Gill Clarke

Gill Clarke, who has died at the age of 56 after a long battle with cancer, was a dancer and teacher who inspired a generation of intelligent contemporary dance artists.

She was educated in English and Social Science and spent her career as a dance artist, performer, researcher and teacher. She was a founding dancer with Siobhan Davies, one of the UK's leading choreographers and performed and collaborated with many of the finest choreographers in the country – Rosemary Butcher, Rosemary Lee, Janet Smith and Wayne McGregor.

The Siobhan Davies Dance company was much loved by Scottish audiences, and Gill Clarke was also involved in many movement research and choreographic projects in Scotland encouraging and mentoring independent dance-makers.

She was a rigorous and generous teacher of dance, who taught extensively at a professional level across the UK and beyond. She regarded teaching as integral to her artistic practice. Her understanding of the body and its architecture, and her ability to communicate this, had a profound influence on the quality and integrity of dance training and development in the last 20 years.

She was head of performance studies at Trinity Laban, London between 2000 and 2006, and regularly led masterclasses and workshops internationally for students, professionals and companies.

Her passionate inquiry into dance was an inspiration to many dance and movement artists, and students around the world.

She founded Dance UK in 1982, the leading campaign group for the health, wellbeing and experience of dance. She was an articulate and committed champion in support of independent dancers.

She was then co-founder of Independent Dance in 1990 with Fiona Millward. This is an artist-led training organisation dedicated to professional dance artists based at Siobhan Davies Dance Studio and has had the longest-running programme for the development of professional dance artists in the UK.

She believed passionately in the contribution that dance and movement can make beyond the artform, and beyond performance. She made connections beyond dance to other makers and thinkers interested in embodied knowledge and inquiry, and was encouraged in her recent research by the interest of scientists, anthropologists and psychologists studying embodied cognition and the increasing understanding of the mind as more than simply the brain, but a set of bodily processes that are themselves highly intelligent and deliberate.

In February 2011, she started a major research lab into the relationship between Movement and Meaning with a group of dance practitioners, scientists, philosophers, psychologists and social anthropologist in London, on which she continued to work until the day before she died. She had put in place mechanisms to ensure that her work with Independent Dance and the Movement and Meaning research continued to thrive.

She was a joint Fellow of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA), and was made MBE for her services to dance.

In 2011, she received the Jane Attenborough Dance UK Industry Award at the Critics' Circle National Dance Awards in recognition of her championing of independent dance artists. The winner of this award is chosen following an open nomination process, making the winner someone who is genuinely respected and admired by their colleagues.

Siobhan Davies has paid tribute to Clarke as someone who "loved dance with an intelligent passion. She intuitively appreciated that there is a knowing in our bodies that too often we are not in touch with. Her lifelong work as a performer, teacher and researcher was to reveal the mindful intelligence of the moving body and what that means to all of us as people, our relationship with others and our place in the world."

The inpouring of heartfelt messages of loss and inspiration since her death are testament to the huge esteem in which she was held, and to the many people she connected to. She is survived by her brother Peter Clarke.