Performing Arts staff and students explore inter-generational communication at Latitude Festival

Following the success of ‘Flock’ in 2013 and ‘The Wagon’ in 2014, the group of 13 are set to perform Borrowed Shoes twice daily to an audience of thousands from Thursday 14 to Sunday 17 July at Henham Park, Southwold, Suffolk.

Hannah Butterfield, Part-time Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and Artistic Director, said: “Borrowed Shoes is a bespoke, new theatre work for Latitude 2016. Leeds Beckett Performing Arts staff are collaborating this year with Strawberry Blonde Curls (SBC) Theatre Company and undergraduate students from dance and performance. I am delighted to be working with such a fantastic team to make, what I think, is a really beautiful and topical work about inter-generational communication.

“We're trying to explore what we can learn from the experiences of our elders and questioning what we should be teaching the next generation. The students we are working with have been incredibly professional and their skill and ability to work in a cross-disciplinary context has been a real driver of the material we have made together. This is absolutely their work.”

Borrowed shoes is a highly physical, evocative storytelling theatre performance. Making use of word-play, live music and gentle audience participation, the visually striking piece encourages passing audiences to stop, look, listen and play.  The non-linear structure allows audiences the freedom to dip in and out of the performance but still engage with the content.

Borrowed Shoes explores the physical and verbal crossovers that occur through cross-disciplinary, collaborative practice. The work, which is concerned with notions of age and community, invites the audience to dip their toes into a moment in time that has passed them by.

Hannah added: “We’re travelling, together, all of us. Dancing through the 1920s to the 2000s, we find ourselves in the here and now. But before we were here, before this was now, we invited our elders to share an anecdote from a sense of their own ‘heyday’ with us. These stories will be shared, whispered, listened to, danced with, sung of and celebrated.”

The cast of Borrowed Shoes is: Gillian Dyson, Course Leader for BA (Hons) Performance; Hannah Butterfield, Part-time Lecturer in Performance and Artistic Director; Dan Craddock, Part-time Lecturer in Performance; John Tomlinson and Rosie Macpherson, SBC Theatre; dance students Melanie McCabe, Luke Murphy, Connor Coulson, Edenamiuki Aiguobasinmwin and Emily Snow; and performance students Bethany Milner; Charli Veal and Jessica Ivison.

Leeds Beckett University Performing Arts have brought performance works to various international festivals, including Latitude, Edinburgh Fringe, Sibiu International Festival of Theatre, Dionysus Festival Croatia, ACT Festival Bilbao, GIFT (Gateshead), and FLARE (Manchester).

Latitude Festival is an annual music and arts festival that has been held at Henham Park, near Southwold, Suffolk since 2006. It has won UK Festival awards for Best Line-Up, Best Family Festival and Fans’ Favourite Festival. The theme for this year’s festival is ‘Love Thy Neighbour’.