everything that rises must dance

everything that rises must dance is a dance project celebrating female movement and the way women have danced throughout history. The piece is created with 100 to 200 women reproducing the minute movements of daily life while weaving in fragments of folk dance from around the world. The spectacle sets expressive, physical action to an evolving sonic score.

“We wanted to create a living archive of contemporary female movement and to celebrate its history and future. It’s a political gesture, an anthropological exercise and an attempt to locate the individual within the collective. When 200 women occupy a space we begin to ask – how do the gestures we make express our identity? Is movement – non-verbal communication – a hidden code to understand a culture, a society, our ancestry or our future? Quite apart from the larger political themes, the piece is a joyous communion, the creation of a new ritual.” Sasha Milavic Davies and Lucy Railton

Produced by Complicité
First presented as part of Dance Umbrella 2018

We partnered with ResCen, Middlesex University to create an online movement archive of all the filmed sequences from each iteration of this project. Explore the online archive here.

© Ali Wright, Keith Hiro