Dear Annie is a queer creative based in London, UK

I don’t want to write of myself in the third person, so I’ll begin with this... ‘I’ is me; Charlie Dearnley. Sometimes I enjoy being called Annie. In fact, I enjoy being called Annie at any time, but different contexts vary the potential of this happening. Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, or if I’m within some kind of crowd, I turn around thinking I’ve heard someone shout ‘ANNIE’. More often than not, I’m mistaken. Regardless, I enjoy these moments: moments where Annie is acknowledged as being/becoming a body, getting a shot at the limelight, with weight, breath, interaction, integration, freedom and new constraints.

I am a queer, trans artist and performer who uses dance, music and spoken word to weave binary melting stories with autobiographical beginnings. As Charlie, as Annie, I am autobiographically feeling through trans-ness and what it is to be a binary-melting body. For me, this often narratively involves my Christian upbringing - a puzzle I can’t solve but can observe - stepping from the church into the wild and finding my feet. I am here, I am queer and I’m excited about taking up space with others,

I have worked internationally within performing arts for 8 years, as a dancer, musician, and writer, working across street-theatre, proscenium theatres, galleries and community spaces. I also work within health and social care and am training as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist (DMP). Through this training I am learning to use dance to support a therapeutic process - acknowledging emotions as physiological, supporting self-expression, and affirming difference to facilitate a sense of self-authorship. Across my work I want to trouble 'normal' to celebrate and nourish an acceptance of 'difference'. I am a body, reconfiguring the world with other human and other-than-human bodies.

I dance, I draw, I make music, I write, regardless of what else is going on in my life and who does or doesn’t see it.