helena@atkin.london
instagram
Presentation-workshop at Symposium: The Peformer-Composer in the 21st Century, KU Leuven, BE
10-11th September 2026
The score has often functioned as a primary point of contact between composers and performers, both establishing and marking as distinct their relationship to one another and the inscriptions that lie in between. While this may seem to position composition and performance at opposite ends of the score, the negative space between a score’s inscription and realisation represents a site wherein composer/performer identities and processes collapse, converge, and refract.
Pulsating with sonic potential and yet not always sounding, how might we use these processes to approach this realm of unsounding residue and resonance as a destination rather than a means? What is the distinction between composing/performing a score and using a score to compose/perform a musical work? What does it mean to compose/perform ‘unsound’?
More information
Collective research project based in Narva, EE with Anna Jensen & Andrea Coyotzi Borja
12-18th July 2026
“The research will focus on themes of the city, the atmosphere and the experience, but also on collective research methods themselves. By embracing uncertainty, the research aims to remain as open-ended as possible for as long as possible, and to document its stages in detail so that the methods can be analysed retrospectively.
One aspect of the research is language, and constantly navigating between languages. Practitioners from multilingual backgrounds are accustomed to operating in broken English, the common language of art and research, to the point where it is no longer clear in which language their fundamental thinking actually takes place. We need shared languages, but what happens if we also try to embed our other languages into the research? The languages of memory, work, emotions, and action are not always the same. Can we convey something essential about our experience even more effectively in the language we feel, even if its words do not reveal themselves to the reader or listener?” - Anna Jensen
Presentation at LUUK! Dance Conference, Vaskjala, EE
13-14th June 2025
“...there’s a moment seeing something like that…there’s a crack in your mind…you know it’s a trick, but you can’t figure it out and that crack lets in all the light…it opens up all the possibilities…when that little split-second thing happens and the audience go wow! did you see that?!’...that’s the moment; that puts them in touch with the invisible…” - Ken Kesey
Through the lens of gesture, this presentation follows the inky forms of the score as they extend from the body of their creator to that of the onlooker, carrying with them a whole host of intricately entangled, but not necessarily musical, histories and potentialities.
“LUUK is a dance conference with a focus on embodied practices and artistic research. We hold that all artistic processes entail various types of knowledge and also produce new ways of engaging, making and knowing. The conference’s aim is to offer a dialogic platform for (dance) artists, movement practitioners, educators, researchers and culture workers to gather and share their artistic work in the realm of dance, embodied practices and body-based approaches.”