The dance goes on: Following in the footsteps of Rosemary Butcher

This article concerns Lauren Potter’s Frames for Falling (2017c),1 a fifteen-minute work for eleven students graduating from London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS), and for which the stimulus was Rosemary Butcher’s Still-Slow-Divided (2002). I trace the artistic and creative background that gave rise to this dance by registering milestones in Rosemary Butcher’s career and investigating her choreographic practice that, echoing the German academic Pirkko Husemann, I define as a ‘critical practice’. Writing from the perspective of practice as research, I chart Potter’s process in the studio when, in the summer of 2017, she created her new dance. Included in the article is interview material from Nigel Butcher, Potter, and one of the participating students, Ryan Jones. There is also a brief sketch of Frames for Falling as it was performed in the Robin Howard Dance Theatre in July 2017. I conclude the article by arguing that under Potter’s expert practical guidance and deep knowledge of Butcher’s choreographic process, the LCDS students engaged in a new form of dance history, studying it as they did in the context of physical studio practice.