Nine More Girls

6 schools’ workshops, 4 audition sessions, over 130 girls. We’re preparing for our second residency with Men & Girls Dance at The Place in Euston in April, and it’s audition time again.

We’re looking for 9 girls. 9 girls who may or may not already dance. We want girls who might not normally feel comfortable attending an audition; maybe they’ve never stepped into a dance space, had a lesson, or seen a show. We want a unique, diverse company of humans who more than anything can work together and play together and be themselves.

I was the child who would never go to an audition, though I was desperate to experience something so new and alien, to be chosen to enter a different world for a time. But when you don’t ‘do dance’, and you don’t have those clothes, don’t go to those places and you don’t know those people, it’s more than a world away, and you’re simply not invited.

So it takes more than just putting up a poster with “please come to..” or “…we’re looking for…” for it to become a reality; it takes work and effort to reach out and meet them, to talk to them and their families, ask them what they need in order to come and to get them over the threshold to spend some time with us.

But they do come, and we have just 2 hours with them before assembling a company of girls we are confident have the stamina, focus and sense of fun that the 2 week rehearsal process needs for this show to work.

We have our 9 girls and our 5 men too, and soon they’ll come together and the process will begin again. But this time it will be different, like it is every time; because they’ll be bringing their unique bodies and their histories and experiences to this wild, intense process to make this joyful, extraordinary show.

You can find tickets for Men & Girls Dance at The Place, London 25-30 April 2019 here.