Rhiannon Faith’s DROWNTOWN announces UK tour dates and London premiere

New dance show DROWNTOWN from Rhiannon Faith will finally hit the stage this autumn.

The piece from the Double National Dance Awards nominee was due to play to in-person audiences in June 2020.

Originally slated for a live world premiere at London’s Barbican, the show eventually made a debut online with a short ‘prequel’ film Drowntown Lockdown followed by a full length Drowntown film.

In choreographer Rhiannon Faith’s newly staged show DROWNTOWN, six strangers, weighed down by individual darkness, come to a deprived coastal land. Seemingly abandoned, there is no one to help but themselves. Stuck between the remains of a broken community and the vast bleakness of the sea, they struggle with isolation, shame and failed support systems.

Dark, uncompromising and moving yet, accessible, tender and physically stunning, DROWNTOWN continues the vein of gritty dance-theatre from this radical choreographer. Bold and brave, at times bleak (in keeping with its subject matter), the show uses autobiographical testimonials and text to give voice to the vulnerable and unheard in modern Britain’s areas of social deprivation. With tenderness and honesty, the show holds up a mirror to a society at tipping point. DROWNTOWN is here to try to help save our world from drowning.

The tour will begin at the Harlow Playhouse (27 September) before heading to Ormskirk, The Arts Centre (18 October), Folkestone Creative Folkestone Quarterhouse (2 November), Newcastle Dance City (4 November), Exeter Phoenix Bradninch Place (8 November) and London The Place (10 November). Further tour dates in 2023 are to be announced.

Rhiannon said: “So many communities are broken, people are drowning, so something must be going wrong. The conversations have dried up and what exists within us, wounds and emotion, just gets pushed down to the sea-bed. I want to reopen those conversations urgently.

“With the extended and combined fallouts of Covid, Brexit and the cost of living and energy crises, DROWNTOWN is, if anything, more relevant in 2022 than it was three years ago.”