Author: Norma Cohen

interview with my grandson,18 year-old Sol Gregory-Cundy I was living in the attic of the Prince George pub in Dalston. I was about seven years old. A week after I’d moved there with my parents, I looked out of the window and saw a boy skating down Parkholme Road. I was so intrigued by what […]

In 2019 I visited the Bedouin village of Umm al Khair. There we were hosted by a charismatic activist Awdah Hathaleen:  so bright, so full of energy, so vivid in my memory, and latterly producer of Oscar winning film NO OTHER LAND. it’s very hard to believe he’s no longer with us because he was […]

I’ve had an ambivalent, lifelong engagement with exercise and movement, striving to balance an enquiring mind with an increasingly anarchic body. But alerted to dance historian Marion Kant’s online lecture, Rudolf von Laban, Reactionary Modernist (Insiders Outsiders Festival, October 2020) based on her revelatory book, Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich, I […]

I’m on the rack again. Glancing at my watch.  Silently willing the hour away, willing my life away until that evanescent moment when I’ll feel integrated, body and soul. Body, mind and soul. Currently, my mind is urging my body to stretch beyond its habitual capacity. Mind over matter. Remembering the insouciant ballet years of […]

In search of Sassoon House, former jewel in the crown of Enfield’s Trent Park, I stumble into a 413-acre estate `of mature farmland’ engulfed by a rash of Berkeley Homes. Scene of my third movement and drama year at Trent Park Training College fifty years ago, the site now resembles a Monopoly board of click-together […]