Rachel Sparks

Written By Gem Kennedy

Something in me was ignited and I was like, “Fuck this!” - Series 1, Episode 2

In this episode of Queers & Co., I'm joined by dancer, choreographer, dynamic relationship facilitator and heart centred dance & embodiment educator, Rachel Sparks.

We chat about gender-neutral partner dancing, the importance of consent, the experience of making the short film, Swivel, as well as the lack of representation of LGBTQ+ folks in mainstream shows like Strictly Come Dancing.

If you haven't already, be sure to join our Facebook community to connect with other like-minded queer folks and allies.

Find out more about Gem Kennedy and Queers & Co.

Podcast Artwork by Gemma D'Souza

Resources

In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

Full Transcription

Gem: Hi Rachel. Thanks so much for joining me. How are you?

Rachel: Yeah, no problem. I'm great. I'm feeling good today. Having had a nice workout this morning, I'm feeling really kind of full of energy.

Gem: Awesome. so there were quite a few things that I'd love to chat to you about particularly around your work with gender neutral dancing. But for anyone who doesn't know your work, I wonder if you could just tell us a bit more about what it is that you do before we start?

Rachel: Yeah, sure. So most of my business is teaching people to dance. And my focus has always been on how to make dance a safe place for more people. And in particular, I, as part of the queer community, I saw that there was a need for a safer space, particularly for partner dancing. As I was a Latin and ballroom dancer, I decided to start teaching and to find a way to teach it so that the gender roles were just not an issue and a problem. So that's, that's how gender neutral partner dancing and came about. There are other people doing it. I just wanted to put my spin on it. Another important thing for me in that is creating good spaces that help people to be autonomous in their bodies and feel that they're making choices rather than just being told what to do. So consent is really big in my classes and I try to work mindfulness and self-awareness into my teaching as well. That's the bulk of my work but I also teach couples to prepare for their weddings - queer couples, but also straight couples and always given the option to swap roles or mess it up a bit. I like to mess with the traditions. And I also coach as well now. I've trained in Embodiment principles. I now coach people on basically learning how to listen to themselves, to their bodies and their intuition better. For me it's about freedom, finding freedom in themselves and freedom in their choices.

Gem: Yeah and you can see how all of those things link together really well. I know on your website, you mentioned that other people are doing it as well, but this is your spin, but you said that there are records going back to the 1980s of gender neutral dancing.

Rachel: Yeah. So it's been called same-sex dancing really. And it was out of necessity. People like Jacky Logan who's just recently been given an Honour in the New Year Honours List for her work. Her and Ralf Schiller did this incredible thing of starting same-sex dance classes for queer people, for gay and lesbian people mostly, cause that was the language that people had at the time. They wanted to be able to dance with their own partners so they created spaces for that. That was a risky time to do that as well. They're the pioneers really. We've shifted in culture and in society in lots of ways but there's still a need. For me it's a slightly different angle because just linguistically saying 'same-sex' you're also assuming gender, you're assuming gay or lesbian really. I was thinking about the broader community and particularly because my personal partners have been trans or non-binary and I was thinking about what makes these spaces unsafe. Even the same sex spaces are they unsafe or at least they don't feel necessarily inclusive or welcoming? Not to diss people who are still doing those things. For me I guess it's very present in my life. I surround myself with great people of different experiences and different gender expressions. So it became a priority for me.

Gem: Yeah. And I really liked what you said about who you dance with doesn't have to represent your sexuality because historically, I guess one, we assume everyone's straight when you see a straight couple dancing and two, there's often some kind of romantic implication by dancing with someone rather than dancing alone and to take the kind of romance out of it and to actually... I think you talk about it's being a conversation rather than anything else. And that seems different as well.

