Belonging (in The Hop)

Choreographer Adesola Akinleye has created a series of dance performances in response to the Hayward Gallery’s new interactive pavilion, Jyll Bradley’s The Hop.

You’re invited to stand and sit at marked places in and around the pavilion to view the performance.

Belonging (in The Hop) explores The Hop pavilion as a threshold space that is both an entrance and an exit. ‘Going on the hop’ from London to Kent was to share the experience of simultaneously arriving and leaving: leaving the city while arriving in Kent. In this dance, The Hop becomes a prolonged act of passage that shapes multiple ways of belonging to the city and the fields.

Created by artist Jyll Bradley, The Hop takes its inspiration from the thousands of working class families from Lambeth who travelled away from the pollution of London for a working holiday in the Kentish hop fields. Bringing in the hop harvest – or ‘hopping’ – was hard manual labour, but it was also a transformative time away from city life, and a space for new experiences and new relationships.

Bradley’s commission echoes the geometry of Kent’s unique hop growing structures, designed to expose the crop to the maximum amount of sunlight.

Dr Adesola Akinleye is a choreographer and artist-scholar. Across her career she has created works ranging from live performance that is often site-specific and involving a cross-section of the community, to the creation of films, installations and texts.

The performers are part of DancingStrong Movement Lab, London.

Belonging (in The Hop) has been realised with the generous support of David Maclean.