Heni Hale is in her second year of a 4 year full time collaborative doctoral award, using artistic practice-as-research into Tavistock’s archives.
Artistic practice-as-research
Heni’s research focus is on the TIHR archive, especially studies from the 1950’s and 60s and the socio technical systems theories that emerged in that period.
She is taking a particular interest in a 1959 study in a sulphur production factory in Manchester, looking at the effects of automation and new technologies.
Immersing herself in fieldnotes from the sulphur recovery plant, Heni observes resonances with contemporary pre-occupation about the speed of advancement in Artificial Intelligence.
Heni is investigating what affective reverberations about the meaning of work can be generated using creative practices, drawing from her dance artist experience that places specific attention on the body as a site of processual change, and on choreographic thinking.
She began working solo, with a process that uses reprinted replicas of archive materials, cutting them and reframing them, sliding and re-ordering to create a reconfigured assemblage.
“Recounting and re-enacting scenes, from a selection of papery documents from 1950 and 60s TIHR studies I am playing with a wobble between past, present and future”.
“There is a deliberate scrambling of what happened then with what is happening in the here and now”.
Heni Hale, PhD researcher
Adding spoken word and video documenting to this process, she produced shorts scenes, or stagings, of her repeated encounters with the archive materials. This has developed into a collection of think-piece video works that she sees as a re-archiving, and as a ‘scrambling (of) time and matter’ (Singh, 2018).
The work is producing resonances with contemporary thinking about work and technology.
In 2024, she designed and delivered a series of 13 one-to-one performance encounters with participants’ (some artist researchers and some Tavistock staff) as a means of embodied practice-based data collection that further point to the connections these historical, mainly textual documents, make to the here and now.
“As we trace an unstable, emotionally tangled bodily encounter with the past, it is in the gaps, fissures, and errors that I hope to uncover the voices that may not have been heard then - but are imagined now, and the many other meanings that lurk in the shadows”.
Heni Hale
What’s next?
In 2025, having been generously awarded some research development funding from Midlands 4 Cities, she will embark on a group performance research process.
She aims to share her developing methodology of creative practice with archives, and bring together a small group of artists and researchers from both within and outside of the Tavistock community. They will begin a collective process that can embody theories of group relations in the here and now.
About Heni
Heni Hale is a PhD candidate engaging creative and embodied practice research with TIHR archive, through Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research and supported through Midlands4Cities doctoral training.
She is a performance-maker, and movement artist working collaboratively for nearly 30 years. She is a founder member of collective, Dog Kennel Hill Project, and has been an artist development facilitator, co-directing Independent Dance, a dance research hub in London.
She has also been Lead Tutor for the Dance Professional pathway of MA/MFA Creative Practice in partnership with Trinity Laban.
