After sold out workshops with rave reviews in New York City, WeCameToDance by Food Tank was originally meant to debut last June with Tony-award winning non-profit theatre company La MaMa as an off-Broadway run in New York City. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic the show’s run was called off so Edinburgh will get to fully experience first what Playbill Magazine said would be “the next hottest trend” at the 2021 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
WeCameToDance is a musical which tells the story of extra-terrestrial life arriving on Earth to warn its inhabitants of a climate crisis that their own planet has experienced. While guiding audiences in a fully immersed experience through rhythms, dance, and song, the characters relay a call to action and convey the tragedy of a changing climate, yet a sense of hope percolates through each and every motion, movement, and note.
Audiences will interact with aliens from a real exoplanet (they call it “Hanyana”) reimagined through conversations with NASA. The performers sing in their own language created by famed linguist David Peterson, who developed Valerian for HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Alongside the cast, you will groove to music created by Grammy-nominated Ghanaian artist Rocky Dawuni and participate in synchronized dance designed by Mary Page Nance of Broadway’s “Finding Neverland.” It is an ethereal, truly otherworldly experience that builds layered rhythms over spoken word poetry performed by an all-Scottish cast.
Food Tank is one of the most engaged nonprofits in food sustainability, agriculture, food policy, and climate change. With more than 1500 grassroots non-profit partnerships around the world, Food Tank, the recipient of the 2020 Julia Child Prize, is uniquely positioned to onboard participants for post-show, long-term engagement creating thousands of new activists in food and environmental movements at a local grassroots level.
Scotland and the 2021 Fringe Festival is also the perfect place to debut “WeCameToDance” in order to build local engagement in the leadup to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow.
They are working with an amazing team of creatives in Scotland including Ashley Jack and Becky Enoch of House of Jack (co-directors and choreographers-in-residence), Simon Hanson (musical director), Alexandra Lort Phillips (local creative producer), Tom Sergeant (presenting production manager) and more to ensure that the work retains all the detail and character of the NY developed show, while being delivered without anyone travelling from the States and in a covid safe and environmentally sustainable way.
The cast is: Betty Valencia, Caitlin Anderson, Ella Gilling, Emmanuella Damptey, Sophie Douglas and Stefanie Eadie.
The show will be performed during the entire festival outdoors and can be performed while respecting social distancing with reduced audience numbers.
For those not yet comfortable travelling to Edinburgh or its city centre in August, Food Tank will take the show directly to schools and communities further afield in the city.
Edinburgh 4 – 29 August, Edinburgh Festival Fringe