Rachel: Yeah... It can be both though. You can think about it as being like a ritual. It can be a dating ritual to dance together. And at one point in time, you could look back tribally, that's important in some cultures to dance and do ritual. But it's not just about mating, it's also about creating connection and keeping community alive. I think it's just the sexualization of things that we just do in our society at the moment... I don't want to take away from the fact that actually it can be incredibly bonding and it can be useful to people who are in romantic connection to try dancing as a way of exploring their relationship. And that's something I offer as well. And... I guess it's not but, it's and... there's real value in us as individuals exploring how we communicate with other people. Dancing really shows stuff up. It's super obvious as soon as you start looking at it as to how people communicate and partner dancing requires this listening and this paying attention to ourselves and to another person. For me there's value in it across different configurations if you like. So the configuration of a couple finding value for their relationship but also the configuration of just an individual person exploring what it's like or what their habits are in relationship to another person and that could implicate or impact positively how they then think about their work colleagues or how they communicate with their friends, do you see what I mean? It's about relationship in general and how we relate. It's what I'm super curious about and what I've been exploring. So I diverted a bit but there's the potential for romantic connection to be explored and really nourished by partner dancing. And it's not the only thing cause any person we come into contact with we are in some kind of relationship with straight away.

Gem: Yeah. That makes so much sense. And so with that in mind, I know that you've obviously been dancing since you were really young. I think you said age 3. I guess it's been a real kind of evolvement of different dance styles and different things that you've been exposed to. But what do you feel you've learned about yourself through dance?

Rachel: Mmm. Oh my gosh. Yeah, that's a great question. It's really interesting cause I learnt some very classical styles like ballet and then I also did partner dancing but in a different dance school and they had a very different emphasis. Up until about the age of 17, I was very used to just being told what to do and instructed. I became very, very disciplined as a person. It really shaped me as a person. It was only when I was about 17, I had this massive change in my life. I had a bereavement, my brother died and everything in my perception shifted. What mattered to me changed and it really woke me up to realising that I had for so long just been good, done the good thing or followed instructions and always been very well behaved. And something in me was ignited and I was like, "Fuck this."

I didn't want to be bullied and I felt that some dance teachers do have a tendency to push their students in unhealthy ways. So that was a big wake up call and I had started to do contemporary dance at school. I was very lucky. I just went to an average comprehensive school in Kent, in Gravesend. We were very lucky to have a great dance department. And my dance teacher at the time was super encouraging of me taking contemporary dance further. Because it's a thinking style of dance, well it depends who's teaching you but for us it was about becoming thinking dancers, not just vessels to move to someone else's goal. So that shifted a lot for me and basically I decided to focus on contemporary after that and I went to uni and studied that and then that became almost therapeutic to me because I was dealing with this massive bereavement and I'd moved away. I went to Leeds Uni and that particular course was really good at exploring dance beyond the elite. We really looked at the value and the healing properties of dance. They didn't use that word, but that's how I see it now is the value of dance to everyone and how it can be accessible to pretty much everyone.

Gem: I was just going to say that ties in so well with what you said earlier about consent, because quite often in spaces, particularly as children who've been to dance classes. I started dancing at the age of three and I remember just not feeling like I had a choice a lot of the time and I thought that was normal obviously because quite often in patriarchal societies that's how people are brought up. Right? You do what you're told. But as I got older, and I guess now when I look back, I think how much enjoyment was taken out of it just because I didn't consent to what I was doing quite often. And I wonder when you bring that into your classes that people come to, how is that received that people have control over whether they say yes or no when a partner asks them to dance or whether they can choose to move their bodies in certain ways or choose not to.

