A WILD Summer…

This summer saw the launch of our exciting new outdoor show, WILD!

WILD, taking place on a forest of tall poles, explores our disconnect with the natural environment in an increasingly urban world, using Motionhouse’s distinctive powerful physicality, dynamic choreography and hand-to-hand partnering.

After a special preview performance at the Bullring, Birmingham, and our premiere at Brighton Festival in May, WILD toured across the UK, receiving wonderful reactions from our audiences! Let’s look back at some highlights from the WILD tour!

In its first summer of touring, WILD has been performed to over 31,000 people so far! WILD visited 17 cities and festivals in the UK, and has upcoming performances in Malta this November.

Photos by Dan Tucker and Simon Hadley.

The WILD tour saw us celebrate important milestones with some of our close partners. We were delighted to perform at the 120^th Anniversary of Birmingham Hippodrome, partners and co-commissioners of WILD as part of the Hippodrome Associate Artist programme. Later in the summer, we celebrated with our partners Gulbenkian and ART31 at the b0ing! International Family Festival in Canterbury, hosting our first ever full-length livestream of the WILD, which you can watch here!

We would like to thank all the other organisations who have made WILD and its touring possible: Without Walls Consortium, Freedom Festival, Hat Fair, SeaChange Arts, Garfield Weston Foundation, Foyle Foundation, 29^th May 1961 Charitable Trust, Saintbury Trust, City of London Corporation and as always Arts Council England.

It was great to spend time with friends, new and old, at so many places in the UK this summer, in addition to those already mentioned: Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Whee! Festival Nottingham, Greenwich+Docklands International Festival, Imagine Watford, Hat Fair Winchester, City of London Festival, Stockton International River Festival, Freedom Festival Hull, and Out There Festival. We had such a good time performing for you!

WILD was also part of our Leamington Spa Centre Triple Bill, marking the first indoor iteration of WILD, performed in our home town of Leamington Spa. We enjoyed performing close to home, as well as getting to chat with our audiences in our post-show Q&A with the dancers and Artistic Director Kevin Finnan.

Additionally, WILD summer tour enabled us to showcase fantastic performances from our youth groups! The ART31 youth group and Motionhouse Youth curtain-raisers at b0ing! in Canterbury and the Leamington Spa Triple Bill respectively were massive hits with our audiences!

A huge thank you to our amazing performers who delivered breath-taking performances all summer; through their dedication and incredible talent, they made WILD’s first tour so successful!

But most of all, we would like to extend a massive thank you to our audiences! Your support was incredible all through the summer and thank you for sharing your fantastically WILD images with us! Take a look at them below!

Photos by Silvia Gasparini, Carla Coyle, David Hornsby, James Richardson, Jock Wilson, Liva Owens, Mike Sanderson, Steve Eggleton, Eddie Mallet, Michael Hailstone, Holly Bellamy, and Scott Akoz.

If you have any WILD pictures and #throwbacks, please share them with us using #WILD2019, tagging @Motionhouse or @MotionhouseDT on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, or emailing [email protected]! We will make sure to credit you when we share your amazing images!

If you have seen WILD this summer, we’d love to hear your feedback! We’d really appreciate it if you could fill in this 3 minute-long survey! Here are some of the feedback from our summer audiences:

You still have an opportunity to catch WILD, if you attend the ŻiguŻajg Festival in Malta, from the 19^th to the 21^st of November!