LEAP Dance Festival 2019 – Liverpool
Kristy Stott, Theatre Editor
We always look forward to Liverpool’s LEAP Dance Festival – a truly exciting event and one of the UK’s most anticipated dance festivals. The 2019 edition of the 10-day festival bounces to venues across the city. Organised by Hope-Street based charity and MDI (formerly Merseyside Dance Initiative), major venues to host shows this year include Hinterlands, Invisible Wind Factory, Unity Theatre and The Bluecoat.
LEAP is one of our favourite events in the dance calendar.
Featuring seven dance companies and 15 performances at venues across the city, the dance extravaganza will also include LEAP Fringe Festival for its 2019 edition, two days of free pop-up dance in unexpected locations along Hope Street.
LEAP 2019 will open with Wild, a spectacular aerial performance from masters of dance circus, Motionhouse. Ingenuously fusing powerful choreography, athletic movement and hand-to-hand partnering, Wild will be staged outdoor on top of an ‘urban forest’ of industrial scaffolding.
Also featuring this year is New Art Club with Cupid’s Revenge, a vivid dance-theatre-comedy performance exploring all the big, old topic of love; Seke Chimutengwende and Alexandrina Hemsley’s Black Holes, which blends poetry and movement to explore the potential and problematics of Afrofuturism, and Neon Dance’s PuzzleCreature, an immersive performance taking place inside a giant inflatable bubble.
The Rosie Kay Dance Company jeté into the Capstone Theatre with Fantasia, calibrating choreography against neuroscientific research, this is an exquisite performance examining the beauty of dance for both the performer and the audience. Meanwhile, visual artist Frances Disley will collaborate with three contemporary dance artists and music producer MT Hall for new performance Tripleflex.
This year includes two days of free pop-up dance in unexpected locations along Hope Street.
Connecting generations of dance lovers, the festival will also include performances from MDI’s Merseyside Youth Dance Company and 50 Moves.
Always pushing the boundaries of dance, and now in its 26th edition, LEAP is one of our favourite events in the dance calendar.
