Being different is a complicated business. It can be exciting, distressing, temporary, permanent, liberating, dangerous, painful, a cause for celebration. It’s about bodies and language, memories and labels, perceptions and assumptions, acceptance and resistance.

Join DAR, a queer, neurodivergent, curious, middle-aged Talking Heads fanatic, to consider some tricky questions around the subjects of difference, identity, positioning, labelling and belonging.

What does it feel like to perform your ageing body? How are women’s bodies read as they age?  What is the relationship between older performer and audience? Why be seen?

In this panel talk Gillian Dyson is joined by Funmi Adewole Elliott and Susan Kempster as they ponder the queering of the body through the ageing process and ask how we redefine our femininity as expectations of women shift in age.

What makes us human?   
How does sound connect us? 
What keeps us going? 
And what happens when we stop? 

Join Kyra Norman for a practical workshop inspired by her latest work, Going, Going, made in collaboration with composer Barnaby Taylor, and a community of dancers aged 20 – 70 from Cornwall. 

How To Change The World By Doing Nothing explores our experience and understanding of time, how time is spent, who controls it, and how we would spend it if we could choose. It explores radical notions of rest, doing less and ‘wasting time’.

Co-created by Fevered Sleep and Yorkshire Dance’s Company of People, How To Change The World By Doing Nothing is a durational performance installation bringing together an intergenerational community from Leeds.

This work is part of Fevered Sleep’s ongoing research and development process for their new show.

Join Funmi Adewole Elliott for a workshop exploring the sensation of movement, playfulness, interaction and performance. In this session Funmi will draw on participants’ everyday experiences of social dancing and telling stories. She will start by teaching a simple routine based on old and new African urban dances: Fuji and Juju, Afrobeats, as well as Salsa and Merengue.

Open to all levels of experience and ages. This is an energetic workshop, but participants are welcome to take a break, sit and watch before re-joining.

One Woman Wrestling Invites…
by Lisa Kendall

Lisa has realised that 33 years of dancing, practicing, making, performing and being are in danger of becoming wedged, stuck inside her.

One Woman Wrestling Invites… invites you to be with Lisa, and dance pals Leen and Rachel, as they navigate the transient energies of this critical impasse, wrestling with what was there and what is now, reflecting as they dance, upon the facts and fictions of living.

This triple bill, unites and celebrates the creativity of older adults in the North with works created by community dance companies from Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool.

Footsteps in the Dust
by The Performance Ensemble

What would you take with you if you had minutes to leave your home?

Inspired by witnessing walls that divide borders and people, The Performance Ensemble’s latest work explores migration and journeys through life.

Mechanisms is a work-in-progress which boldly embodies ideas of effort and persistence, success and failure, visibility and joy. Drawing on knowledge of anatomy and physical practices in dance and kayaking, Christine playfully constructs and situates herself within a precarious structure of hard and fluid materials to build an environment of complex environmental interaction.

Christine Thynne shares her journey of passion for dance and performance, of anatomy and the kayaking adventures, which led to the development of her solo work-in-progress, Mechanisms.

Joined by friend and collaborator Robbie Synge, Christine will use a mix of film, performance and conversation to share her story. Expect a warm and lively audience discussion about creative ambition, play and finding your way...