Claire Hind is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre at York St John University, UK. Her practice is concerned with the making and shaping of live performance using conceptual art and physical performance techniques, and her research is focused upon performance making using notions of ‘dark’ and ‘deep’ play. Her work Screen Test featured at the Performance Studies International conference at Brown University, USA, and at the Function live art event, with Nottingham based live artists Reactor. She has an international reputation for creating contemporary performance work and, since 1998, has directed several cross cultural collaboration projects in Romania for The Sibiu International Theatre Festival, and for the TJUZ Theatre St Petersburg. Claire has a history of making performance projects in collaboration with Claire Macdonald including the durational installation project In Bed at George Mason University, Virginia in 2003.

Claire MacDonald initiated the space between^words in 2006 in order to research the encounter between art, writing and performance. She is Director of the International Centre for Fine Art Research, University of the Arts London, writes about visual art and performance and holds a PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She has just completed her first novel, ‘All that Remains’ and her current work for performance includes the new play ‘Correspondence,’ directed by Patrick Morris for Menagerie, and a new collaborative performance work with Charlotte Vincent of Vincent Dance. She is a co-founding editor of the journal Performance Research, and a Contributing Editor of Performing Arts Journal.

Maria Fusco is a writer whose research interests focus on experimental strategies for contemporary art writing, with specific reference to fiction that positions ‘anti-suspense’ as its primary creative process. Her own work crosses different modalities of production including: fictive, critical & theoretical writing; editing and independent publishing. She's interested in testing how such transdisciplinary writing practices might probe readers’ attitudes towards the accuracy of critical art writing: the independent experiences of fiction and visual art writing together potentially gaining the ability to produce non-sequential narratives which reintroduce the reader / viewer to closer looking – calling for readers’ presence in the present, rather than inviting them to wonder what will happen at the end. Projects of relevance to her work include: aleksandra mir^ factotum^ F.R. David^ Her journal, The Happy Hypocrite, can be found here:

Simon Zimmerman is an artist and freelance Producer and Project Manager. Between 2005 and 2008 Simon was responsible for Arts Council England's "Artists' Insights" programme, and managed an investment of £3.5 million in support services for professional artists across England. Simon is currently Producer for London based theatre O, and the space between^words. As an artist, Simon's concerns focus on the relationships between language and loss, and he is currently developing a new project Understandable Loss bringing together his interests in endangered language research and erasure as writing.

Vincent Dance Theatre has been making and touring devised dance theatre work since 1994. Artistic Director Charlotte Vincent is ‘one of the most challengingly theatrical of the UK's choreographer-directors’ (The Observer). Charlotte is currently collaborating with Liz Aggiss on RADIO PLAY, a dance for the radio, to be seen and heard. RADIO PLAY finds two movement heads competing for aural choreographic virtuosity, acknowledging the desire by a couple of old dogs to share some new tricks in a modified performance kennel. She is also currently working with Wendy Houstoun and Claire Macdonald to explore walking, writing and talking in THE EURYDICE PROJECT, initiated through an investigation of Charlotte stepping into Claire’s role in a restaging of Impact Theatre’s seminal work CARRIER FREQUENCY. In 2009 Charlotte Vincent will collaborate with an ensemble of mature dance practitioners to create IF WE GO ON, a new middle scale work. IF WE GO ON questions the premise of dance (and the dancer) as (a) subject always moving, apparently without effort, always energized and never stumbling. IF WE GO ON investigates the urge to move beyond dance as a form driven by movement or the kinaesthetic form. IF WE GO ON offers a glimpse into the constant striving that takes place within a performance and investigates the relationship between text and movement, between moving and not moving. ‘Why this obsessive concern with the display of moving bodies, this demand that dance be in a constant state of agitation?’ (Andre Lepecki, Exhausting Dance). Artists relevant and of interest to her work include – Liz Lerman

Hal Hartley

Cornelia Parker

Peter Brook

Pina Bausch