Who We Are

Karen Wood

Karen is a dance practitioner/artistic researcher/educator based in Manchester where she performs, teaches and advocates for dance  in the region. With a doctorate in dance, Karen regularly teaches in higher education and is involved in dance research and practice. For her Masters degree at Laban, she explored neurofeedback and dance. This has evolved into the Stream Project, which has been awarded funding from Arts Council England and other institutions. Aside from the Stream Project, Karen is also collaborating with other art forms, such as fine art, lighting design and music were she creates and performs in dance pieces for traditional and non-traditional spaces.

Karen has been professionally involved in dance for the last 20 years. She has recently performed  Echo, a collaboration with a textile artist and Soundmoves project, a collaboration between Mixed Movement and Tap Rhythm Project, which she runs in Manchester. She is a strategy group member for Manchester Dance Consortium who advocate and encourage dance making in the region.

Genevieve Say

Genevieve say is an independent dance artist, performer and choreographer based in Manchester. In 2003 she trained at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, graduating with First class BA(Hons) in Dance and Performance. Since then Genevieve has been working professionally as a dancer nationally and Internationally for many companies, including Collision (Lisi Perry), Gary Clarke, Flukt (Norway), Anna Macdonald, Splendid Productions, Eee-Motion, Sweetshop Revolution, and Cheshire dance.

Genevieve has been described as performing with ‘fearlessness and considerable presence’ and is ‘richly imaginative’.

Since 2006, Genevieve has been choreographing her own work under her own name and as The Mustdashios, a company she set up in 2010. Genevieve was recently commissioned by Urban Moves International Dance festival (2012) to choreograph 5IVE, an outdoor dance piece. She has also been commissioned by various institutions, organisations and companies including Manchester Metropolitan University, UcLan University, Merseyside Dance Initiative, Dance Initiative Greater Manchester and the Brindley Arts Centre, Runcorn. She has choreographed original work for Seven, Contact Theatre Manchester, Hot August Fringe London, LEAP Festival Liverpool, Word Of Warning Sampler series Manchester, Up The Walls Chester, DEDA, and Turn Festival Manchester. This August her company The Mustdashios will be performing Snap!Bar at Dance Base as part of Edinburgh Fringe festival.

Ben Lycett

Ben is the creative coder for the project and came on board as part of the MMU Code Creatives residency. Ben is responsible for all the software coding and technical consultancy on the project.

Lee Grey

Lee is an the in-house technician for the Contact Theatre, Manchester, and has been a freelance lighting designer for more than 10 years.

Tony Steffert

Tony has been working with the Stream Project as a neuroscience and technological consultant.

For the last 10 years Tony has been studying qEEG/ERP’s and Neurofeedback in ADHD and Dyslexia, and more recently in creativity and peak-performance using “Virtual Reality” to enhance Neurofeedback learning and creativity in Actors, Dancers and Musicians. Before that he worked in a Neurofeedback clinic in Cambridge with both children and adults for a range of conditions.

Tony is a founder member and the Webmaster of the Society of Applied Neuroscience, which is devoted to advancing neuroscientific knowledge. He is also the Webmaster and researcher for the Arts Dyslexia Trust, whose aim is “To promote greater understanding and appreciation of minds usually labelled as dyslexic.” Tony is Webmaster and consultant for Neurofeedbackup.org, who wish to promote Neurofeedback and encourage research and education in the field.

Gavin Wayte

Gavin Wayte composes music for the concert hall and opera stage as well as for non-traditional contexts, combining dance, physical theatre, text and visual technologies with music. Recent works include Bones of Spring, a multi-media dance, physical theatre and music event, premiered in March 2013 in the Bridgewater Hall foyer spaces, and Hot to Trot Love Bot for actor-harpsichordist, selected by the British Harpsichord society for their 10th anniversary composition competition for performance in the Foundlings Museum, London in summer 2013. He is an experienced collaborator with dance practitioners, having created four works in the last two years, is artistic director of Out of the Blue Productions, a Manchester-based dance and new music collective and was music mentor for Manchester Dance Consortium in 2012-13.