Bringing Dance Back to Bristol Harbour Festival

Bristol Harbour Festival 2024 - Image Credit: Amy Fern

We were delighted to be welcomed back to programme the vibrant dance stage at this year's Bristol Harbour Festival - one of the biggest events in the city welcoming over 250,000 visitors across the weekend.

'This cocreated dance piece has been a wonderful creative project that brought dancers together from different backgrounds from across Bristol to create a unique, emotive piece' - Penny Marie, Dance Workshop Facilitator

Taking over the stage in Queens Square, we platformed a huge range of dance styles and traditions present in Bristol’s dance community; from Indian to Irish Dance, Voguing to Turkish Belly Dancing.

Some highlights from the weekend included Anna K, Bristol Ballroom Community, D-Wild Fitness and RSVP Drummers. We also platformed established resident dance groups based at The Trinity Centre, such as Gerry’s Attic, a dance group for older people who rehearse at Trinity every week.

In the lead-up to Bristol Harbour Festival, we commissioned Dance Facilitator, Penny Marie, to lead a series of participatory dance workshops in which attendees co-created a new dance piece to be performed at the festival. Across five workshops dancers of all abilities and backgrounds collectively devised a 15 minute dance piece entitled 'Our Light Within' that they performed on the Saturday of the festival.

Alongside this, HYPE Dance, who offer weekly street dance sessions at Trinity, hosted the Ultimate Dance Championships 2024 – a competition open to all dance styles for ages 12 and above. Winners of this competition showcased their dancing skills in front of the Harbour Festival audience and a panel of judges that included professional dancers Bethany Kyle, Tesleem Adeyemi and Candice Scott. Alongside this, HYPE brought performances from Lil Hype, Hype Dance and Hype Carnival Squad.

We wanted to say a massive thank you to everyone who made the takeover at Bristol Harbour Festival 2024 such a success; from the facilitators, the talented dancers, the technical team behind-the-scenes, our partners Movema, Gerry’s Attic and HYPE Dance, and of course to everyone who came along to watch the performances and support dance in Bristol.

Programming the Dance Stage is one of the many ways we are creating pathways for communities to connect and celebrate together though culture. Click here to find out more.