This week LEAP dance festival returns to the city for ten days of incredible performances. We chose five favourites.
Motionhouse: WILD
The opening performance of this year’s festival, WILD explores our disconnect with the natural environment and asks if, in our increasingly urban lives, the wild is still shaping our behaviour?
Integrating dynamic choreography, acrobatic movement and hand-to-hand partnering, WILD will be staged atop an urban forest of industrial scaffolding in Constellations’ outdoor space, in a breathtaking show for audiences of all ages.
Hinterlands, 12 Oct, 19:30 – 22:00. £12 / £10 concs
Frances Disley: Tripleflex
Merging visual art and dance, artist Frances Disley presents a new immersive installation activated by three contemporary dance artists and accompanied by a newly commissioned soundtrack from M. T. Hall.
Tripleflex explores painting via live performance, as brushstrokes guide the movements of the performers. The work will be presented in two parts; matinee for families, and the evening performance for the general public.
Bluecoat, 1o Oct 11:00 – 12:30 and 19:oo – 20:30. £6 / £5 concs
Community Dance Platform
Dancers from MDI’s 50 Moves, Men!Dancing! and Merseyside Youth Dance Company will be joined by invited groups and dance artists from across the North West to present new work.
Performers from previous years have gone on to be part of the CAT programme, joined the National Youth Dance Company or been commissioned to create original dance works.
Capstone Theatre, 6 Oct 17:00 – 19:00. £8 / 6 concs
Fringe Festival
A platform for young performers based in Liverpool, and a chance for new audiences to experience dance. LEAP Fringe is a mini ‘festival-within-a-festival’ with a DIY ethos, using movement as the catalyst.
Expect the unexpected; a programme of pop-up performances on the street and in non-traditional theatre spaces along Hope Street.
Hope Street, 11 Oct 17:00 – 22:00 and 12 Oct 13:00 – 22:00. Free
Black Holes
Weaving poetic text and movement, Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende retell the universe’s history from big bang to death.
Speculating on how to be, with bodies carrying histories of marginalisation and anti blackness, they propel lived experiences onto a cosmic scale.
Alexandrina and Seke began working together in 2016. Exploring the potentials and problematics of Afrofuturism shapes their collaboration.
They situate their bodies inside shifting and imagined landscapes, searching for hopeful possibilities amidst the harshness of past and present dystopias.
Unity Theatre, 5 Oct 19:30 – 21:30. £10 / £8 concs
You can find more about all these shows, plus all the other LEAP 2019 shows, and buy tickets at the LEAP festival page.