National Dance Company Wales has created its first full-length family show, Zoetrope, with choreographer Lea Anderson, co-founder in the 1980s and artistic director of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs companies, who was awarded an MBE in 2006 for making dance more accessible and inclusive for audiences.
This one-hour performance will premiere 13–16 December at The Dance House at Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff this December before touring in 2024.
Inspiration for Zoetrope came from Anderson's residency at the Bill Douglas Film Museum where she became fascinated with pre-film animation devices such as Zoetropes. To bring those ideas to the stage, Lea is working with designer Simon Vincenzi to create a cast of creatures from different periods in evolutionary history with costumes based on the black and white drawings used in zoetrope machines that represent the evolution of man all the way from the first cell, through to lizards and monkey masks to atom-inspired headdresses and eventually to long boney fingers and skeleton heads where that wheel of life ends, before beginning again.
On Saturday 16 December, there will also be a family fun day, free to attend with tickets purchased for the show, where children can make their own Zoetrope, learn how to juggle, have a go at ribbon dancing and even learn a sequence of moves from the show, before watching the performance.
NDCW is also touring its Pulse dance bill again this autumn: it will be at Ipswich DanceEast (3 November) and Dance House, Cardiff (9–23 November) and then it will head to Italy to Padova, Teatro Verdio (29 November).