PDSW announce recipients of Digital Commission led by a Disabled Artist / Company

Pavilion Dance South West are excited to announce the recipients of our Digital Dance works led by a Disabled Artist / Company Commission. 

Made possible by our Culture Recovery Fund grant from Arts Council England and DCMS in April 2021, after an open call, we are pleased to announce we are supporting: 

Second Hand Dance: Hearing Dances is an experiment in audio description and foley, made for visually impaired and non-disabled children ages 5-8. The project will explore the sounds that dance can make with different materials, and tests audio description (written by children for children) as a score for an improvised dance.

Families will see the outcome of this stage of the project in a special Zoom session on Saturday 9th October, as well as being posted a box of materials to explore from home. Booking will open soon for this event. 

Stopgap Dance Company:  Dance Tapes is a series of six choreographies of speech and sound. The first two in-progress works by artists Kat Ball and Sander Verbeek will be shared with online audiences on the 29th July, with the series completed later this year.

Book your place for this work-in-progress sharing here. 

The project will be an intimate experience for audiences, highlighting the disabled artists’ lived experiences through an interweaving choreography of speech and sound. 

Alongside, the audio choreography audiences will be able to access artistic transcripts to accompany the pieces – deepening the experience. 

Album artwork from Dance Tapes by Lily Norton. Graphic Description: On a black background a cassette tape unspools, the winding tape unravels to tangle up into the form of a dancer balancing across their wheelchair. The cassette sits top right, outlined in white linework, with neon etchings echoing copies of the cassette. The words ‘Dance Tapes’ scribbled across the tape label. The figure sits bottom left, composed of wriggling lines of white tape, the dancer faces away from us as they lean horizontally across the wheelchair seat. The linework of the wheels of the chair mirror the tape, with etchings of neon echoing behind.

Lead website image: Hearing Dances by Second Hand Dance. Image by Rosie Heafford. 

Image description: A large gold, foil sheet is being held up in a studio with black curtains. At the front of the image, a laptop is showing the same scene.