Rachel: Yeah, I've had feedback about it that it's unique and it's very helpful. This is the reason why some people come to my classes, it's because they get the choice. And most people still say yes, but then if they're saying yes from a place of autonomy and "I am choosing this for me because this is what I want to do", it's so different to "I'm doing this because the teacher told me". The quality of that in ourselves. Basically for me its about self-love. It's such an overused thing right now but how can we be kinder to ourselves? How can we be way more compassionate to ourselves cause I really do think we make better choices that way in life. And we are fed so much shit all over the place from all angles, from social media mostly and TV and newspapers and everything. We're just so consumed by all of this and we consume it without even realising we're doing that. So for me, if we can come back to our bodies and come back to what's really true and what our choices are, then we may start to wake up a bit more to where we're actually making conscious choices or where we're just habitually going along with life. It does feel like there's a shift going on right now. Just the very fact that we've got Extinction Rebellion, we've got young people, young kids going out to protest. It's like they're taking control. It really feels like there's a shift going on because we have to, because we're destroying our planet this way. This feels like it's beyond the individual. It's broader than that for me.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely. I don't think I told you, but I have two children and they're home educated for the very same reasons and they're involved in a very good consent-based project that I'm going to speak to the Founder of in a couple of weeks. But it's all about the children. Making a choice and choosing what they opt into and what they choose not to do rather than in a school environment where you know they often don't have choices. And I think young people actually realising that their consent is a thing that they have ownership over. I guess that's not really something that our generation or older generations realised. That's a really powerful, powerful thing and hopefully a powerful tool for change.

Rachel: Exactly. And thinking back to the original question that you asked me, I had some lovely words come from one of my students the other day. Unprompted she just shared something and it really touched me and it was just that she had come to my dance classes because she wanted to explore a connection with people but also our connection to our body. And even though the dancing has been super valuable and she's enjoyed the dancing, you can see that as the external, the aesthetic. The most valuable thing has been what's been going on internally and what she's learning about herself. And I was like, "Woah..."

Gem: It's everything hoped for!

Rachel: Exactly! It's just perfect and I think that's the thing I realise that I almost used to separate these interests that I had. I teach dancing to people and I was always so interested in how do we reconnect to our bodies. I always felt like they were somehow separate and now of course they're not. Dancing is a route to that. It's a pathway to that. So I realised I could really combine and... even though I really simply promote my classes as a dance class with these ethics that are really holding it up - the ethics of consent and the focus of having mindful approach - , it's actually having effect that people are having deeper experiences than I could anticipate and it is wonderful.

Gem: Yeah. And I guess just holding a space for those people to come. I know you mentioned about your classes being open to everybody, for example, so every shape of body, every size, every gender or no gender. And just making a space where people can reconnect to their bodies is really powerful because quite often with things like diet culture, we don't have that space. And people who exist in larger bodies often don't feel like... It would probably be the last choice for a lot of people to choose to go to a dance class. Because in the past they may have found that really problematic or traumatic in different ways. But to actually have that is really radical.

Rachel: Yeah, it's super important to me. And actually I'm starting to see how other people are sharing the possibilities for safe spaces for dancing bodies, whatever the shape and whatever their experience. I'm quite interested in how I might reach more people who have found the idea of a dance class to be so, so painful. I would love to reach more people really. That's my hope because I've had discussions with friends who are fat activists and they talked about how they value what I'm doing but the process for them to get from thinking about coming to my class to actually coming to my class... there's a process there for them. I'd love to have conversations with people about what I could do more or what needs to be there, what needs to be supported so that more people with different bodies can come and feel safe. Just as I talk about it, I feel this sense in my heart. I feel sad that so many people get restricted by what pains they've been through and the traumas they've experienced from the way society treats people with difference. Yeah, it ignites my mission even more whenever I think about it.

Gem: Yeah. I don't know if you know Dr. Charlotte Cooper, do you know her?

Rachel: Not sure. Tell me...

Gem: She was my podcast guest last week. She is a fat activist and over recent years, part of her work has been around dance and she did an incredible dance at the Wellcome Trust. They had a horrible exhibition on obesity. So her and her dance partner did this amazing dance in the hall, I think where the sculpture was. And actually since doing that, the sculpture has been removed and they've sort of re-framed how they have the exhibition. And just hearing from her what her journey around dance has been really empowering to realise that I thought at a certain age, that dance was something I had to leave behind because I was told that I was too fat to dance essentially. And so from age 13/14, I stopped but to see people like Dr. Charlotte Cooper who are doing it and who are I guess just pushing the boundaries of what people think that fat bodies can do is really, really encouraging and I think the more people hear about it, the more they'll want to explore it as well. Cause there aren't many other better ways than dance to get in touch with your body, just to move it. It's something that as fat people we're so disconnected from, you're kind of like a pair of eyes walking around in a body just seeing the outside world and not really feeling, which is I guess where our work overlaps because a lot of the work that I do is around tuning into your body and where the feelings are. And it's something that we're very often very disconnected from, aren't we?

