The Ragroof Players Relaunch Their Ever More Relevant Show About Migration

Bridges y Puentes, created by internationally renowned company The Ragroof Players, is a vibrant and engaging show about migration and the search for home, using a multiplicity of languages - spoken, sung, played, and danced. It is a promenade performance, with an international cast of actor-dancers, all of whom have had direct experience of migration, or who are the children of migrants.

The audience is invited to come on a journey; to step inside many different pairs of shoes as they witness a performance that evolves from, then disappears into, thin air. It has been performed in many different sites and cities across the UK and in France with enormous success and acclaim, and is now being substantially redeveloped and remounted. Ragroof's partners for 2017 are Hull Freedom Festival, where the show will be presented as part of Hull City of Culture 2017; and Theatre Royal Stratford East in London. The company are also working with Dover Big Local and numerous arts organisations and gencies across Kent, to deliver the show and its related extensive community outreach programme.

A brand-new incarnation of Bridges y Puentes is being created for 2017, with a vibrant professional team in place, which includes: Marion Duggan, director and co-devisor; Dorothy Max Prior, writer/dramaturg; Carmela Acuyo, choreographer; Anna Symes, creative producer and performer; Chris Umney, lighting designer and production manager; and Filipe Gomes, Sound Designer. The company will be casting for a further five members of the team: three actor/dancers, a musician/actor, and a designer/scenographer.

Interviews with migrants (recent and not-so-recent) in every place that the show has been presented have informed its development, feeding into the creation of text, visual imagery, physical action, and a soundscape which fuses together live and recorded music from all corners of the world. Local communities in every area that the show is performed are engaged in an extensive outreach and community engagement programme, and this process will continue throughout 2017 in Hull, Kent, and East London.

The reworked Bridges y Puentes will look at the stories behind the headlines - providing a platform for migrants' voices and stories to be heard, interpreted through theatre, music, sound design, and installation. The multi-discipline show is about far more than the current refugee crisis, and places current issues within a broader context - reflecting a history of migration to the UK which shows that we are in fact a nation of migrants, and that British culture is a constantly evolving negotiation between old and new.

www.ragroofplayers.co.uk/

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