WHAT'S NEW
CURRENT SHOW
Goat Song is our current show.
For all booking enquiries, please contact us via the contact page.
WORKSHOPS
Movement and Text Improvisation Workshops
coming up soon...
Sun 29th June 2025
9AM - 12PM
PAY WHAT YOU CAN
The Island Dance Studio, Bristol
Movement and Vocal Improvisation Workshop
Practitioners in performance-making, movers, dancers and actors, the workshop is an opportunity to develop your movement and vocal improvisational skills to create movement, imagery, and text for performance. The focus will be on an embodied approach to creating imagery derived from our production, ‘Goat Song’, which takes the idea of the 'eeriness of place' to explore mythologies of place and to create new mythologies about the world in which we live.
This workshop will delve into the process of performing improvisational scores and developing interactions through movement, storytelling and imagery. Through prompts you will deepen your creative response and ability to generate ideas through an emergent process. The work fosters a playful, and open approach to exploring dynamics, interconnections, and impulses that arise from the individual within the ensemble. Our work is inclusive and diverse, fostering a supportive environment for creativity to thrive.
Mary Steadman, Artistic Director of Dust Ensemble.with over 30 years of experience devising, performing, and teaching workshops nationally and internationally, will be leading this workshop with Xavier De Santos, who has extensive experience in dance and physical theatre, performer with Dust Ensemble and Artistic Director of AllouAqui Dance Theatre.
#artspaceevents
Entry requirements: 18+
TaPRA 2025
Mary will present her work at the prestigious TaPRA (Theatre and Performance Research Association) annual conference at Warwick University in August 2025.
The talk entitled 'Embodying the Eerie: Performing Beyond the Known' will be presented as part of the Bodies and Performance working group, based on the 'Haunted Futurities' theme. The concept of the Eerie as a lens examines how theatrical elements of space, objects, the performer's body, and technologies are 'unsettling things'. Eerie materialities that disturb dualisms of subject/object, absence/presence, and material/immaterial to create an ‘egress' (Fisher, 2016), which Colquhoun describes as ‘latent acts of exit’ (2020, p.10) that offer ‘passageways of the outside’(2020, p. 11). Exploring an eerie theatricality where things are not what they seem.
Imagining Beyond: The Eeriness of Place
a talk with Mary Steadman of Dust Ensemble
Thu 25th September, 2025
7pm-8.30pm
Front Room, Weston Super Mare.
The recent “Folk Horror’ revival is gaining momentum, and Dust Ensemble’s work, although not ‘horror’ per se, draws more on the Eerie to ask: What is unsettling things? Why are things not what they seem?
By sharing extracts from our performances, inspired by the eeriness of place —such as a derelict mansion in Dwelling, unsettling landscapes in This is The Land, and in our recent performance, Goat Song —which exlores themes of death in a town that has fallen into an eerie silence. The talk will explore the eeriness of place, opening to you the audience to share your stories as a starting point for imagining the Eerie; by involving you in various activities and interactions about stories of ‘place’ that have an eerie presence of the past, which unsettles - Weston-Super-Mare (and beyond).
What is mysterious about these places? How can the eerie inspire stories that deal with the mysterious and the unknown - and why is this so relevant now?
Mary’s recent PhD research examines the Eerie in Performance, through her work with her company, Dust Ensemble. Exploring the current resurgence of the Eerie, which Robert Macfarlane wrote about in Tthe Eeriness of the English Countryside’ (Guardian, 2015) and Mark Fisher’s ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, written one year later. Fisher unpacks the ‘weird’ as ‘horror’ - as the presence of something that should not be - and the ‘eerie’ as an unseen presence of absence or absence of presence in places.
Join me for an evening of strangeness in the intimate space of Front Room. Afterwards, there will be opportunities for questions and a drink at the bar to get a bit spooked!