Strangers & Others at Colchester Arts Centre

Strangers & Others is a new immersive piece from award winning maverick performers and choreographers H2DANCE.
This is a performance without performers. Instead the audience are the protagonists in a show that asks how we can come together to co-exist and create understanding and empathy between social groups and cultures? At a time when global events seem to lead to increasingly fractured and isolationist society’s, community and integration seem more important than ever.

The audience are invited to put on headphones to receive live instructions from H2DANCE’s Hanna Gillgren and Heidi Rustgaard. The pair lead them through a series of choreographed meetings – with permission to look, touch, assume and judge. The trademark humour inherent in most of the company’s work is never far away.

Each performance will be different as, alone in their own headphone-controlled world yet moving within a group of strangers, each individual is free to choose how to respond. Witnessed only by the choreographers, appearance, physicality and behaviour will be their sole guides as they cooperate in silence. As the audience moves around they will create a constantly changing physical landscape of shapes and patterns as they come together or shift apart.

Immersed in light and sound, this is an experience of being alone and together at the same time.