Jon Petter is a community artist, musician, dancer, composer/arranger and educationalist.
He has many decades of experience working across dance, music, voice, composition, and community arts settings.

Training:
He was educated in dance (at the Central School of Ballet) early on.

He trained in the “Search & Reflect” method with Community Music, under John Stevens and others.

He holds a certificate (“EAR-tificate”) from Pauline Oliveros’ Center for Deep Listening ® at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

He recently trained with Simone Salvatici as a Sound Therapist and is working towards his IPHM accreditation.

Artistic practice:
Jon Petter’s practice is very much community-centred, combining music, voice, sound and movement. He uses approaches that emphasise listening (both among participants, to the environment, and to bodily/listening awareness) as central. His background in dance gives him tools to incorporate movement and the body in his work.

He has developed long engagements with particular communities through his work for Turtle Key Arts, working with people living with dementia and their carers and with young people on the autistic spectrum; and through his role as Associate Artist on the English National Ballet’s Dance for Parkinsons programme since its inception in 2010.

He works in school settings: runs choirs, bands, instrumental teaching; he also does the arrangements for and musical direction of large school productions. He has a long-term commitment to Queens Park Community School and in 2018 he received an Outstanding Leader award from the Jack Petchey Foundation for his services to music education.

He collaborates with Intercultural Roots, offering Deep Listening sessions, and is involved in their Health & WELLth and Human-Nature-Connect programmes.
An off-shoot of this work with IR is a collaboration with Thomas Kampe in a project “Listening Bodies – Questioning Voices,” combining Deep Listening and Feldenkrais Method.

As a performer, he plays clarinet, saxophones, percussion, piano and sings. He has been a long-term member of The Drones and Klezmer Klub, who still gig, even if somewhat irregularly. He is also associated with Zubop, the Love Grocer, Tinpots and Zion Train.

In 2019 he used a scholarship from the Dylan Foundation to go to New York City where he embedded as an International Fellow in the Mark Morris Dance Group’s Dance for PD® programme, working all over the city and collaborating with choreographer Pamela Quinn in a Movement and Voice Lab. He also studied with Meredith Monk, took voice lessons from long-term ensemble member Katie Geissinger and studied at Movement Research with Tatyana Tennenbaum, mayfield brooks and Marisa Michelson.

He has a long history of collaboration with Indian dancers and musicians, both in the UK and internationally. Projects include being an artist for the Shrishti Institute of Art Design & Technology Interim Semester in Bengalaru, creating a project called Sound-Body-Space: Rituals for the 21st
Century, with performances at Chikpet Metro Station.

Impact, values and philosophy:
Central to Jon’s work is the belief that everyone has a right to an artistic life, regardless of age or ability. He sees art, music, movement, singing and sounding as not just as an aesthetic pursuit or entertainment but as means to empower, heal, enrich and unite communities.
He uses immersive, embodied practices — Deep Listening, movement, voice, sound — with a sensitivity to people who might be marginalised (by health, neurodiversity, aging, etc) to create spaces for self-expression and joyful connection.