Dual Till the Death & A Body of Rumours
Liam Francis Dance Company (Brighton)
German premiere | No spoken language | No age restriction
Liam Francis is a leading voice of an emerging generation that is reshaping the British dance landscape. He first met the performers in his company at Rambert, one of the UK’s longest-established contemporary dance companies. In A BODY OF RUMOURS, he asks what happens when dancers from families with Caribbean and African roots come together in an ensemble and are assigned certain roles because of the colour of their skin, prejudice and assumptions – or “rumours”.
Audiences may attach the label “hip hop” to the dancers, even though their training ranges from ballet and dance theatre to a wide variety of contemporary dance forms. In A BODY OF RUMOURS they develop an infectious, dynamic and universal movement language that draws on all these styles and challenges habitual perceptions of their bodies and personalities. Together they experience highs and lows, solidarity and companionship, while Chloé Mason captures the sounds of the dancing bodies and condenses them into a multifaceted soundscape.
The second piece, DUAL TILL THE DEATH, explores our inner duality and contradictions. Throughout our lives, we are serious and playful at the same time, aggressive and tender, mature yet still youthful. Who better to explore these tensionsand turn them into psychologically gripping dance theatre than Liam Francis – a member of the younger generation who already brings considerable experience to his work, along with an outlook on life that is as perceptive as it is compassionate?
Biography Liam Francis
Liam Francis is an award-winning dancer & choreographer who has gained international recognition through his dancing career with Rambert Dance Company and LostDog. His choreographic work has been presented in numerous cities, including Hannover, Rotterdam, Rome, Paris, London and New York. Drawing on his background in contemporary dance, ballet and hip-hop, Liam's practice seeks to explore his eclectic embodied knowledge to give form to human emotions and concepts centred around community, identity and the space in between.
Credits
DUAL TILL THE DEATH Choreographer Liam Francis Performer Liam Francis, Nathan Goodman Lighting Designer Zoé Ritchie Sound Composer Wouter Gulikers A BODY OF RUMOURS Choreographer Liam Francis Performer Liam Francis, Nathan Goodman, Rakeem Hardy Live Music Composer + Sound Artist Chloe Mason Lighting Designer Joshie Harriette Associate Lighting Design Zoé Ritchie Technical Director Zoé Ritchie Executive Producer Steph Bergé Guest Performance Support FABRIC Creation A BODY OF RUMOURS Théâtre des Abbesses Paris, 4. September 2025 / DUAL TILL THE DEATH Theater Rotterdam, 23. Juni 2022
DUAL TILL THE DEATH Production Liam Francis Dance Company Co-production The Place, South East Dance Funding Abderrahim Crickmay charity und Rinova A BODY OF RUMOURS Production Liam Francis Dance Company Co-production Théâtre de la Ville Paris mit Unterstützung von Caisse des Dépôts, Cndc Angers und The Lowry Funding Arts Council England, FABRIC, Studio Wayne McGregor Resident 6, Serendipity Institute for Black Arts and Heritage, South East Dance, Brighton Dome, London Studio Centre, Rinova, The Abderrahim Crickmay Charitable Settlement
https://liamfrancis.co.uk
LIAM FRANCIS IN CONVERSATION
LIAM FRANCIS IN CONVERSATION
Liam Francis came to dance relatively late. At the age of 14, he began taking hip-hop classes in Brighton, and soon afterwards encountered ZooNation, performing in INTO THE HOODS. Contemporary dance came later. At 18, he took his first ballet class and began to immerse himself in a range of techniques, including Limón, Cunningham and Graham. What mattered to him was not simply adopting their outward appearance, but understanding their foundations from the ground up. As he explains in his conversation with Bachtrack, he fell “in love with the core of the styles, not their superficial aesthetic”.
Seven years with Rambert followed, during which Francis danced leading roles and worked with internationally renowned choreographers. Looking back, he describes this period as one of intense learning and accumulation. Every collaboration, he suggests, leaves a trace in the body. A friend once compared this to tattoos: “Every time you work with a choreographer, you get a tattoo.” At a certain point, Francis felt the need to turn these accumulated experiences into an artistic language of his own.
In 2021, he made a conscious decision to focus more strongly on his choreographic work. At first, however, he was reluctant to think of himself as the director of his own company. It was only when his mentor pointed out that he was already working with a regular group of dancers, touring productions internationally and building a distinct artistic structure that his perspective began to shift. The Liam Francis Dance Company grew out of this process.
What Francis particularly misses from working in larger ensembles is the daily practice of training together and the particular sense of community that emerges from it: people spending hours working physically towards a shared goal, experimenting, failing and developing together. This is precisely the atmosphere he seeks to create within his own company. For him, the work is not only about realising his own choreographic ideas, but also about making stories visible and building a community.
Francis deliberately resists defining his artistic language as something fixed or complete. He does not want to establish what a “typical” Liam Francis piece should look like. Instead, he is interested in continually filtering and recombining different experiences and influences. His background in hip-hop, ballet and contemporary dance is not a fixed stylistic formula, but rather a physical archive from which new forms can continue to emerge.
Source: Deborah Weiss, “Breaking free: Liam Francis makes a new company”, Bachtrack, 15 June 2026.
A Body of Rumours (Photos: N. Houguenade, D. Fitzpatrick)
Dual Till the Death (Photos: Mark David, Ton van Til)
Main Supporters
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