Helen Calcutt is an award-winning poet & choreographer whose practice centres the body as the primary site of language. Celebrated for a distinctive practice in text embodiment, her choreography redefines how language is authored, experienced, and performed, placing her at the forefront of cross-disciplinary performance in the UK.

Her collections and edited works include the acclaimed Somehow a Poetry Book Society Winter Pamphlet and Poetry School Book of the Year; anthology Eighty-Four, shortlisted for a Saboteur Award and named a Poetry Wales Book of the Year, and the Pavilion title Feeling All the Kills, described as “radical, revolutionary, and fearless in depicting women as sexual and maternal.” (Zoe Bridgley, Seren.)

Her choreographic work spans theatre, television, 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, Midlands Actors Theatre, and the Southbank Centre. She has performed and collaborated with 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 is artistic director of the dance-theatre company Beyond Words.

Helen is the creator of the Hypha Method, a pioneering system of text-to-dance translation. Reaching practitioners across both dance and literary fields, her research is funded by Arts Council England, the Society of Authors, and One Dance UK. Her radical dance adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, created and produced by Beyond Words, received a major touring grant in 2025 and will tour internationally from Spring 2026.

She 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.