Magnus Westwell is a Scottish artist and director working with choreography, composition and performance. Spanning the euphoric and desolate, Westwell’s work seeks to understand and express states of cathartic transformation through embodied sound.

Exploring cycles of liminality, transcendence, and absence, Westwell works within ethereal, dream-like worlds, where decaying and generative processes aim to challenge the limits of emotional, physical and sonic experience, revealing cascading states of collapse and transformation, and researching the essence of memory, consciousness, fragility, ephemerality, time, and loss. Westwell’s practice unfolds through an ongoing experimental dialogue between movement and sound, where choreography and composition evolve in response to one another. In the studio, sound works are composed alongside the development of choreography, with music emerging from the presence of dancers in space. This reciprocal process allows movement to shape sound as much as sound shapes movement, creating a cyclical exchange between the disciplines. Westwell’s practice has been shaped by time living in Orkney, London, and Glasgow, where they are currently based.

Magnus Westwell is a Sadler’s Wells Young Associate alumni, and their work has reached a diversity of venues, institutions, galleries and festivals across Europe and the UK, including Sadler’s Wells Theatre, London Short Film Festival, Institute of Contemporary Arts, Britten Pears Arts, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, Cafe OTO, Number 1 Main Road Berlin, Institute of the Arts Barcelona and Amsterdam Dance Event, with digital work published and premiered across Nowness, Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage and FACT Magazine.

‘At Cove Park, I will be working with collaborator Océane Robin, in the beginning stages of developing a new production – Caught Hold of Nothing. We will be looking at the relationship between sound and movement, developing a duet where musician and dancer merge disciplines.’