BA (Hons) Dance Degree Newcastle College Workshop

'Touch The Beast' is a dance film, a ‘gothic romance’ choreographed by Dora Frankel and filmed by Andy Wood with original music composed by Roma Yagnik. It’s inspired by the tales of Edgar Allen Poe and the costumes designed by Kate Collins are inspired by the work of Aubrey Beardsley.

This production takes Poe's idea that the seeds of our own destruction lie in ourselves: so the 'Beast' is our guilt at our sexual orientation, our age, race, gender, bodies, looks and our past actions. Sensual, strange, gender-fluid the film draws inspiration from primarily Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and The Oval portrait.

After creating and showing Touch The Beast it has been clear the effect it has had on our team and we want to share this with more people. We've already done three workshops with universities and schools and the participants all agreed they had a fantastic time.

“Spending the afternoon exploring movement was surprisingly liberating and cathartic. I don't understand it but the workshop had a way of getting you out of your mind and feeling at ease enough to move around freely, expressing things from within that were surprisingly personal” Masters student at Northumbria University.

“It was a very relaxed environment, Dora was brilliant at putting people at ease… I actually really enjoyed the movement part, it was both freeing and connecting at the same time” Masters student at Northumbria University.

With your help we’d like to do more workshops and bring dance movement and the idea of exploring your inner beast to more schools and educational institutions. You can help us by donating to our small community of artists and sharers. Just £60 helps us deliver a 1 hour workshop with children, £120 could mean different schools and more workshops and £200+ could mean the dancers will join to help inspire and encourage children to get involved.

Thank you so much for visiting our page, every donation is sincerely appreciated by Dora and her team, now let's make this happen!

Benfield School Workshop Performing Arts Students

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