Hello my name is Jonathan Starr (he/they) I am a freelance dancer, choreographer, and sound maker from England. After my studies at London Contemporary Dance School I moved to Sweden to work with Norrdans (2019-24) as both a dancer and community outreacher. There I worked on the Kommunal Utåtriktad Dans Ensemble and choreographed ‘Rota runt på lämpligt sätt’ for local amateur dancers in Härnösand.
Since 2024 I am based in Stockholm, dancing and presenting my own work, like: my sound walk ‘Noticing Elsewhere’ at Närheten Festival in 2025, and performing in others works, like: ‘For What We Will’ by Stina Nyberg, and ‘Vår Drivkraft’ by Ludvig Daae and Tove Berglund.
I work often unfolding around themes of non-seriousness, birds, magic, and documentation. Across my practice, I explore what it means to pay attention. I work slowly, allowing sound, movement, and mark-making to become translations of place and invitations to look again. I begin from simple gestures, walking, listening, sketching, imitating birds, that I collage together into layered compositions.
https://www.jonathanstarrdance.com
Instagram: @jonathanstarr
Tell us about your artistic practice?
‘I am serious about my non-seriousness, it is light, I am light, and that is heavy.’ – this is a motto that came from a practice about hosting slowness in my body in 2021. I clung onto it with a tight grip for a few years without really dissecting it too heavily, it just sat nicely on my tongue and in my body. It still does, sit nicely, but now it lays a crumpled up post-it in the back of my brain. I mean it to give me permission to allow the stupidity and silliness into my work, that falling into something fully and believing with conviction that I can be a bird, that I can build and transform space, that every cell in my body can instantly vanish and you can’t see me.
I think my practice in general is about chasing that magic feeling of being totally convicted to something, to saturate my body with different things and allow it to move me from there……?? Maybe…. I’m still figuring it out!
Is there something specific in your artistic practice that you’re looking forward to devoting particular attention to during a year at SITE?
– I am particularly looking forward to being part of a workplace. Having other artists around who are busy working on their own things in their own ways. What can I learn from them? I want to soak up all I can about freelancing in Stockholm. I also look forward to transforming into a bird, recreating, mimicking, arranging, rearranging, collaging, bird movement and sounds. I would like to devote attention to reconsidering how I speak about my work, to gain some more confidence and honesty in how I talk about what I am doing.
What role does space hold in your artistic practice?
– My practice is often in relation to being outside, I like to walk, look and listen, document, and then collage together moments and landmarks to inspire something new. Trying to create something alive out of something otherwise unnoticeable. I also feel a need to work with sound and fill the air and space around me, see what bounces around and comes back to me. I like to move physically through space, be bigger or smaller than I actually am, change my shape, detach my arm and move it around on the opposite side of the space.