Lila Dance

Lîla Dance is a South East based Dance Company that was founded in 2006 by Abi Mortimer and Carrie Whitaker; it is then that the company became an associate of The Point, Eastleigh. In 2008 the company began working in collaboration with sound artist Dougie Evans and in 2012 Dougie was appointed joint Artistic Director.
Fearlessly imaginative, and physically daring, Lîla Dance creates worlds that feel real, and yet only exist within the fictional space of each performance. Their work captures the extremes of humanity within physical movement and text, expressing the balance between primal urgency and intelligent reasoning.
The sound of Lîla Dance has developed over the four-year collaboration with Dougie Evans. The use of familiar sounds, often heard in an unfamiliar way, creates a sonic world that feels real and yet exists only within the space.
Our creative methodology places emphasis on the power of the body to give life to a narrative, primarily through movement but also through text. We take a selection of thoughts and feelings that bare relevance to one another and we work with these connections to create a ‘world’ on the stage that the performers inhabit. One of the most important elements of the work is ‘play’ and the understanding that the work itself is a game: alive and changeable. ‘Lines of flight’ is a term we use to describe the tiny pockets of improvisation that the work contains in order to empower the dancers with choices in live time. This is a very important element to the work as it gives the performers the opportunity to be expressive in the moment and therefore keeps the work fresh and ‘spontaneous’ with every performance.
Lîla Dance is driven by its passion to develop a unique movement language, this vision has been supported by the Arts Council England through Gfta funding in 2007, 2009, 2010 and now in 2012. The company’s debut tour, In Our Blood, toured to huge acclaim in 2011 and presented a collection of dance flavoured by the company’s work with national and international choreographers and artists.
Lîla Dance is dedicated to developing creativity in young aspiring dancers and has devised a programme of community projects to complement the tour (see below). Many of the performances will be preceded by curtain-raisers by local young dance groups.

This project is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.