With a canny eye on the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 this November in Glasgow and featuring an all-Scottish creative team and cast, WeCameToDance arrives with atomic-clock timing.
After sold out workshops with rave reviews in New York City, WeCameToDance by Food Tank was originally meant to debut last June with Tony-award winning non-profit theatre company La MaMa as an off-Broadway run in New York City. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic the show’s run was called off so Edinburgh will get to fully experience first what Playbill Magazine said would be “the next hottest trend” at the 2021 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
WeCameToDance musical tells the story of extra-terrestrial life arriving on Earth to warn its inhabitants of a climate crisis that their own planet has experienced. While guiding audiences in a fully immersed experience through rhythms, dance, and song, the characters relay a call to action and convey the tragedy of a changing climate, yet a sense of hope percolates through each and every motion, movement, and note.
Audiences will interact with aliens from a real exoplanet (they call it “Hanyana”) reimagined through conversations with NASA. The performers sing in their own language created by famed linguist David Peterson, who developed Valerian for HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Alongside the cast, you will groove to music created by Grammy-nominated Ghanaian artist Rocky Dawuni and participate in synchronized dance designed by Mary Page Nance of Broadway’s “Finding Neverland.” It is an ethereal, truly otherworldly experience that builds layered rhythms over spoken word poetry performed by an all-Scottish cast.
Food Tank is one of the most engaged nonprofits in food sustainability, agriculture, food policy, and climate change. With more than 1500 grassroots non-profit partnerships around the world, Food Tank, the recipient of the 2020 Julia Child Prize, is uniquely positioned to onboard participants for post-show, long-term engagement creating thousands of new activists in food and environmental movements at a local grassroots level.
Scotland and the 2021 Fringe Festival is also the perfect place to debut “WeCameToDance” in order to build local engagement in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) this November in Glasgow.
WeCameToDance Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2021: 4 – 29 August
