Artistic Statement

Leila McMillan is a dance artist, choreographer and teacher.

Leila creates work that is high-energy, abstract choreography stemming from personal experiences using theme based movement and movement from the soul.

Leila begins with assumption, presumption, and judgement allowing it to dissolve into truth found from experience and observation working with ridiculousness, absurdity, beauty and grotesque combining live art, performance, extreme physicality, joy, electricity and rage all sewn together.

She creates work for theatre and site specific performance spaces working in collaboration with artists and designers brining together movement, fashion and sound. She travels around the world living in different cultures, experiencing different ways of life, people, rituals, traditions, allowing this rich information to seep into her mind, body and soul eventually filtering into her creations in one way or another.

We can practice steps and timing until the day we die but true movement and true dance comes from our soul, comes from who we are and where we come from.  It’s a driving license for pure physical self-expression.

Express yourself, use what you’ve got, always exercise freedom of expression.  Laugh, cry, vomit, poo, shake, orgasm, fall.  Be as imaginative as humanly possible.  There are no limits.  Be subtle, be explicit, be controversial, be extreme, be beyond.  Develop something new.  Write your own history.  Draw what you imagine. Transform.  Use large costumes.  Start from the end, start from the middle and go backgrounds, throw everything away and start again.  Culture.  Community.  Identity.  Sex.  We must live life in order to make interesting art, without life experience we have nothing innovative to say.  Be the audience.