Ophey T.K Chan
About Me
Ophey Chan (She/Her) is a London-based dance artist, embodied researcher, and educator. Working across choreography, teaching, and practice-as-research, she investigates how somatic practices and embodied enquiry can reveal the ways bodily experience is continually transformed through relationships with environments, memory, and community.
Drawing from traditional West African dance, African diasporic movement traditions, and contact improvisation, her work explores movement as a way of generating relational knowledge. Through performances and collaborative projects, she creates spaces where collective learning and new ways of sensing can emerge
Ophey holds an MFA in Dance and Embodied Practice (Distinction) from the University of Roehampton. Her artistic work has been presented internationally, including at Resolution Festival and the Dancing with Decolonisation Global Conference.
Alongside her teaching as a Visiting Lecturer, she contributes to the wider dance community as a peer reviewer for somatic journals, an emerging dance critic, and a collaborating artist in academic PhD research projects.
OPHEY's PRACTICE
Dance is, for me, a way to sense and understand the world through the body.
My practice explores corporeality as an ever-changing process shaped through encounters. Through embodied enquiry, somatic practices and artistic research, I investigate how bodily experience is continually transformed through relationships with people, environments, memory and imagination. Rather than using dance to represent ideas, I approach movement as a way of generating knowledge—creating conditions where new ways of sensing, relating and imagining can emerge.
Working across choreography, screendance, teaching and practice-as-research, I utilise movement not only as an artistic medium but also as a methodology for critical investigation. I am interested in how embodied practices enable us to notice, question and experience the world differently, grounding reflection in lived, sensory experience rather than solely through language.
My movement practice has been shaped by traditional West African dance, African diasporic movement practices, contact improvisation and a range of somatic approaches, including the Feldenkrais Method, the Franklin Method and Skinner Release Technique (SRT). Rather than treating these as separate techniques, I understand them as different ways of cultivating awareness, adaptability and embodied listening. Together they continue to influence how I create, facilitate and research.
Across live performance, screendance, workshops and participatory projects, I investigate rhythm, relationality and collective presence. My work explores how cultural memory, identity, ecology and everyday experience are embodied through movement, and how artistic processes can create spaces where relationships are experienced, negotiated and transformed collectively rather than explained.
Participation and dialogue are central to my practice. I often develop projects through collaborative processes, creative tasks and community engagement, creating situations where movement becomes a shared act of enquiry. Rather than seeking fixed conclusions, I see each project as an evolving process of research that continues through repeated encounters with people, places and the more-than-human world.
Across my artistic and pedagogical endeavours, I am interested in how movement and the body can open spaces for reflection on the complexities of life, including questions of neurodiversity, ecological awareness, well-being, and the many-layered identities we carry.
