Lalitaraja Chandler

I am a performer, improviser, contact dancer, educator, choreographer, meditator, Buddhist and sometimes all of these things at once! My background is diverse having worked with Scottish Ballet, Michael Clark, Adventures in Motion Pictures, Laurie Booth, Yolande Snaith, Fin Walker, Charles Linehan and more recently Annie Pui-Ling Lok, Joe Moran, Jia-Yu Corti and Kate Brown and many others. I am still active in performing and making work alongside my role at Roehampton.

I have presented more than 25 works including commissions from Chisenhale Dance Space, Jackson's Lane, Royal Opera House, London Contemporary Dance School and Laban Centre. I organise the Friday Club which is a forum for dance improvisation that meets regularly.

In the early 1980s I began practicing Buddhism and have been teaching meditation and Buddhism for more than twenty years. In 1998 I was ordained as a dharmacari in the Triratna Buddhist Order receiving the name Lalitaraja from my preceptor.

MA (distinction) Choreography

My research interests focus around improvisation, contact improvisation and choreography and the links with committed spiritual practice. I am interested in Heidegger's ideas about calculative vs meditative thinking particularly his concepts of Gelasenheit and Aletheia (releasement and revealing respectively) with respect to this. I'm currently looking at these links as a phenomenology of experience.

Higher Education Academy

I teach improvisation, contact improvisation, choreography and performance on BA and MFA programs. What I am really interested in doing by teaching these practice is helping students get good at being who they are in order to fully realise their potential at whatever stage of development they find themselves. I see this as educating them for the ongoing project wherever it takes them. Improvisation skills are life skills and they open the possibility to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom over time.