Songs from the Other Side will premiere as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival
A new online dance theatre show aims to find a new language for exploring mental health challenges.
Songs from the Other Side has been created by Fuora Dance Project in association with Platform.
It will premiere on Monday 29 November as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival.
This new show weaves choreography with originally composed music and soundscapes to create an intimate, accessible ‘gig theatre’ performance. Radical, truthful, and hopeful, it invites the audience into a private world and asks how we can help each other through the dark times.
The piece personally resonates with the director and choreographer, Guilia Montalbano. With her new work, she wanted to explore mental health, not just from her own personal experience but as a way to share what it can mean to live with mental health challenges and to act as a provocation for people who believe that mental health issues do not exist.
Montalbano said: “In every show I do, I want to find new ways to connect with the audience that it is not necessarily coming from the theatre world. I try my best to search for things that make connections with people who are curious to discover through art, daily life experiences, topics not touched, issues, stigmas, arguments that people do not know or get information from the usual media.
“Perhaps with my art, I can create more connections and reflections of our daily life. This is why I wanted to explore mental health. Not just from a personal experience (due my previous illness) but a way to share what it can be or means living with mental health and being provoking for those who still believes that it doesn’t exist.”
In the show, Montalbano explores her own personal experiences with mental health and said lockdown has made doing so even more important.
She said: “I gave birth to my first child on the first day of lockdown in March 2020. My life evolved with my new addition to my family. I had ups and downs as everyone else did in every aspect, but after two weeks, from the best event of my life, I was there again on writing an application to make this show.
“The urgency to share this now, shows that the world is even stronger than before. Mental health is important and we need to protect us and everyone should know about this. I was also about my other collaborators. A project is not done by one person and I felt worried for the others that needed to work and pay bills too as with myself - we have finally made it after almost two years.”
You can sign up to watch the show online. After booking a ticket, a viewing link will be sent on Monday 29 November. The link will be available until Monday 6 December.
