These Stories We Tell - A New Dance Theatre Work

Riverside dance was established in 2018. We are based in Worcester, UK. We create fun pieces, intense pieces, real pieces about real lives. We strive to make meaningful dances that help us to live in the world around us. They are joyous, playful, raw and honest. They celebrate, commiserate, they help.  

This project stems from our own experiences, dance has been our way of making sense of the world. Like many people, we've had difficult times in our lives and want to make this a focus of our next piece. Our aim isn't to make a depressing work about the bad times, but to look at how we integrate these into our sense of who we are. We also want to allow others, particularly young people, to come on this journey with us to find their own understanding.

When we experience trauma our brains don't work effectively, memories get distorted or lost, events become jumbled. To make sense of these experiences we tend to create stories that fit what we do remember. From a young age, we are immersed in stories and storytelling, heroes and villains, good and evil, all following similar types of plots. They are embedded in our subconscious and are often our "go to" place we go to to make sense of the world.

We want to make a piece that jumps between the ‘real’ event and the ‘story’ memory. The ‘story’ parts of the performance will be animated and shown on stage through immersive projection mapping. We plan to use state-of-the-art motion capture to make these animated characters. Using this approach we can explore that boundary between the real and the fiction.

We aim to work with four schools across Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Gloucestershire throughout the process. We don't want to charge the schools for their participation so as to allow as people who need this experience to take part. With your funding we'll start the journey. Your money will help change the lives of young people who have experienced difficult times in their lives.