Artists Announced for New Work Sessions at Children & Their Grown-Ups Showcase

The Windows to New Work sessions will enable exciting artists and companies to present their new ideas to an audience of industry professionals: the artists selected as part of these sessions have been named as Xenia Aidonopoulou, Georgia Tegou, 21Common, Barrowland Ballet, Krishna Zivraj-Nair, Rachel Erdos, Vincent Dance Theatre, Joss Arnott, Second Hand Dance, Sophie Nüzel, Sarah Blanc, infuseDANCE, Anna Rowe and Karen Louise. These sessions offer the opportunity to get a glimpse of brand-new work and chat to the creators. The Children & Their Grown-Ups Showcase is designed to stimulate more interest and discussion about dance shows for children and families.

Zannah Chisholm, Artistic Director and CEO of PDSW, comments, Post-pandemic it's important to enable children to watch and take part in dance as an educational and fun experience that they can do as a collective. And therefore we need to find the artists and shows out there and start programming them more regularly. In this Showcase there are more than 20 new Danceworks covering different styles and different themes. Some are for theatres, some for outdoors or digital presentation. There are case studies and discussions to get us thinking and chances to build relationships and talk in greater detail. The event is relevant to artists, programmers, journalists, producers, teachers, governors and parents. Together we are able to bring dance to more children if we reprioritise our work to do this.

Pavilion Dance South West have joined forces with DanceEast (Ipswich), People Dancing (UK wide), South East Dance (Brighton), TandemWorks (South East England), The Place (London), The Work Room (Glasgow) and Yorkshire Dance (Leeds) to present Children & Their Grown-Ups, providing the opportunity to find and develop new work for children and families. The showcase will form this year's PDSW Summit - an annual event to shine a light on the industry and look at what is needed in the world of dance.

This industry focussed showcase offers a programme of discussions, live and livestreamed work and pitches. The showcase aims to spark the creation and programming of more dance work for children and their grown-ups. Although this is primarily industry facing, the four-day event will also offer opportunities for the public to watch never before seen shows aimed at 0-15-year-olds. The presented works will be a mix of live and digital with an emphasis on using dance to experience different feelings or stories.

Children & Their Grown-Ups is a new way of collaborating to showcase work from across the UK and the dance industry with a mixture of live work taking place in different locations as well as a shared digital portal. Most of the programme, including discussions, will be accessible online including the livestreamed shows and pitches, allowing audiences around the world to attend and see what work is available for international touring. The event builds on PDSW's experience of running the UK-wide Surf The Wave programme to find new ways to showcase and tour work, making more dance available to more people.

This event will be fully BSL accessible on request, and there will be audio description and live captioning for performances.