Born twenty days after my mother arrived in England, I grew up in the church from childhood to my early teens in a close knit Jamaican community in Birmingham. This gave me a solid religious grounding and a strong belief in God, the ‘Supreme Being’.

Years of church conventions and ‘altar calls’: singing choruses over and over until music, voices, clapping and movement all collided and fused together, mesmerising and filling mind, body and soul, I was often taken to the point of transformation. I have felt the vibe where at that moment if death came, I felt ready to embrace it, free from the fear of retribution. I was always curiously envious as others around me spoke in tongues jumping, dancing, screaming and crying as the spirit moved in satellite bursts throughout the church. I wanted to know what they felt - No! to feel what they feel - to enter the spiritual unknown.

Decades later, pursuing my PhD I am striving to come to terms with my many spiritual journeys and achieve a deeper spiritual grounding within my artistic practice. My time as a Trailblazer was therefore used to further develop my choreographic practice and facilitate field research into Jamaican dancehall; to gather data in order to advance my artistic ideas around dancehall and the African spiritual practice which proceeds it.

Spirituality at this point encompasses the transformation of an individual through the engagement of signs and signifiers which link the cultural and collective memory of a particular community to shared understandings of meaning, history, intention and action. A window into the unknown, spirituality connects the mind, body and spirit of individuals through sensual and emotive feeling using movement and sound - whether physically or mentally - to initiate rational and physical responses which help in creating meaning.

During my Trailblazer year I also won a Cultural Leadership Programme (CLP) bursary, which enabled me to expand my research trip to include Ghana and Nigeria. In Ghana I worked with the Ghana National Dance Company and Ghana Dance Ensemble, Legon. And in Nigeria, I participated in The Lagos Black Heritage Festival 2010 a festival of music, dance, theatre, film, visual arts and boat regattas which took place in the cities of Lagos and Badagry. Masquerade dances were an important part of the festival, embodying the festival's sub-heading Lagos the city of a thousand masks.

Amongst the varied masquerade traditions present at the festival the Egungun and Eko masks were the most numerous and most familiar to me. However, the magical Dananfojura mask, constantly set alight, provoked and insulted by its accompanying dancers and musicians, fascinated me. As the agitated mask paced up and down to the chanting of insults, its entourage ran, scattering themselves amongst panicked audiences who also ran away in fear. The mask wheedled a chained amulet which is believed to contain the smallpox disease which is passed on if it touches you. The idea of masked dances hiding/revealing and enabling social commentary immediately became apparent as a link between this masquerade character and the dancehall artists in Jamaica who masquerade and transform into their constructed personas. Both are revered and feared, both hold high profile positions in society which challenges concepts of lawlessness and gender politics as, similarly to dancehall, few females are involved or featured as masquerade characters. Importantly, female movements are performed by male dancers who may or may not fully dress as female characters whilst wearing the masquerade costume. Within dancehall culture, male fashion is often more 'feminised' than is acceptable in 'normative' Jamaican society. Tight pants, elaborate hair styles/colours, and skin bleaching all enable many males to look in the self-declaring words of dancehall DJ Vybz Kartel 'pretty like a colouring book'.

The Trailblazer research trip really assisted me in focusing my PhD research. I have since collaborated and experimented with three international artists, pushing the boundaries between dancehall, African and Caribbean spiritual dance practices and the concept of identity masquerade and personhood. Importantly, Trailblazers has also helped me re-establish myself within the community of young dance artists who form the next generation. This has enabled me to identify artists with whom I can collaborate with and pass my skills and knowledge on to in the near future.

For those who want to really experience the range of dance that African People's Dance has to offer beyond the readily accessible, then Trailblazers offers a strong supportive network. My advice to artists within the sector is to dare to dream, then follow the dream and see where the path leads you. As a word of caution remember: 'one, one coco fill basket!' (add one cocoa pod to another and eventually the basket will become full) so do not expect the first research trip to suddenly provide all the knowledge you require as time, patience, good friends and networks will open the doors to knowledge, change and growth.