MEN & GIRLS DANCE Comes to The Place

FEVERED SLEEP's critically acclaimed and much discussed dance production, Men & Girls Dance, will be back at The Place in April 2019, two years since it performed there to capacity houses. Men & Girls Dance will be performed by a cast of five professional male dancers and nine girls aged 8-11 from in and around London who were cast from open auditions.

Men & Girls Dance has entertained, challenged, surprised and charmed audiences at every turn. It was named as one of the Guardian's Top 10 Theatre Shows 2016 and the Evening Standard's Best Dance in London 2017. The show perfectly complements Fevered Sleep's creative philosophy: to produce thought-provoking projects that challenge people's perceptions of their relationships with each other and society in general.

The piece is co-conceived/directed by Fevered Sleep's award-winning artistic directors David Harradine and Sam Butler.

Says David: This show is for anyone who's interested in contemporary performance or dance. It's for anyone who cares about human relationships. It's for people who have never been to see contemporary dance before, who might think it's not for them. It's for the parents and relatives and neighbours of the girls who perform in the show. It's for everyone.

Says Sam: David and I spoke to a lot of people about the idea and initially we had some strikingly negative responses based on just the idea of men and girls dancing together. We immediately knew how important it was to challenge these notions and to reclaim the right for girls and men to be together and dance together as fellow human beings.

The show was commissioned by The Place as part of their Made At The Place programme.

Says Eddie Nixon, Artistic Director of The Place: Men & Girls Dance is a wonderfully Moving Theatre show which reclaims for the world a way of being freely and carefully together. Our city needs to have the conversation that this work provokes. It's the most beautifully political, gently radical dance we've ever put on our stage.
The production uses newspaper as a key design element. The design is a direct response to the role of the print media in creating a negative perception of relationships between men and girls, says David Harradine. We've all been aware of tabloid sensationalism so we take newspaper and we literally rip it up, and repurpose it, and reuse it; we turn it into a thing of beauty we approach those negative headlines head on, and we dance all over them, until they're no longer visible, until positive stories take their place.