Highly visual, unabashedly experimental and underscored by generous humour, Recreation is a choreography about work. Rather, it’s about the things that we do that aren’t work, or that aren’t quite work. It’s a show about caring, about cooking, about sex, about gardening and meditating and singing in the kitchen and playing 5-a-side, and, of course, about dancing.

Recreation is a new dance performance created by artist Gillie Kleiman, and the ideas it explores around work, leisure, and pleasure are an important part of Gillie’s practice and her previous works.  Recreation is a chance to explore these ideas on a much bigger canvas, working with a larger cast and with Gillie taking the role of choreographer rather than dancer.

Recreation has a core cast of three – Amanda Drago, Victoria Guy and Kit Haigh – who are joined on stage by two guest performers local to each new location where the show is presented (names to be announced soon). In addition, the project includes an open workshop in each location, offering the opportunity for local people to join the process.

Performed by professional, not-quite-professional and non-professional dancers, Recreation is a lamentation for leisure, a choreographed question of labour, a danced demand for seeing our value beyond our work.

The performance raises questions about our lives as workers and non-workers, the associations we have about hard graft and lazy leisure, productivity and complacency, suffering and enjoying. At the centre is the action of dancing, and Recreation hopes to unfold dance’s double identity as work and leisure, exposing its radical and unstable nature.

If you can’t wait until Friday 9 June to see the preview of the work, why not come along to a free workshop with Gillie Kleiman…

Recreation | Trailer from Gillie Kleiman on Vimeo.

Recreation was commissioned by ARC Stockton, Shoreditch Town Hall, and Yorkshire Dance. Supported by Arts Council England, Rajni Shah Projects, and via South East Dance and Jerwood Charitable Foundation Dramaturg in Residence programme.