About the company 

Southpaw Dance Company creates dance theatre across all contexts: small to large scale, indoor and outdoor audiences, touring and site-specific, with professional and community casts; accessible work with a distinctive choreographic vision connecting compelling narrative with explosive physicality.

Southpaw has created five large scale mass movement projects: WordPlay for the National Centre for the Written Word; Rush, a largescale CPP commission, nominated for a Journal Culture Award and recommissioned for Hull Freedom Festival (and now for Left Coast); Future of Things Past, the opening ceremony for the Castlemaine State Festival in Australia; Erimus, celebrating the opening of Middlesbrough Town Hall, and Beautiful Thing, commissioned by Greenwich + Docklands International Festival in July 2018.

Southpaw’s AD, Robby Graham, was Movement Director for Marianne Elliott’s acclaimed production of Angels in America at the National Theatre, OpenClasp’s production of Rattlesnake, Maximo Park’s video for Get High (No I Don’t), and for Pericles, the NT’s first Public Acts production. Robby is currently directing Leave to Remain for the Lyric Hammersmith.

 

About the work

Speakeasy draws on one of our most successful works, Faust, which has toured extensively outdoors. Speakeasy is a transition work: we aim to build on the Company’s established and successful heritage in outdoor touring and community cast work, adding indoor touring capabilities to our repertoire, and bringing new audiences and new participants into indoor venues in 2019-2021.

‘Told through the intense physical and narrative dance style for which Southpaw Dance Company has become renowned, Faust features a unique fusion of world-class breaking combined with Lindy Hop, Charleston, and swinging big band music of the roaring 20’s that taps into the spirit of gangsters, bootleggers, gamblers, flappers, and hep cats of the time.’

Speakeasy has had two audience sharings which developed new capabilities in theatrical staging for indoor venues, the incorporation of different technologies, such as lighting responsive to the movements of the dancers, and the inclusion of community casts into indoor venues, building on the Company’s success in participatory outdoor work.