Matthew Rawcliffe

Sleep is a funny thing. When I’ve been at my worst in life, it is something I want lots of and cannot seem to get hold of. In fact, often the more I want it, the harder it is to come by. It is also orientated around very specific states of being. When I sleep during the day it feels fucking luxurious. I listen to audiobooks or television to go to sleep, so often my evening is quite blended into my sleeping - I almost don’t notice the process of falling asleep. I find it very hard to decide to sleep, I really have to fall asleep. When I wake up in the middle of the night I’m actually very attentive - for instance if I need to go to the toilet I never turn the lights on because I cannot bear the harsh lights, instead I do a clumsy (but often successful) journey through my apartment in the night - my proprioception kicks in beautifully. When I wake up in the morning, I find it very difficult to function for a bit - my eyes don’t really want to open and I have the sensation that my feet a...

Hello friends :) I'm writing applications at the minute, I will leave my full time job in June and so I'm looking at opportunities for commissions and funding etc. I don't necessarily have a hard time with rejection - I think I have quite a healthy relationship to that part of what we do.  What I find crazy is the traces we leave through this process - whereby I come with so many ideas and someone else gets to say if, when and where they will happen. But the more I go through this process the more that excites me - I'd love at some point to host an exhibition with all the unsuccessful applications I've sent. Especially because I have a very specific design style through my applications, they are often incorporated within designs and expressed through some form of art writing. So they become little works of art.  I wrote a while back about this beautiful book Imagined Theatres: Writing for a Theoretical Stage (2017), which is a collection of theoretical performan...

  I started back at work this week, so I also wanted to come back to writing! Since there’s been little break I’ll start the numbering again as if it’s the start of something new - which it could be, but most likely it will be a continuation of something old. I've been thinking around copying, plagiarism and the art of the parody - I want to discuss some perspectives from others alongside thoughts I’ve been having on this. I’ve just got back from a beautiful holiday in Kiruna (Sweden), where I stayed at ICE HOTEL - which was just beautiful, I’ll blog about it shortly! In ICE HOTEL: The Experience , founder Yngve Bergqvist is interviewed sharing their philosophy that most things which can be done, haven’t been done yet. I thought this was remarkable - I’ve definitely encountered so many teachers, choreographers and colleagues who have had the opposite philosophy: everything has already been done before. Maybe this relates specifically to the finite possible configurations of the hum...