The Monthly interviews the Artistic Director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, Steve Batts – Part 4 – Upcoming Productions

What are your upcoming productions?

There will be a new Christmas show which the four professional members of the Echo Echo dance ensemble will make. We have a festival in September which is the second edition of that festival which we started running last year. It is called Tradition and Beyond and is based on people who are working from the traditional Irish dance history. and who are developing that work and doing interesting things with it, either in relation to the music or performing the movement itself. I think it is very exciting.

We have new ensemble pieces, we have quartet and duet works. I have a couple of new solo pieces which I am hoping to show around the place.

We also have collaborative work with musicians and other artists, and we are collaborating either as directors or choreographers on other people’s work. We have a lot of cross border work going on.

We also have a lot of participatory work, our Body Wisdom group, for people over 50, is a wonderful long term programme, and we are working with schools and community organisations.

The thing with our work is that we start with the roots of why people like dancing in the first place and because of that it is naturally inclusive. We don’t have to find ways of including people in a particular idiom which may not be the most suitable for them.

With our approach, people can find their place in the poetics of human movement. There is a universal, shared, creative root which is human movement, and from that starting point everyone is already, to some extent, poetic in their movement and that is the source of what we do.