Richard Hancock is an artist and choreographer, currently based in Amsterdam and Berlin. His practice is research-led and multi-disciplinary, spanning dance, video, photography, drawing, and text.

Since 2001, he has collaborated with the artist Traci Kelly on the project hancock & kelly live, exploring questions of collaboration, identity, and inter-subjectivity. The resulting works have been a series of visceral and queer encounters, both moving and spectacular. From 2005-2008, they developed their acclaimed series of Lone Duets, a series of 6 solo performances, each made alternately by Hancock and Kelly in response to the previous piece, made by the other. They are currently developing Lone Duets Redux, which will see them perform one another’s works from the original series, in an attempt to embody performances that were never meant for them.

In 2010, Richard Hancock choreographed and starred as Anita Berber in the video artist Liz Rosenfeld’s Frida and Anita, a fictitious account of a sexual encounter between Anita Berber and Frida Kahlo in 1920s Berlin. Frida and Anita premiered in November 2010 at Rivington Place in London, and was then shown as part of a programme on Queer Surrealism at Tate Modern. In April 2011, it screened as part of the 25th BFI London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival. Hancock and Rosenfeld’s ongoing collaboration, RESIDENT ALIENS, is an exploration of queer family and portraiture. So far, they have portrayed themselves as Penny Arcade and Quentin Crisp, and restaged the boxing portraits of Jean Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol (both works in collaboration with the photographer Finn Ballard). Their current project, Eulogies, is a 2 screen video work in which they will make epitaphs for one another’s living bodies, that they will never see.

In 2009 and 2010, Richard Hancock was Associate at New Work Network, a London-based artists’ membership organisation promoting live and inter-disciplinary practices internationally.

Richard Hancock has performed, exhibited, facilitated workshops, and given talks internationally at such events and venues as the National Review of Live Art, UK (2005, 2007, 2009), Schwelle7, Germany (2008, 2009, 2010), Performance Space, Australia (2007), Critical Path, Australia (2007), the Museu de Évora, Portugal (2009), PSi, Denmark (2008), Nottdance, UK (2008), the SPILL Festival of Performance, UK (2007), The Granary, Ireland (2007), and the Arnolfini, UK (2007, 2010, 2011).

His work has generously been supported by, amongst others, Arts Council England (UK), the Art & Humanities Research Council (UK), Dance4 (UK), the University of Reading (UK), New Moves International (UK), greenroom (UK), Future Factory (UK), and Angel Row Gallery (UK).

His solo gallery show I Thought You'd Never Come... will open at AKA project space in Berlin, in July 2011.

He is open to offers… … Read More