DanceDigital, St Albans City & District Council and Watford Borough Council are delighted to welcome you to Big Dance 2010.

Come along and catch a professional dance performance, support your local dance groups who will be showing you their moves or put on those dancing shoes and have a go at a dance workshop – try hip hop, Capoeira or go strictly ballroom.  There is something for all the family.

All workshops, demonstrations and performances are FREE! DanceDigital also presents the award winning dance company ZooNation.  Join us for a live dance performance by one of the UK’s leading hip hop dance companies.

Try Something Different Schedule
Workshop Timetable St Albans
Workshop Timetable Watford
ZooNation Performance Information
Invitation to the Big Dance Party with JiveSwing

Come along and catch performances along the High Street and in Victoria Shopping Centre, including a special 15-minute preview of the reworked West End hit Into the Hoods from critically acclaimed dance company ZooNation. Plus screenings of chatroom dance film Computer Love by local filmmaker David Valentine.

Support your local dance groups who will be showing you their moves or get on your dancing shoes and have a go at one of the FREE dance workshops in Hip Hop, Breakdance, Contemporary or Street Dance. It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, complete beginner or professional dancer, there is something for everyone! Dance workshops and demonstrations will be taking place between 11am – 4pm at Victoria Shopping Centre and on the High Street.

My Shadows and Me

Bombastic’s style is zany, different and pushes the boundaries of dance theatre for young audiences.  Director Sean Tuan John, is one of Wales’ most successful independent choreographers with an international reputation and DanceDigital are excited to be working together with Bombastic once again!

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Go to Recoil Performance Group website

Hats, Planes & Trains

Recoil Performance Group is one of Denmark’s most exciting and successful contemporary dance groups.  Led by Tina Tarpgaard and incorporating Ole Kristensen they produce exciting and provocative work which stimulates the mind and the body. The group was formed in 2003 by choreographer Tina Tarpgaard and composer Pelle Skovmand, with the intention of establishing collaboration between artists across genre and borders.

Auditions for the new work were held on 12 March at the Hat Factory in Luton. 3 dancers  were selected to begin work on the new piece, which will be performed at the Hat Factory in June 2010.  Recoil will be rehearsing in Chelmsford and Luton throughout May and June in the run up to the opening performance. DanceDigital will be following it’s creation and production over the coming months on this site.

Go to the performance subsite
Go to Recoil Performance Group website

Avatar* explores the field of interactivity between the virtual image and the live body. It is a solo dance performed in an interactive virtual space. Throughout the show, movement and gestures are detected and used to change the flow of the narrative and explore one person’s emergence in to a computer generated world.

Erre Que Erre are a collective of artists based in Barcelona. Avatar* is the result of a collaboration between choreographer Mariangeles Angulo and visual artist Roman Torre.

Go to the performance subsite
Go to Erre que Erre website

Most of the groups taking part have either worked with DanceDigital in the past or are associated with DanceDigital in some form.  The evening includes work from independent dance groups running their own classes in the Chelmsford area to a selection of Essex schools that have worked with DanceDigital over the past year.

SpringBlast also includes special performances from DanceDigital’s two senior youth dance companies, Focus and InPulse who will be performing their most recent works, both selected for the regional finals of Youth Dance England’s U.Dance project, Radiate, which will be held in Cambridge in March 2010.

Heather Eddington’s State of Flux DanceFilm Company presents A Blank Canvas, a piece that blends the mediums of dance, film, animation and sculpture into a dancefilm installation. In 2009 DanceDigital have worked with Heather to bring this installation to Southend, Chelmsford and St. Albans. In 2010 we will be working with Heather again to present the piece at DanceDigital’s Emerge artist platform in St. Albans. Heather will also be joining DanceDigital’s Dance on Film panel at the Forward Motion screeningings in early 2010 at the Thameside Theatre, Grays.

Through the dancers recounting their individual and vivid journeys, Heather has brought to life their personal stories using colour, shape, texture and sound the result being sometimes humorous, at times strikingly truthful but always intriguingly beautiful. The finished work is a short dance-film animation in which the two characters in this story move through their animated world interacting with the drawn objects and with each other.

I See U

I See U takes over three spaces at The Hat Factory, Luton, transforming them into personal worlds linked through video and sound. Through incredible choreography, technology and the transformation of space, IP Tanz provides an opportunity to see how an online existence is changing our reality.