This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more about our use of cookies click here OK
This site uses cookies. By continuing to browse this site, you are agreeing to our use of cookies. To find out more about our use of cookies click here. OK

Home > Phoenix Dance Theatre: The Open Fund for Organisations

Phoenix Dance Theatre: The Open Fund for Organisations

Phoenix Dance Theatre: The Open Fund for Organisations

Phoenix Dance Theatre are delighted to announce a new collaboration with Christella Litras, generously funded by the PRS for Music Foundation’s Open Grant. Christella will create an original music score for Windrush: Movement of the People, a major new multi-disciplinary dance piece by Artistic Director Sharon Watson, that will premiere at West Yorkshire Playhouse on 7 February 2018.

The Windrush dance production celebrates the 70thanniversary of the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush, which brought the first wave of Caribbean migrants to the UK in 1948. A symbol of the rise of multicultural Britain, Windrush is an incredible story that is now being re-told through the idioms of dance and music.

This dance work tells the collective history of British Caribbean people; their dreams, hopes and pain, while celebrating the complexities of their struggle for identity, equality and belonging. The dance narrative explores a history that has led to demographic, cultural and economic changes to the British landscape, underscored by a musical soundtrack that will start from 1948 to present day.  Spanning the vast sweep of 70 years with different music genres – calypso, jazz, blues, ska, gospel, reggae, soca – which were the soundtrack to the lives of the Caribbean British people and the wider Black British communities.

Christella Litras is a producer, musical director and artist, who most recently produced and musically directed Rob Green’s new EP, which debuted No 3 in the R&B iTunes chart. She formed the award-winning Vocal Performance group Caution Collective to develop the talent of local young singers, and has been performing as a Vandella alongside Motown recording artist Martha Reeves on her European and UK tours for the past five years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pyt0HFHFLWY

https://www.phoenixdancetheatre.co.uk/work/windrush-movement-people/

Search Grantees

If you’re looking to see if we’ve supported someone like you, working in your genre or region, or if you want to find out who we’ve supported through our different funding opportunities and partnership programmes, then please use the drop-down menu search tool.

If you have a specific artist, group, performer, promoter or organisation that you’re looking for, please use the ‘Search’ tool in the top right hand corner of this page. If we have supported them, this is the best way to find out about the support they’ve received from us.