Helen Calcutt

Helen Calcutt is an award-winning choreographer and poet whose work centres the body as a site of language. Her choreographic practice spans theatre, site-responsive performance, and live production. with commissions from Birmingham Royal Ballet (Curated by Carlos), Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Total Insight Theatre (When I Was 10, dir. Kieran Vyas), Def Motion, Apple (Three Poems) Midlands Actors Theatre (Descent, The Fountain of Light), and the Southbank Centre (Marina). She has extensive performance experience across large-scale and experimental contexts, including Dundu (Giants of Light) Sonia Sabri Company (Sharing the Light), Autin Dance Theatre (Little Amal, the Big Walk), Akeim Toussaint Buck (OKAN), SEH Company (She Swims), and was a leading performing artist in the Commonwealth Games Opening Ceremony, 2022.

She is Artistic Director of dance-theatre company Beyond Words.

Helen’s collections and edited works include the acclaimed Somehow (Verve Poetry Press), the anthology Eighty-Four (Saboteur Award shortlist and named a Poetry Wales Book of the Year) and the Pavilion title Feeling All the Kills. She is the creator of the Hypha Method, a pioneering system of text-to-dance translation informing research and performance across both dance and literary fields. Her practice is funded by Arts Council England, the Society of Authors, and One Dance UK. Her radical new dance adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers received a major touring grant in 2025, and will be touring internationally from Spring 2026.

Helen is also an activist and speaker, and was awarded a career-wide Honorary Doctor of Letters in 2023 from Loughborough University, acknowledging her mental health advocacy and outstanding contribution to the arts.