On Saturday 6 August 2022, performers from Dancing Strong Movement Lab danced among the yellow and blue refractions of light inside The Hop installation. Passers-by of all ages and generations were invited to participate by entering the installation and joining in the free movement.

The choreographed performances, Belonging (in The Hop), explore The Hop pavilion as a threshold space and connect us to local history: working class Londoners used to travel to Kent in the summer to bring in the harvest. ‘Going on the hop’ was to share the experience of simultaneously arriving and leaving; leaving the city while arriving in Kent. In the dances, The Hop becomes a prolonged act of passage that shapes multiple ways of belonging to the city and the fields.

During the performances, we received electromagnetic signals from a live hop plant and converted them to sound. The plant’s living processes were amplified as an audio that accompanied the performances and that can be heard in the video above.