Rachel: Totally and I think it's a symptom for many people for many different reasons. This sort of disconnection from the body. I see it in people that I know, who have experience of a trans identity or who are non-binary. There can be this experience of "my body has betrayed me somehow" and to try and reconnect and, and make friends with, with what is there, what is real but also supporting any transition that might be being made or any choice to not transition that might be being made and... It feels important for everyone that we listen in to our bodies. And for me, it's so interesting because the way I came to dance was so pushed through the aesthetic of it and now I just don't care. I just don't really care. Well, I mean beauty is a beautiful thing as well. Aesthetic beauty is lovely and creating beautiful shapes is also a nice experience. But for me, what's really super important is if we can just feel how possible things are in our bodies and look for possibility rather than restriction. And go for ease rather than force. This sort of perspective has been something I've been learning more about and experiencing myself more so in the last year or so with my mentor who is coming from a bodywork background but she's also a dancer and actor and performer and she's training in Feldenkrais technique, which is a really fascinating technique, which is all about finding more ease and finding the most efficient way of being and moving. It's incredibly pragmatic work actually. So this focus, this idea that if we can move into ease and possibility, we're actually more likely to make progress than if we're constantly forcing against something. It's a bit of a myth or it feels like it's not always true that we have to go through pain in order to change or grow.

Gem: Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds similar to flow state, for example, where rather than pushing yourself and constantly trying to... I guess obviously some discomfort in a way can be useful if it's a small amount, but not that constant push, maybe it's like a capitalist thing as well, right?! To constantly strive for better and "no pain, no gain", all that kind of crap. If you can leave that behind and actually get into the flow of what it is that you can or that you could possibly do, there's more potential there.

Rachel: Yeah. Again, it just feels more kind. Yeah and it's not true that we won't ever experience pain and we don't ever need to feel the discomfort of life sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah. It's the striving. I'm just moving away from that in my own life. Fuck, I just don't want to force myself anymore. It just doesn't feel conducive to healthy life.

Gem: Yeah, I hear that. So I know that you had a short film come out last year and it'd be great to hear about what the experience was of that. And I know you've still got some screenings coming up over the next six months. It's won loads of awards as well, which is amazing.

Rachel: Yeah, it's been fascinating really cause this came slightly out of the blue. This is with me and my partner in dance, Henri. We were dancing together for a while before this happened. It will be five years this January. Yeah, five years we've been dancing together. And we were approached by Lois Norman who's the director who's also quite new to directing. She came from a theatre background, but she changed her focus and really wanted to represent women and queer people and wanted to tell stories that aren't being told. So she basically, and she tells the story about this as well, she stalked us on Facebook in the kindest way. She was basically just watching us, following us on Facebook and Instagram and just seeing what kind of stuff we were up to and was quite fascinated by the way Henri and I dance together. Our focus is on equality in the way that we move. So when we used to compete we would swap the roles, the leading and following roles during the dance. And that then has then fed into the way in which we perform. We tell stories through dance basically. And so anyway, Lois was fascinated and approached us and said, "Hey, I've got an idea. I'd love to work with you." It took a little bit of working out because Henri's the one that holds our vision and I tend to be the one that helps the creation. I mean, we both create but Henri's the one that is our gatekeeper effectively. And they're very principled about that and it's great cause they make sure that we're doing what really is good for us and what's true for us. I'm always like, "Yeah, sure." He was like, "Hang on a minute. What are we actually being asked to do?" So we had a quite a long negotiation period before we actually started work on it. And we did agree eventually. And it was actually about this time last year that we agreed to do it and we had very limited time. There was no money in the end, but Lois basically paid all expenses for the rehearsal time and everything like that. And we made the decision that we were okay to do that because we felt like there was going to be a real benefit to doing it. And then we literally went to Wales to film just because that was the space that could be had for a weekend. We had one and a half days of filming after having seven hours of rehearsal or something like that.

