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Welcome to the exhibition catalogue. Please allow me to introduce my dance partner Stephanie Sturges and myself, the artist, dancer and writer, Anthony D Padgett. This exhibition is of some of the cross-overs between art and dance in my paintings, photography, sculpture, film and dance. Many of the dances I created I have put on youtube and QR codes are in the book for you to scan. This technology will likely be outdated and you can search by titles for the films as well. Most of the images are of works in the exhibition but also images of some of the works that weren't included but form a part of the broader body of work.

A fascinating memoir from the Bake Off Winner, BBC's Strictly Come Dancing Runner Up and popular TV Baker<BR><BR> Well-known as the third-series winner of The Great British Bake Off and runner up of Strictly in 2021 with his same-sex dancing partner Johannes Radebe, John Whaite's personal story is a complicated narrative that embraces coming out on Bake Off, his ongoing body dysmorphia and bulimia as well as mental health challenges and a changing relationship with his mother, particularly after the break-up of his parents marriage.<BR><BR> Each chapter takes an element of food or culture and loops it back to John's northern upbringing above a fish and chip shop which instilled a strong a work ethic, as well as using baking as a form of meditation. He also talks about how gay people in the 1990s had to choreograph their every move depending on the people they were surrounded by to ensure they were protected - the dance on eggshells - and how Strictly changed his life and relationship with his long-term partner, Paul, for the good.

Because dance materializes through and for people, because we learn to dance from others and often present dance to others, the moment of its transmission is one of dance's central and defining features. Valuing Dance looks at the occasion when dancing passes from one person to another as an act of exchange, one that is redolent with symbolic meanings, including those associated with its history and all the labor that has gone into its making. It examines two ways that dance can be exchanged, as commodity and as gift, reflecting on how each establishes dance's relative worth and merit differently. When and why do we give dance? Where and to whom do we sell it? How are such acts of exchange rationalized and justified? Valuing Dance poses these questions in order to contribute to a conversation around what dance is, what it does, and why it matters.

Watching Weimar Dance asks what audiences saw in the peculiarly turbulent and febrile moment of the Weimar Republic. It closely analyses the reception of various performances, from cabaret to concert dance and experimental theatre, in their own time and place - at home in interwar Germany, on tour, and later returning from exile after World War II. Spectator reports that performers died or became half-machine archived not only the physicality of past performance, but also the ways audiences used the temporary world of the stage to negotiate pressing social issues, from female visibility within commodity culture to the functioning of human-machine hybrids in an era of increasing technologization. These accounts offer offer limit cases for the body on stage and, in so doing, speak to the preoccupations of the day. Approaching a range of performance artists, including Oskar Schlemmer, Valeska Gert, Kurt Jooss, Mary Wigman, Bertolt Brecht, Anita Berber, and the Tiller Girl troupes, through archives of watching, the reception of these performances also revises and complicates understandings of Ausdruckstanz as the representative dance of this moment in Germany. They further reveal how such practices came to be reconfigured and imbued with new significance in the post-war era. By bringing insights from theatre, dance, and performance studies to German cultural studies, and vice versa, Watching Weimar Dance develops a culturally-situated model of watching that not only offers a revisionist narrative, but also demonstrates new methods for dance scholarship to shape cultural history.