Maxwell.
Lighting by Guy Dickens.
Marta (2004)
Solo performed by Marta Cercueira.
Choreography by Jane Mason.
Colina. (Collaboration in Arts 2004).
Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.
Red, White and Blue (2004)
Piece for pupils and PE staff from St Edmund’s School, Dover.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
In the context of Creative Roots I in partnership with Box Clever.
Sun Fast (2003)
Commission for Northern Youth Dance Company.
Piece for ten dancers.
Little Fictions (2003)
Commission for final year Bretton Hall Dance Students with projection.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Be Still I’ll Draw You (2002)
Duet with Amanda Lawrence.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Costume by Anna Fleischle.
Lighting by Drew Pautz.
Desert (2002)
Quartet.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Text by Matthew Dunster after the last writings of Michael Mason.
Costume by Anna Fleischle.
Lighting by Drew Pautz.
Commissioned by The Place.
Fall to the Land of Souls (2002)
Commission for Newcastle College HND students.
One Step after You (2002)
Commission for final year Laban Centre Students.
Peer Gynt (2001)
"...while beautifully lithe dancer Jane Mason as the Green Woman was worth half a concert programme alone." Evening Standard
Created and performed two roles ‘The Woman in Green’ and the ‘Mountain King’s Daughter’.
BBC Proms and Salzburg Festival.
Scenes (2000)
Three commissioned and performed solos by Jane Mason.
Created by choreographers Wayne McGregor, Charles Linehan and Director of Fecund Theatre, John Keates.
Lighting by Lucy Carter.
A Monologue about Shipwrecks (1999)
Quartet.
Live text by Matthew Dunster.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Lighting by Lucy Carter.
The Jolt (1997)
Duet with actor Dominic Coleman.
Live text by Matthew Dunster.
Music by Jules Maxwell.
Lighting by Lucy Carter.