Each year we select Dance Partners from the Yorkshire Region to receive tailored producing and dramaturgy support from our Artist Development Producer João Maio, £3,000 seed funding and residency space to support the development of their projects. 

Our newly selected Dance Partners Projects for 2025-26 are Izzy Brittain’s The Smalls and Charlie Morrissey and Katye Coe’s Grapple. 

Izzy Brittain – The Smalls 

The Smalls is a fun, fascinating interactive dance performance exploring the magical microworld of soil animals with children and their grown-ups. Join us as we wriggle through a journey into the story of soil, creating together through dance, poetry, storytelling and song in a sensory environment provided by set and projections.

Izzy Brittain is a Yorkshire born and based interdisciplinary artist. Her work is often participatory, intergenerational, improvisational or outdoor. She welcomes art that expands beyond traditional spaces, audiences and formats, with an interest in trans-disciplinary thinking and collective experimentation. Her practice centres care, embodiment, creative play and empowerment.

Charlie Morrissey and Katye Coe – Grapple 

Grapple is a duet-based research project exploring how bodies meet, resist, yield, and support one another. It navigates physical negotiation, tension, care and disagreement through touch, movement and conversation. Grapple is both a practice and a question – asking how physical intelligence might support us in encountering complexity and uncertainty.

Charlie Morrissey and Katye Coe are movement-based artists with long-standing practices in improvisation, performance and physical research. Their work centres on the intelligence of the body, collaborative processes and embodied ways of asking questions. They bring decades of shared and individual experience to create live, curious and physically-driven dialogue.

Images: Izzy Brittain © Coralie Datta, Katye Coe, Charlie Morrissey