Gem: Oh wow. Not long.

Rachel: No, no. It was really tight. Henri and I can work pretty quickly together... when we've got a bit of pressure as well helps. And we would work out a story, an idea. And Lois came to one of our rehearsals and helped to direct it a little bit and bring out some of the story. And in the end it was really much more focused on the narrative than it was on our dancing, which is great because that's what's important to us really. And I love it. I love the film. I couldn't be more proud of it really. Henri and I will just watch it over and over again so we're very proud to share it. And it has done really well this year. It's called Swivel. And the whole idea is that love is not based on gender. That it's not about your gender expression or your gender identity. Love is all about how you feel, what's in your heart. And the narrative of the piece starts in conflict and it looks at how you move around and negotiate and the power shifts from one of us to the other because we swap leading and following. And it's not power as an overpower. It's more like who is speaking now or who is having a sense of supporting the other. It goes from a difficult moment to the most tender moment. And it's only seven minutes long, but I feel like it tells a quite deep narrative and I actually think it speaks to people universally no matter what their identity.

Gem: Mmm. Yeah. It's amazing. I really hope to be able to see it soon. I I haven't been able to. I think it was in Brighton a while back but I couldn't get there on the date. But if people want to watch it, where can they go to look for listings of where it's going to be screened.

Rachel: The best place is probably to follow us on Instagram or on Facebook, everything gets posted on both of those. And yeah, there's definitely something coming up in London on the 15th February. And it's part of the Love Story Festival. The New Renaissance Film Festival have organized that one and we're part of that.

Gem: Okay, great. So if if anyone wants to follow you on Instagram or Facebook, it's @ironandsparks

Rachel: @ironandsparks is our tag and then there's also @swiveldancefilm

Gem: Yeah. Okay. So we'll put both of those in the show notes. Amazing and I just wondered, recently we've seen more gender neutral or same sex, however it's described, dancing on television and I just wondered what that has been like to see, because obviously potentially there aren't things like consent and other things involved in the work, but the fact that there's some representation in mainstream media, like we've got Dancing On Ice with a same-sex couple and also there was one on Strictly last year. Are you hopeful that it's gonna become more common or what do you think?

Rachel: Yeah, I mean we've been campaigning for a couple on Strictly. I say we, it's the community of same-sex dancers and equality dancers. We've been banging on at the BBC about it for a while. I think it's probably going to happen next year, or this year in fact because it's 2020 now. I keep forgetting. I think things are changing and it's good. For me it's about representation. It's so helpful I think as a queer person to see what could look like representation even if it isn't two queer people dancing together, that doesn't matter. It's more that that is an okay thing for prime time TV. It does make a difference. You hear about people talking about the first time they saw a lesbian couple on TV kissing or something like that and how that reassured them that there's not something wrong with them and I think it's still needed. Young people still need to know that they're okay. For me it's an opportunity for representation and it's a normalising of something that has been othered for so long. I think it's particularly touchy. It seems to be particularly touchy for two men to be dancing together because actually we talk about tradition and tradition being male and female dancing together and that's not really true because in the war lots of women had to dance together cause they weren't enough men around or whatever. Women dancing together doesn't threaten the patriarchy.

Gem: They could just be friends or something.

Rachel: Yeah, exactly. Because women are allowed to be soft. They're allowed to have connection with each other in that way. But the idea of two men having that connection, firstly I think takes people into thinking about sex, about queer sex. For some reason it's just immediate... You wouldn't start thinking about that when we have random politicians on Strictly Come Dancing dancing with a professional. We don't think about those two people having sex.

Gem: That's so true.

