Candoco on Tramway's Unlimited Festival

What does Unlimited mean to Candoco?

One thing you might not know about Candoco

Candoco Dance Company is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year and our performance at Tramway’s Unlimited Festival will mark our very first performance of our anniversary autumn tour. We’ve been telling stories from our 25 years on our website (www.candoco.co.uk) with many more to reveal over the coming months. One of our stories features Laura Patay who is a current company dancer and will be performing at Tramway this September. When we first met Laura she could hardly speak a word of english and was one of our quieter dancers, oh how things change - Laura’s energy and presence on stage is astounding! Make sure you listen to her story before you see the show.

A bit about our work at Tramway’s Unlimited Festival

We are bringing CounterActs, a really exciting double bill, to Tramway’s Unlimited Festival this year. The two pieces we will present challenge and engage the audience in totally different ways and demonstrate the range of our 7 company dancers. Alexander Whitley’s Beheld is intense and unrelenting, pushing the dancers incredibly hard with powerful duets and breath-taking ensemble dancing. Hetain Patel’s, Let’s Talk About Dis, has been created around the dancers’ personal stories and, using a combination of movement, BSL and speech, is a humorous interrogation of both Candoco’s and the dancers’ identities. 

We are very much looking forward to being able to offer an audio described performance on 24th September which will be accompanied by a Touch Tour beforehand. We first experimented with audio description last year but this will be the first time we have audio described a double bill. We are committed to making audio description available for visually impaired audiences across as many performances as possible so any feedback from audience members who use this facility would be very welcome.

Candoco will be performing at Tramway's Unlimited Festival on 23 & 24 September 2016 

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The Performance on 24 September will be audio described with Touch Tour on 24 September at 5.45pm (prebook before the event or just access on the day)

Candoco Open Family Workshops on 25 September 

Vahan Badalyan on Hiraeth and disability arts festivals

Hiraeth

We are going to present a dance piece named "Hiraeth". "Hiraeth", a Welsh word, expresses a specific concept of homesickness - a longing to return to a home or land that one has possibly never seen. Words expressing the idea of homesickness and a lost belonging exist in a number of languages, which proves the phenomenon to be universal. As war, exile and the need for asylum manifest, the appropriateness and use of these words increases. "Hiraeth" was choreographed and staged by Candoco artist Jemima Hoadley in 2015. Official premiere of the performance took place within the main programme of the Highfest International Performing Arts Festival, on 3rd October 2015, at Small Theater.

This production is presented by Armenia's first integrated dance collective, bringing together disabled and non-disabled performers collaborating to tell a story of the painful, yet remarkable journey of the Armenian people throughout their history: their yearning for a lost homeland and their efforts to regain an identity in new lands.

Disability Art Festivals: Will we always need them?

Currently, yes, till we will learn to see something different. Till everything different will become usual. Disability art festivals still teach us do not speak about people with special needs in third person, they help us to move toward them and change our view in general.

In this prospective disability art festivals are unique platforms with great potential to teach all of us to see the world surrounding us differently. They help us move toward an understanding who we are and who are these people and how do they explore the world.

If we consider Art as a tool which always focus on the work with human being, with the man himself, his integrity, disability art festivals engage us in this process of research and development of ourselves and the different world around us.

NCA Small Theatre and Candoco present Hiraeth at Tramways Unlimited Festival on Thursday 15 and Friday 16 September 2016 at 4pm each day. 

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