Four recent LCDS Graduates receive Propeller Residency commission from The Place

Every year for the summer months, The Place, London’s leading centre for dance and performance, opens its studios for artist residencies, to create new work and research new ideas.

For the second year now, four additional residencies are offered to recent graduates (graduating this summer 2025) as part of a suite of new Propeller projects, designed to give recent graduates a lift to kickstart their creative careers in the crucial time period straight after graduation.

The four graduates this year are Evie Longstaff, Company Sixth (Becca Dodd & Elina Wates), Ty Burrows and Lilah Bobak. They will each receive £2.5k and 2 weeks of residency time in our studios to develop a 15–20-minute piece to present at Resolution 2026.

Evie Longstaff is a choreographer and movement artist whose work is defined by a clean, structured, and precise movement language. Rooted in minimalism and repetition, her choreography draws out every possible variation from a single idea, revealing complexity through clarity. Approaching choreography as both an art and a science, she constructs movement methodically while experimenting with unfolding images which evoke a feeling of satisfaction.

This project explores Entropy - the natural descent from order to disorder that defines the default state of the universe. Just as rooms clutter, relationships fracture and sandcastles crumble, entropy is not a failure but is inevitable. Yet within this, is the human drive to restore order and structure. This work seeks to explore what it means to exist within this law.

Company Sixth is a creative movement collective founded on 6th June 2023 by Becca Dodd and Elina Wates. Inspired by their training in contemporary dance, Sixth aims to push the boundaries of specific themes using humour, music and spontaneity that emerge from improvisation and in-depth theoretical discussions. Performances are shaped by the people in the room and the ideas that arise between them. Sixth exists to provoke thought and craft performances that respond to the strangeness and complexity of the world we live in.

Researching how fans follow and idolise celebrities, the ever-changing influence of pop culture and the visceral impact of Artificial Intelligence on our screen-absorbed society, their new work mocks with sinister undertones the reality of our digital dependence.

Ty Burrows (They/Them) is an interdisciplinary artist who works with fine-art, photography and dance. Ty studied Fine art at Leeds Art University before graduating from London School Of Contemporary Dance. They also trained alongside Phoenix Dance Theatre in their Youth Academy as well as Northern School of Contemporary Dance in their CAT scheme. Artistically, Ty focuses on the process of creation. They’re interested in world building and characterisation in relation to real life contexts. They strive to create a space where the dancers physical and mental needs are at the forefront of the practice.

Lilah Bobak, a multidisciplinary artist originally from Los Angeles, now based in London, is a classically trained contemporary dancer with a broad performance history spanning the US, UK, and Europe. She has worked with Director Matt Reeves as a MoCap performer on Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and was a featured dancer in music videos and live music performances in the US and London. She is also the bassist and vocalist in noise-rock band, green star. These broad artistic endeavours all influence her choreographic work and contemporary dance style.

Her work will explore the interplay of music and movement, creating a sense of otherworldliness, feeding off costume design, movement and lighting, within a performative setting. With themes of longing, indulgence and intimacy, dancers will explore their visceral reactions to the distorted, post-rock guitar music, following the droning intensity and curvatures of sound. A continuation of her costume design project, ‘entanglement’, which integrated these abstract garments, tethering dancers together throughout the contemporary dance choreography, the piece will be feeding off the ideas of the musicians and dancers, involving multidisciplinary art forms, culminating in an experimental descent into orchestrated chaos.

Previous graduates taking part inf the Propeller Residency 2024 were Brooke Sorenson, Alex Whelan, Lucy Turner and Samara Langham. Samara’s work SKY ZONE Burial will be performed as part of Thames Festival in Sep 2025.

More information about how The Place supports emerging artists can be found here: https://gameltuae.com/choreodrome-artists-2024