We are Dash Arts
We create exceptional artistic experiences.
We listen to the stories around us and share them in workshops and unique productions in startling ways.
We bring theatre out of the theatre so that it collides with real life in unconventional spaces, through encounters with non-professional performers and through interactions with ideas and people you might not usually get to meet.
We are international. We make work about our world.
“We created Dash to work across the art forms, to bridge divides between theatre, music, dance and art, but also between countries, languages and communities. That was our initial vision, and it still is that vision, today.”
Over the last 18 years, we’ve created award-winning new work with over 10,000 artists and participants for live audiences of over 400,000 worldwide. Our international productions, events and education programmes expand the way we see the world
Dash Arts was founded in 2005 by then co-directors, Josephine Burton and Tim Supple. Previous productions include the site-specific promenade The Great Middlemarch Mystery, part of Coventry City of Culture 2021, the double Olivier-award winning Babel and the Indian A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which played sell-out seasons with the RSC in Stratford and at London’s Roundhouse before touring world-wide.
Our productions have had widely-acclaimed major tours in the UK, Europe, Australia and North America and numerous awards and nominations including Olivier, Evening Standard, TMA, Herald Angel and Dora Awards.
“Immersive ingenuity.. that stretches the vocabulary of the stage. Suddenly, theatre is firing on its newest cylinders.”
We ask a question and explore it deeply.
- Josephine Burton, Artistic Director
Dido’s Bar, 2022 by Josephine Burton. Photo credit: Ali Wright
With each show, we immerse ourselves in a particular part of the world, a question or a theme over an extended period of time to research, create and produce new work, resulting in rich productions, events and participation programmes with international actors, musicians and artists. You can discover our research and development process in our blog here.
We assemble multi-national creative teams that draw on their own experiences to create stories that need to be told and provide a platform for voices that pierce echo chambers.
“The most fiercely resonant dance theatre of the decade”
“We bring real life hurtling into theatre with documentary and testimony. We redefine who gets to be called an artist.”
- Josephine Burton. Artistic Director
Rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2006 by Tim Supple
Through an artistic lens, our audiences and participants engage in relevant, sensitive, sometimes difficult, often joyous conversations, and gain an increased understanding of different ways of seeing the world, cultures and performance styles.
Our workshops involve disadvantaged and often unheard communities, who become a crucial part of our artistic experiences.
In all our work, we seek to fuse local and global perspectives, cut through stereotypes and generalisations, remove international cultural barriers, access hidden communities and increase our audience’s understanding of the many possibilities of performance.
Songs for Babyn Yar, Kyiv 2021 by Josephine Burton. Photo credit: Ira Marconi
Our current season of work ALBION explores Englishness through an ongoing programme of events, residences and workshops; with three new productions in development.
Outside of this we host regular Podcasts and Special Events, which explore current affairs, artists, movements, ideas and more.
“Work of profound worldwide artistic significance, awakening us to new styles, beliefs and voices”