Beyond the Odds: Recovery Becomes Performance

Aim

To stage the UK’s first post-stroke dance theatre company’s debut at The Place and show how performance can transform recovery.

We are raising £25k for Beyond the Odds, a new disabled dance theatre company created with Rosetta Life. Its 20 artists have all experienced brain injury from stroke or accident, and most are new to creative practice. It is the first company in the UK set up to resist the marginalisation of the post-stroke disabled community.

Beyond the Odds and its wider community engagement programme offer a groundbreaking model for recovery through performing arts. Co-created and co-produced with company members through devised and improvised theatre, the work will show that performance can transform life after stroke and brain injury.

Rosetta Life’s past projects have shown how holistic performing arts programmes support rehabilitation: rebuilding pathways in the brain, improving speech and movement, and tackling depression and isolation. Beyond the Odds goes a step further, modelling how arts practice can nurture new careers and identities for people whose lives have been dramatically altered by injury.

How will the money raised be spent?

The company has been rehearsing its first piece, Our Heroes: The Superfan Club, since April 2025, and shared an early work in progress in July 2026 after a residency at The Place, London. With The Place’s support, we hope to present the finished work there on 31 March 2027.

As the first performance company to grow out of clinical healthcare pathways, Beyond the Odds can become a model of best practice for healthcare and disability dance theatre, and we are seeking £25k to make that happen. The artists need time to learn each scene, and rest between rehearsal days as well as during them, so we will rehearse twice weekly from 11 January to 31 March 2027.

We recognise the need for an Access Manager to support communication across the company. Of the company’s 20 members, 18 live with severe aphasia. Our Access Manager will be the link between the artists and the production team, holding each person’s access needs and making sure reasonable adjustments are planned, delivered and reviewed as those needs change. They will also work with venues so every artist can take part fully, safely and with dignity.

Funding will also showcase best practice in accessible performance, paying for audio description, BSL interpretation and text projection.

We will record every rehearsal so that any artist who misses a session through ill health can catch up without feeling disadvantaged. We will also livestream the performance so that people who are housebound can watch from their bedroom, and hospitals can hold watch parties to celebrate the achievements of people living with stroke and brain injury and encourage others in their own recovery.

Background to this project

100,000 people in the UK experience stroke every year. Almost two thirds of stroke survivors leave hospital with a disability, and around 30% experience aphasia, which affects the ability to speak or write. (https://www.stroke.org.uk/stroke/statistics)

Rosetta Life’s vision is that everybody living with a serious illness or long-term condition has access to ambitious, high-quality art-making and performance. Its mission is to co-create performances with people living with serious illness that challenge the stigma of disability and illness and build inclusive, tolerant communities. Read more about our work at https://rosettalife.org/

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 18th December 2026 at 10:53am