Lea Anderson is an independent choreographer, filmmaker and artistic director and has worked on hundreds of different collaborations throughout her career. She has a special interest in working with museums and collections, and is particularly focused on ways to present objects and ideas in new and engaging ways. Although a choreographer her concerns are not solely with dance. She is interested in the choreography of objects and their hierarchical place in our lives.

For her Creative Fellowship Lea was based at the Bill Douglas Cinema on our Streatham Campus. The museum is home to one of the largest collections of material relating to the moving image in Britain. It is both an accredited public museum and a research facility and holds a collection of over 80,000 items, including artefacts dating from the seventeenth century to the present day, covering all aspects of cinema, pre-cinema and the history of the moving image.

Lea worked with Professor John Plunkett and Professor Joe Kember on their research which focuses on demonstrating the exhibition of visual and optical media in the period 1820-1920, particularly the different performance and exhibition strategies of the peepshow and other lens-based devices. The Creative Fellowship aimed to offer up new ways of understanding this museum material and enrich the educational work that takes place there.

Discover more about the fellowship and how it unfolded in the below video.

Lea spent a number of weeks in the museum at the end of 2019 and just before lockdown at the beginning of March 2020. This time was dedicated to free exploration, handling objects that were initially suggested by John then following paths of inspiration through the ones that sparked particular interest.

Along the way John and Lea discovered a shared interest in the performance strategy of presenting media in unexpected public spaces, for example the historic placement of peep shows, lens media oddities and science experiments at fairs and public bazaars.

This commonality led to the development of a proposal for a larger project, inspired by and utilising the idea of ‘Pepper’s Ghost’, an early Victorian illusion using lenses to create a hologram effect.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic many of the dissemination events that had been planned in connection to the above had to be cancelled but Lea and John are continuing to stay in contact, and the museum's collections are still a source of unending inspiration for Lea in the development of her work and practice.

Zoetrope

Lea's time at the museum directly inspired her show 'Zoetrope', a collaboration with National Dance Company Wales, which premiered at the Wales Millennium Centre in December 2023 and again in April 2024.

During her time at the Museum Lea became fascinated with pre-animation devices such as zoetropes which are also referred to as 'Wheels of Life'. A zoetrope is a device that produces the illusion of motion by displaying a sequence of drawings or photographs showing progressive phases of that motion.

Lea's performance playfully charts the evolution of man through dance, acrobatics and movement. You can watch an excerpt and an interview with Lea below.