FFIN DANCE
Degrees of Freedom
Megan Griffiths
Image Paul Trask

The weekend is well and truly over and I’m still reeling over the enormity of the tasks that the company undertook last week.

For the 4th year running we held our Easter dance faktry festival here in our home base Abertillery in South Wales.  The week leading up to the festival, hosts our Easter Intensives Programme for professional dancers: this year we had the pleasure of working with 7 dancers from South Wales, North Wales, Bristol, Devon and the Lake District.  During the week, Megan and I re-worked sections of my piece Missing Pages to create a lovely new version that was performed at the festival on Friday evening.  How we all managed to work from the Ravel score, from John F Wake’s story and learn repertoire I don’t know, but we did!  An excellent team effort that culminated in a terrific performance which ended the show.

The dance faktry is the outreach unit of FFIN DANCE and we work with the community facilitating dance activity for children and young people.  Since Christmas we have been working with the theme of lines with our groups and over 70 young people performed and shared their work to a completely packed auditorium.  Some of the children who were aged only 4 years performed for the first time, I always feel so privileged to be sharing in that experience for the children and their very proud families.

We are often referred to as the FFIN family as we have dancers from infants all the way through to young professional dancers in our faktry and of course the FFIN dancers at the head of the ‘table’ inspiring and motivating the aspiring family members.  It’s a model which I believe is unique and rare and one of which I’m tremendously proud.

So we move on now to the second leg of our Inspired Tour with performances in The Met, Abertillery, Chapter in Cardiff and Burg Namedy in Germany.  Please join us if you can.

sue lewis