LEAP DANCE FESTIVAL 2026 to Support Regional Artists With Commissions & Bursaries

Leap Dance Festival is supporting and nurturing outstanding regional dance talent through series of generous commissions and bursaries at this year's event.

The annual festival of dance opens two weeks today, promising 16 spectacular days of live performance across Liverpool and beyond.

As part of Leap's commitment to championing local and regional dance talent, a series of special commissions – presented in partnership with Culture Liverpool and made possible by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund - will be staged throughout the 2026 festival which runs from 24 April to 9 May.

In addition, rising star dancers and choreographers will be showing new pieces as they vie for the coveted Liverpool Dance Prize, with five bursaries awarded to help them develop their work.

A commitment to artist development and celebration of exciting dance practitioners is at the heart of Leap and is also part of a wider ambition to make Liverpool a vibrant regional hub for dance.

Two thrilling new festival commissions from LGBTQ+ artists will be presented at Queer Moves which comes to the Unity Theatre on Friday, 1 May.

Amber Buttery and Owen Gillott will stage a new work – The Queer Dancehall - which combines live performance, community participation and a dance film. Subverting a traditional ballroom dance through a queer lens, the work will break away from ‘expected' gender roles in partner dance and celebrate queer identity.

Ahead of Leap, they are also holding free workshops where they will invite queer couples (and friends) to get dancing.

LIPA-trained Amber Buttery is a director and actor whose work specialises in connecting communities, starting conversations and embracing the complexity of life through bold visuals and sensory elements. Her directing credits include Small Hours (Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse), Missionary (Hope Mill Theatre) and Power (Tmesis).

And Owen Gillott, who has a first-class degree in musical theatre, is an award-winning Liverpool-based dance artist and lip-sync extraordinaire whose dance credits include Between the Lines, Love Letter series and the Vogue Ball.

Meanwhile Rowena Gander is an academic and international performance artist with a PhD in dance practices, who creates thought-provoking solo performance works that question and negotiate themes of sexuality, power and objectification in women.

For Leap, she is working with director Izzie Major to create Red Flag, a physical theatre piece exploring the impact of narcissistic abuse and objectification on an individual's sense of self, agency and bodily autonomy. The work's emotional and structural basis uses real stories, collected through ethically facilitated community conversations.

Two further special commissions are also being premiered as part of Leap.

Tom Shennan is an artist and filmmaker working in expanded cinema whose practice explores play, sensory perception and audience agency, drawing on autistic and queer experiences to create often absurdist works.

For Leap, a new dance film, “It is a Tuesday, and I am still the wind”, will be accessible online throughout the festival period.

Wind courses through Liverpool with curiosity, returning again and again to Toxteth. In collaboration with choreographer Shivaangee Agrawal, the film asks what it is that keeps drawing it back here?

Dawn Holgate started her career performing with Extemporary Dance and Images Dance Theatre before joining Phoenix Dance Theatre as one of its first female dancers and later the company's first education manager. Over three decades she has become a prominent leader the fields of dance education and community including as artistic director of East Riding Youth Dance.

Her piece for Leap has been created is collaboration with The Dancing Queens, a community group of Global Majority women based at Toxteth's Caribbean Centre and will open an evening at the Unity Theatre on Saturday, 2 May along with Toussaint to Move performing Windows of Displacement.

The work integrates dance, live song and embodied storytelling to explore radical Black joy, resilience and collective care, alongside powerful narratives of womanhood.

In addition to the special festival commissions, emerging artists from across the North West will share work at the Unity Theatre on Thursday, 30 April as part of this year's Liverpool Dance Prize.

Five bursaries of £750 have been awarded to help artists create a new piece of work and compete for a development grant of £1,000. Artists from the 2024 prize have gone on to present work at the Edinburgh Fringe, Warrington Contemporary Arts Festival and at Turn North West.