Motionhouse today announced the addition of several dates for its world premiere tour of its new production, Nobody. Marking the Company’s return to live theatre performance following lockdown, Nobody will receive its world première at The Peacock Theatre in London from the 22-25 September 2021.
This will be followed by an extensive tour which sees the company visit Denmark, England, Germany, Scotland and Wales. Several of these are first time visits, including three new venues in Germany, Yvonne Arnaud in Guildford and The King’s Theatre in Edinburgh. This marks the Company’s first visit to one of the city’s main stages.
Louise Richards, Executive Director, said: “Our work is in high demand from audiences, and our venue partners have been very keen to reschedule postponed dates, with others taking up the opportunity of presenting us. I’m absolutely delighted that post-pandemic we’re able to perform for our regular audiences and make new friends in new places.”
Spectacular, fast-moving and highly physical, Nobody explores the tension between our inner lives and how we make sense of the world around us. Motionhouse’s renowned dance-circus style combines with mesmerising choreography to tell this emotional and ultimately uplifting story, full of twists and turns.
Kevin Finnan, Artistic Director of Motionhouse, started exploratory work with the dancers for Nobody in late 2019 and was just about to go into creation when the pandemic hit. Abruptly halted, creation resumed in January 2021 when the Company came back, operating a strict Covid bubble. It was originally scheduled to open in August 2020, and the Company has been able to reschedule the postponed tour in its entirety.
Finnan said: “It’s been a challenge to make Nobody during the pandemic, but the process has been interesting because the pandemic has entirely reshaped my original vision for the show.
“When the dancers and I came back early this year after a long period of lockdowns and furlough, we had an incredible urge to be creative and to explore new ways of moving. I think the energy and emotions of the extraordinary collective experience of dealing with the pandemic shaped the content and the movement we were coming up with as a group.
“The narrative arc of the production reflects this: the first act of Nobody is driven by the raw emotion of our recent experiences. There is a sense of isolation and being alone and the effects this has had on us all during the pandemic.
“In the second act there is a sense of coming together and the strength we all get from that.”
Finnan works collaboratively with the dancers to create the choreography and movement vocabulary as he develops each new work. He sets creative tasks and allocates time for the dancers to ‘play’ on the set, in order to explore the possibilities that this offers in terms of being an ‘apparatus’ for the movement to take place on.
Kevin Finnan adds: “We’re very pleased with the finished show.
“It’s quite different from our recent work, and as a company we’re excited to be breaking new ground. We’re embracing the relationship between dance, digital and circus in a new way for this production; developing our movement language and expanding our use of on-stage digital technology.
“This will be an exciting show for audiences – it’s a significant leap forward in the merging of our dance-circus language and the use of spectacle. Its messages are so pertinent to the time we live in that audiences will be able to relate to what they are experiencing and certainly be moved by it.”
Nobody is packed with visual magic: the world on stage is transformed before our eyes, with the set seemingly moving by itself or being moved by the dancers. Digital projections and the shape-shifting set create a constantly changing environment where nothing is quite what it seems.