Charlie Morrissey is a director, performer, teacher, and curator who has worked with movement for over 35 years. His practice spans theatre, gallery, and site-specific contexts in the UK and internationally, grounded in a deep and ongoing enquiry into the body as a place of experience, perception, and imagination.
He is a prolific teacher, sharing his work across a wide range of international contexts, from independent festivals and artist-led spaces to major dance companies and institutions. His teaching is rooted in improvisation and contact-based movement enquiry—working with attention, presence, and the cultivation of physical intelligence. He creates spaces that invite curiosity, risk, and care.
Charlie’s performance work is shaped by long-term collaborations with influential artists including Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Siobhan Davies, and Kirstie Simson. Recent performance collaborations include work with Markéta Stránska, Siobhan Davies, Katye Coe, Eva Karczag and Bettina Neuhaus, and Lucy Suggate.
His current focus is on movement, touch, contact, and composition as expanded fields—exploring layers of information that emerge through physical dialogue, attention, and co-presence. He works with ‘alongsidedness’ as a practice of being with—of encountering and navigating difference through embodied listening. Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores and Steve Paxton’s Material for the Spine are central influences in his work, both of which he has engaged with in depth as a practitioner and teacher.
Charlie also co-directs Wainsgate Dances with Rob Hopper—an artist-led programme for experimental dance based in a rural chapel in Yorkshire. The programme supports residencies, performances, workshops, and daily dance practices, creating a space for diverse bodies and voices to meet. His work celebrates complexity, queerness, and the generative potential of shared attention and embodied inquiry.