Rachel: But we do have... and I think it's this sort of fetishisation of queer people that happens particularly to men is like very, very challenging for people for some reason. And obviously I don't think people really understand why they're just disgusted or they find it so hard. They'll just say it's just not right. It's like, why? For me it's like yeah it will be challenging. It will be challenging people. And I think, well that's not a bad thing. But for me a bigger step forward will be eventually if we also see women leading men.

Gem: That would be cool.

Rachel: If we see people swapping roles, swapping leading and following because that for me is the broader, the more kind of human thing, as in we are all capable of leading and following. That's my belief. We are all capable. Yeah. It takes skill. We have to learn the skills. But being a leader does not belong to men. And following, being softer and receiving, doesn't belong to women. It's just what we have ingrained as a belief. And there's so much learning that can come from shifting ourselves into different places, into different roles. So yeah, for me, that would be the biggest step. And hopefully that might come. I know there's been in Dancing With The Stars - that's the offshoot of Strictly that's on in other countries. There were two men in the Italian version of it and they did swap roles sometimes, so that's great. That shows you that it's totally possible. And they won I think as well.

Gem: Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that.

Rachel: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that happened. Yeah, on Strictly we've seen the professionals have done a bit of that, but we haven't seen it as a celebrity and a professional together, so we haven't seen an actual competing couple.

Gem: Yeah. Hopefully this year, fingers crossed. I guess what would be even more radical is actually to have trans and non-binary people doing dances and, as you say, swapping. I mean, the fact that we're still confined on mainstream TV to men or women, and they may be gay or they may be lesbian, but there's not much more representation than that. That's pretty shit.

Rachel: Totally. No, that is definitely where we need to be getting to. That would be brilliant.

Gem: Yeah. It would be really cool. Maybe you should set it up.

Rachel: I'll do my own version. If anyone wants to help fund me with that then...

Gem: Yeah, that would be really cool. We'll put your email address at the bottom so people can send you all the funds. So you've had obviously a lot going on and there's different streams of your work. I just wondered what, what next, are there any kind of big projects underway for this year or in the coming years?

Rachel: Mmm, yeah. So in the next year I'm kind of... Yeah, the streams continue so I'll have my dance teaching, working with couples and also doing relationship coaching, which is using partner dance to help, I think I mentioned that earlier, helping people to explore their relational habits through dance or through partnered work. It's not always dancing, it just depends on what's really needed. That's the new focus for this year. I started a workshop a couple of years ago called Fuck Yeah Dance, which is about freedom and moving without boundary and how to come to free movement as a sort of bridge between people that have never really done that kind of free movement. Again safe space, queer space. So I'm going to bring that back but I'm having a slight refocus cause I've shifted in my own experience and Fuck Yeah doesn't fit it quite right anymore for me, but it is going to be about moving towards the yumminess and towards what maybe feels like pleasure and what's nourishing. So I'm gonna set up four workshops across the year that are going to be based around the seasons as well. So a watch this space kind of situation cause I'm still working that out. But that's coming up. So anyone that's come to my Fuck Yeah dance workshops will probably enjoy these and I think it might appeal to a few different types of people as well. And that's the new stuff. I also do some great events. I've been invited to the Royal Opera House. They wanted to create more diverse and inclusive Tea Dance-type events so I'm gonna be there in March. There's a Tea Dance there that's going to be run by me with a live band. And it really is about anybody is welcome; all bodies, all types of people or configurations of relationship, anyone, families. Cause they have a very elite following at the Royal Opera House and they're really wanting to, I think they have to, it's a need for them to shift that focus and really make sure that everyone feels welcome there. So that's been a really lovely opportunity. I'm going to name check someone who got me that job basically. Treacle was amazing and she introduced me. So I'm very grateful for that.

Gem: That's such a cool thing to do.

Rachel: Yeah, it's lovely. It's very, it's a very good vibe. And the staff there are incredible. It's a very, very nice place to be. And I would really encourage anyone who feels like that's not their space to come and give it a try because I ensure that when I'm running stuff anyone's welcome and there's no snooty people looking down their nose there. It's a cool vibe.

