Abundance
Abundance is a new project exploring rest, care and connection, and what it means to feel enough.
The project exists in two interwoven forms - a performance and an installation - each offering a different way to experience the world of the work.
Centred around duvets - objects of comfort, weight and warmth - both forms create landscapes for rest, resistance and release, where duvets, bodies and sound invite us to slow down, notice, and feel the fullness of being together.
Extending beyond the artworks are a series of clay workshops and community feasts. The workshops explore the embodiment of clay and abundance - its weight, texture and transformation - while the feasts bring people together to share food, stories and moments of collective joy.
The performance version of Abundance is an intergenerational dance work performed by six people - three older volunteer performers and three professional dancers - with live music by Me Lost Me.
The work begins with a pause - a spacious moment of stillness. People move, howl, rest, leap, reverberate, and hold one another. Moments emerge and dissolve. Colourful duvets are worn, sculpted, hidden under, and danced within.
Built through improvisation, the choreography moves between moments of intimacy, release and joy, beneath which runs a quiet pulse of resilience, echoed in the shifting textures of the sound design.
Touring Spring 2026.
Choreographer: Lizzie Klotz
Collaborators & Performers: Alys North, Eve Walker, Jia-Yu Corti
Volunteer Performers:
Dance City: Anne Hemy, Carolyn George, Liz Highmore
Queen’s Hall: Christine Partridge, Karolyn Hurren, Rowena Plant
Alnwick Playhouse: Heather Banfield, Sandy Lewty, Virginia Kennedy
Sound Designer & Performer: Jayne Dent (Me Lost Me)
Designer: Bethany Wells
Lighting Designer: Barnaby Booth
Dramaturg: Rosa Postlethwaite
Stage Managers: Andrea Scrimshaw, Leah Goldie
Volunteer Performer Support: Amy Becke
Creative Collaborator: Luca Rutherford
Mentors: J Neve Harrington, Rosemary Lee
Captioning Consultant: Chris Fonseca
Chef: Kaltouma Hassaballah
Ceramicist: Megan Randall
Anti Racism Consultant: ID.Y
PR: Joy Parkinson
Photographer: Amelia Read
Videographer: Alex Ayre
Graphic Designer: Brainbox Studios
Dates
Dance City, 7:30pm on 2nd April 2026
Queen’s Hall Arts, 7:30pm on 22nd April 2026
Alnwick Playhouse, 12:30pm on 25th April 2026
Yorkshire Dance as part of Ageless Festival, 10th July 2026
It’s an open space.
It’s an empty aisle in a supermarket.
It’s a rumbling, like a ppprrhhhgh.
The gallery version of Abundance reimagines the work as an installation for gallery contexts, created in collaboration with designer Bethany Wells. Translating its sculptural qualities into a spatial experience, it shifts the work from performance to presence - from something witnessed in time to an environment that holds people in space.
Visitors can walk through, lie down, rest and connect within the installation - landing, sinking and drifting among duvets that hold the traces of the live work. Invitations, or scores, encourage playful engagement with the work, allowing audiences to experience abundance in their own bodies through moments of pause and stillness.
Beneath the stillness lie echoes of effort, care and fatigue held within the material, creating an atmosphere of abundance that is both tender and weighted, both collective and solitary.
Exhibited at The NewBridge Project Summer 2026.
Breathe it in.
Breathe it out.
Images by Amelia Read and video by Alex Ayre from R&D for performance version of Abundance in 2024.
Abundance is commissioned by Dance City, The NewBridge Project and Northumberland Dance Development, with R&D support from Moving Art Management through their Seed to Stage Micro-Commissions, and is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.