Autumn UK Tour Announced For Canadian Contemporary Circus Company The 7 Fingers

Dance Consortium has been touring the very best international contemporary dance throughout the UK and Ireland for over 20 years. This autumn it presents the first UK tour for eleven years by Canadian contemporary circus trailblazers The 7 Fingers - one of the first international companies to visit our shores this year.

After performing with some of the world's best contemporary circus companies including Cirque de Soleil, The 7 Fingers' seven founders set up the collective in 2002. Their mission was nothing short of redefining circus, stripping the spectacle down to its thrilling essence and fusing it with dance, theatre, multimedia, music and storytelling. Since then, the company has gained a reputation for telling human stories with life-enhancing theatricality, warmth and humour.

In Passagers, show director and company co-founder Shana Carroll plays with our fascination with travel, both nostalgic and symbolic. A colourful and diverse group of strangers meet onboard a train. Through the course of their journey, in a temporarily-suspended reality, they get to know each other, sharing their stories and revealing their emotional states through virtuoso acrobatics - vaulting somersaults, breathtaking trapeze, daredevil balances on the highwire - along with contemporary dance, narrative, song and original music by Colin Gagné.

Stephen Crocker, Chair of Dance Consortium, 'After one cancellation, two postponements and 14 months of empty theatres, I am delighted - and very excited - on behalf of DC members to be announcing our next tour by one of the world's leading performance companies. This is the first time that the Dance Consortium members have presented The 7 Fingers Company from Quebec and I can think of no better way of welcoming International Artists back onto our stages than with their wonderful show Passagers - a beautiful homage to travel, love and the power of storytelling."

The 7 Fingers' co-founder and Passagers director Shana Carroll says: "Passagers was originally designed as an ode to travel - departure versus arrival, chance versus choice, familiar versus foreign, confinement versus border-crossing. Those themes have taken on a new meaning for us all these days, with the very idea of departing or arriving feeling like a distant pipe dream. Border-crossing is now fraught with risks, regulations and complications and confinement was the unifying theme for everyone. The show has now taken on a whole other dimension I'm not sure I could ever have imagined. I hope it will make us treasure the days of simple, liberating travel and celebrate a return to greater freedoms."

Learn more at www.The7FingersTour.co.uk

Tour Dates:

Tuesday 21 September at 7.30pm & Wednesday 22 September at 1pm
BIRMINGHAM Hippodrome, part of the autumn edition of Birmingham International Dance Festival (21 September to 3 October)
Hurst St, Birmingham B5 4TB
Tickets: 0844 338 5000 / www.birminghamhippodrome.com

Friday 24 & Saturday 25 September at 7.30pm
MILTON KEYNES Theatre
500 Marlborough Gate, Milton Keynes MK9 3NZ
Tickets: 0333 009 6690 / www.atgtickets.com/miltonkeynes

Tuesday 28 September at 7.30pm
HULL New Theatre, presented as part of Freedom Festival, Hull
Kingston Square, Hull HU1 3HF
Tickets: 01482 300306 / www.hulltheatres.co.uk

Thursday 30 September and Friday 1 October at 7.30pm
BRIGHTON Dome
Church St, Brighton BN1 1UE
Tickets: 01273 709709 / www.brightondome.org

Tuesday 5 & Wednesday 6 October at 7.30pm
Royal Concert Hall, NOTTINGHAM
Theatre Square, Nottingham NG1 5ND
Tickets: 0115 989 5555 / www.trch.co.uk

Monday 11 & Tuesday 12 October at 7.30pm
PLYMOUTH Theatre Royal
Royal Parade, Plymouth PL1 2TR
Tickets: 01752 267222 / www.theatreroyal.com

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