Dancers explore life in and out of lockdown at the Brighton Fringe

Spokeswoman Rosy Nevard said: “During lockdown, a group of our professional dancers got themselves together and worked many, many hours on Zoom documenting the experience and keeping on dancing when theatres were closed. What a horrible time it was but the dancers adapted to their version of working from home. We now want people to talk about their own experiences and not just move on without a backward thought. We have created a performance which looks back at what we all went through – the ups and downs.

“We’re bringing the performance to Fabrica Gallery, Brighton for Brighton Fringe Festival on May 25 and 26. It is the development of a unique project beginning in the dancers’ bedrooms during lockdown 2020 and continuing to virtual performances and now to stage. It reflects on the whole Covid-19 experience and aims to help people talk about what lockdown was for them. See. Feel. Heal. From bedroom to stage to push the spatial limits of their homes and explore life in lockdown through contemporary dance. They were apart but yet together and were kept going by the purpose of this shared project – dance was their coping mechanism, climbing through windows, jumping on beds, rolling in duvets, taking brooms as partners and leaning on chairs, walls, wardrobes, even ceilings! They explored the possibilities of every room in the house – except the bathroom! – giving working from home a new meaning, until they could meet again outside and at a 2m distance. They documented the experience by working remotely over nine months to create and rehearse four 15-minute sections looking at the various stages of lockdown. Working like this had so many challenges. They found it was difficult to see each other’s movements clearly on a small screen, had no peripheral vision of the other dancers beside them, and trying to count music with a time delay was a huge challenge! But in December 2020, while Covid-19 was still scary and unknown, they shared their creation with a virtual audience of 100+ people – a unique moment in history and one dancer had Covid at the time. Since then, the project has become a channel for healing. No-one was left untouched by Covid. So many loved ones lost, so many families separated, so much of society broken – it was an experience of upheaval which has left so many people broken and traumatised. This moving in-person reflection of the pandemic documents the strange times we lived through, taking the audience on a journey back through times of scary news headlines, questions over vaccines, wearing masks, confusing social distance rules - capturing it as a moment in history.” A time which must not be forgotten or swept under the carpet and which there is much to recover from.”