Chichester dance show highlights importance of every single creature

Noemí Luz and Magdalena Mannion will premiere Blue Ghost in the UK this spring with dates including Chichester’s Minerva Theatre on February 4, Christ’s Hospital Theatre, Horsham on March 23 and Theatre Royal Winchester on March 25. They will combine the music and dance with stunning light-up costuming to lead us into the light and dark of our natural world through the beauty of the Blue Ghost Firefly. It will show that even the smallest creatures have an important part to play.

As Magdalena says: “Our company Dotdotdot Dance creates thoughtful, multidisciplinary flamenco dance and is based between Spain and the UK. We’ve performed in festivals such as Sadler’s Wells’ Dancin’ Nation and Sampled.”

For this show, the point is that there is unexpected beauty and rhythm harboured in the insect world. It will highlight the importance of insect conservation, but they will also be offering a nostalgic celebration that “reminds us of our interconnectedness and embraces our need for transformation.

“We are a choreographic duo, me and Noemí, and it was founded by three of us back in 2014 though it has been just the two of us for quite a while. We're both British dancers who fell in love with flamenco and when we were younger we moved to Spain though the company is based in the UK. We are back and forth but I've just always found that flamenco is really addictive. When you feel that emotion that you get through flamenco, it is so powerful as an art form. It's also great fun to dance and the range is really really big. It is much more flexible as an art form than people expect. You've got the traditional stuff but there's a huge range of contemporary flamenco as well. It is much more open minded than people often realise and it's a huge as an aesthetic space.

“For this show the focus is on the natural world. Like a lot of people we were concerned about the natural world and the state of things as they are and we just got interested in fireflies. They are such magical beautiful creatures. We thought that the firefly was a good way to talk about what is happening in the natural world, a good introduction to it, to make people think about their actions.

"The message I guess is that every small creature has importance. That's the message and we can take that message from these tiny creatures that all play their part in something so much bigger. You can apply it to the bees and flies. All of them are important in this cycle. Sometimes with our way of life we can get bogged down in just simple little things that don't matter but they really do.

“We start the show in Chichester. We were in Chichester a few years before the pandemic with our last show so it's really exciting to get back. We were able to continue in a way during the pandemic though we had a UK tour that was cancelled but we were able to continue in some ways because we're used to working remotely together. We both move around quite a lot and work from wherever we are but it is so great to be back to proper performance now.”