Chamber Dancing

Two new initiatives for the West End Festival will also take place in connection with The Cottier Chamber Project. The first is the newly established dance programme, The Cottier Dance Project, which will be Glasgow's only professional dance festival. In this first year performances will include a new work by High Heart Dance Company and traditional music superstars Emily Smith, Jamie McClennan and band, and a showcase programme made up of short works by emerging choreographers who are formerly or currently members of Scottish Ballet and Scottish Dance Theatre. In partnership with Grosvenor cinema, there will also be screenings of several films featuring dance.

§  Glasgow’s only professional dance festival

§  Dance, new choreography and film

§  Showcase for Scottish-based choreographers

A new strand to the 2014 West End Festival’s programme is The Cottier Dance Project, a professional dance festival which will take place in Glasgow from 22nd-27th June 2014. It aims to champion Scottish-based choreographers and dancers, to provide a platform for new work and to forge new collaborations across the arts to create and develop original performance pieces.  As well as contemporary, commissioned work, we will be showing archival dance footage and arts film, to revisit great and inspirational work from the past.

Curator of the Cottier Dance Project , Freya Jeffs said, “We are delighted to be a new part of  the West End Festival, and to be bringing professional dance to the Cottier Theatre and St Silas Church.  All the live shows are less than one hour in length, making them perfect for unwinding after work or with the family.  It will be a week of short bursts of artistic excellence in Glasgow’s West End.”

The Cottier Dance Project opens with archive ballet footage shown in the glorious Grosvenor Cinema, followed by the iconic 1937 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film, Shall We Dance?, which will take us back to the golden age of musical cinema. There will be a live dance demonstration before the film to get everyone in the mood, and there is a complimentary drink with every ticket.

The live performances in Cottier’s Theatre include a collaboration between traditional Scottish music and contemporary dance, as well as a showcase of new choreography.  Footprints (Monday 23^rd, Tuesday 24^th and Wednesday 25^th June at 6.30pm) is a new work by multi-award winning, traditional Scottish singer Emily Smith, musician Jamie McClennan and the dancers of High Heart Dance Company. The idea behind Footprints stems from the footprints left by Scotland on other cultures, and vice versa. The work explores, through music and contemporary movement, the identities of the performers who have all been influenced by Scottish culture.

The Cottier Dance Project will be involved with The Cottier Chamber Project’s family concert at St Silas Church at 11am on Saturday 14 June. Two dancers join host ensemble Daniel’s Beard in the premiere of a specially commissioned piece; a setting of Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, by composer Lenny Sayers, with narration by singer and BBC presenter Jamie MacDougall.

There are a further two live events in the programme which will be held at Cottier’s Theatre on Thursday 26 June and Friday 27 June at 8.30pm. Watch This Space is a showcase of five, new, short dance works, by independent artists and dancers from Scotland's national companies.