Gem: Yeah, that sounds great. I might come myself.

Rachel: Yeah. Please do. Please do.

Gem: That sounds like you've got a lot lined up then. And when you mentioned about the relationship coaching and seeing how people's relationships play out in dance, that must be such an interesting experience. Can you tell just from looking at how people dance together, what stuff would be useful for them to work on or do people often tell you exactly what their issues are before

Rachel: It sort of can play either way. It became really obvious to me. The reason I came to this was because when I was working with couples particularly when I was working with couples getting ready for their wedding, I could see so much stuff, well their dynamics going on. And I was like, "Oh wow, there's something in this". And so that's why I created an offer out of it. Cause I could see there's a need. And yeah, sometimes I can see a dynamic where I'm guessing I'm sort of intuitively listening into what my body is saying and what I can see is playing out. But then it's important for me to not just project what I think. So when I working with a couple, I'm going to be exploring, asking questions and it really is that they are going to come up with the answers, they're going to see and allow the reveal to come to them. Sometimes couples come to me with a specific need and then I would use specific exercises to explore that. But sometimes what people think they need isn't necessarily what's going to be most useful. And I tend to keep my sessions very organic and very much feeling into the moment. I don't tend to plan six sessions ahead. This session is this, this and this, because humans are ever shifting and ever changing. And the dynamic between two people will be very dependent on the day. So I tend to work much more on the live and in the present, really trying to encourage people to share where they're at today so we can work with what's going on and what's live. And it is healing, I would say. It could have a healing effects. People often describe it as therapy because it seems therapeutic. I'd just want to put a disclaimer that I'm not a therapist, so it's not a replacement for therapy. It could complement therapy very well. And that's something I'd be interested in working with people who are offering therapeutic services and whether they would want something to compliment the learning that's going on. But yes it's super fascinating and I can see what might be going on, but I definitely try and leave it to them to learn and find out that through some exercises. It's super fascinating and I'm excited to see what else I learn because I learn so much from working with people. I'm not the expert in the room. Most of the time the people I'm working with are the experts on themselves. I'm just a handy facilitator.

Gem: It's great work to do, isn't it? It's really similar in my work. Every session you're like, "Oh, I never thought about something that way" or "Wow, that's so interesting". It's just a constant learning experience as well. So every episode I ask my guest whether there's anything they'd like to recommend that they're enjoying at the moment. So I just wondered if you had anything.

Rachel: Yeah. So what I was thinking of was I just recently saw a performance by Thick and Tight, a dance collective and company. I just saw them at Sadler's Wells. They were in the Linbury Studio. And yeah, it was brilliant. And they do quite a lot of stuff at different events. So they also come to the Royal Opera House when I'm doing my stuff at Duckie as well which is at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. What's just brilliant about them is they are funny, queer and political and what was lovely about the particular performance I saw was they also had a company that they worked with who is made up of people who have learning difficulties. But it's like allowing and permission and like possibility. That's what I saw happening in that dynamic. I think they're super good and I really would love to support them and what they're doing.

Gem: Amazing. Okay. So we'll share them in the show notes as well. If anyone wants to go along and you said that they're going to be at your event at the Royal Opera House as well?

Rachel: They might be. I don't actually when they're going to next be there, but they often are. I need to check that out but you can definitely catch things at Duckie and just follow their Instagram cause they'll pop up stuff there as well.

Gem: Okay. Amazing. They sound great. Thank you for sharing. So thank you so much for joining me today. It's been really great talking to you about your work.

Rachel: Oh my absolute pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. It's been lovely and it's just so good to connect with people who are exploring similar things, but in a slightly different way. So, yeah I've loved it.

Gem: Absolutely. Yeah, I've loved it too. Thanks Rachel.

Rachel: My absolute pleasure. Thank you.

Gem: Bye.

Rachel: Bye.

Gem Kennedy https://www.gemkennedy.com
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