A milestone year for DanceLive, with dance running from playful to politically charged.
We are heading towards this year’s DanceLive at a rate of knots, and there’s a lot on deck for fans of dance and performance. This October, Dudendance Theatre brings Alien Aquatic to Bon Accord Baths. The costumes are worth knowing about on their own: half sea creature, half washed-up rubbish, imagining what ocean plastic might turn into if it came alive. The show has been adapted for the Baths, with film and a live choir from Con Anima joining dancers from Germany and Scotland.
DanceLive runs 15 to 19 October across The Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Cowdray Hall and the Baths, and this year marks the festival’s 20th anniversary, with several international companies in the mix.
An apology from the future
The most intriguing of those is Balfour Reparations, a performance lecture from Palestinian dancer and scholar Farah Saleh. It’s set in 2046, imagining a Reparations Committee looking back on a fictional UK government apology issued in 2026 for Arthur Balfour’s role in shaping policy that denied Palestinian political rights. Archive material sits alongside invented futures, and the show runs into a post-performance panel discussion. It’s BSL interpreted, with audience participation built into the format.
Thrice picks up where Macbeth ends. Nine women, in three trios, are left after the bloodshed to work out what comes next, reclaiming text once spoken by soldiers and tyrants along the way. Al Seed, who produce the show, describe it as “movement-led” and “choral,” built on image and feeling rather than a conventional plot. This isn’t a piece chasing narrative closure.
Thinking like a plant, and other departures
Sensorial Symphonies goes somewhere stranger again. Luxembourg choreographer Elisabeth Schilling built the piece around a single question: what would it feel like to perceive the world as a plant does? It’s staged to a reworking of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, alongside a contemporary score by Pascal Schumacher and sound from The Plant Philharmonic. Plants aren’t decoration here. They’re billed as collaborators.
Not everything is heavy going. Yangled brings circus-style lifts to the Sculpture Court at Aberdeen Art Gallery for a family audience, and May Fly/May Not tells the story of Lilian Bland, the first woman to design, build and fly her own aeroplane, aimed at young children and closing with an interactive workshop. Fleur Darkin’s The Odyssey, drawing on Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer, gets an early outing too. It’s an “intimate and playful” first glimpse of a full-length production due in May 2027, built around displacement and the pull of home.
Closing on the Moray coast
The festival closes on Monday 19th, with Sharon Took-Zozaya’s Everything That’s Still Is Preparing to Move, grown out of research on the sandstone formations at Hopeman on the Moray coast. A short live performance in the Art Gallery’s Remembrance Hall is followed by film and discussion upstairs, with a workshop earlier in the day open to anyone from nine years old up.
Most shows are one-offs with only a couple of them getting a second date. We’d recommend deciding now which evenings you’re keeping free!
DanceLive 2026 runs 15 to 19 October across The Anatomy Rooms, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Cowdray Hall and Bon Accord Baths. Tickets and the full timetable are at citymoves.org.uk/dancelive26.
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