Award-winning multidisciplinary artist Mele Broomes announces and launches her new performance company moniqux ensemble with a powerful new work.
Glasgow-based performance company moniqux ensemble presents the world premiere of Dictations, The Heart of the Sea – a new collaborative dance and live vocal performance, directed by Artistic Director Mele Broomes. Commissioned by Tramway and supported by Creative Scotland, the work premieres on Thursday 30 April 2026 at 7pmand runs until Friday 1 May 2026.
Building on Broomes’ long-standing commitment to creating development opportunities for Black and POC creatives in Scotland, the company brings together leading artists connected to the African and Caribbean diaspora to produce large-scale group works in Scotland.
Performers include Kemono Lebe-Riot, ACE V!S!ON, Chinyanta, Emmanuella Damptey, Kimberly Mandindo, KJ Clarke-Davis, Laura Mathana, Marios Ento-Engkolo, Mawadduh and Salma Francoise. The soundscore has been created by Mele Broomes, Noushy Nanguy and Simone Seales, ft. Micheal Arolowo.
The premiere of new work introduces moniqux ensemble’s unfolding vision of bringing a stylish, sensorial and embodied performance language to Scotland’s stages by creating collaborative dance and music work shaped by lived experience, cultural plurality and an understanding of performance as a space for exchange and reflection.
The company’s work emerges through ongoing dialogue between physical practice, sound and the social contexts in which it is made. The name moniqux reflects histories of migration, adaptation and redefinition. It honours family lineage – values that continue to inform the company’s methods and approach.
Through dance and live vocals, Dictations, The Heart of the Sea explores how family and community are carried and remembered. The work holds intimacy and distance together, tracing the ongoing love and labour of making home while navigating intersecting identities.
Inspired by the poem To My Coral Bones by Grace Nichols, the piece moves like the tide, reflecting on inheritance and what is carried across generations. It unfolds as an imagined island made together, breathing with slow, patient currents that carry fragments of story, sensation and feeling beyond the individual body. The work pays homage to ancestorship, family lineage and migration, celebrating deep connections to community, identity and self.
The announcement follows the international touring success of Broomes’ recent work through warm temperatures, presented at Lublin International Dance Theatre Festival, Actoral Festival Marseille and Dance International Glasgow. Originally commissioned for the sell-out opening of the Edinburgh Art Festival’s 20th anniversary in 2024, the expanded piece later featured in the Made in Scotland Showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2025.
In the same year, Broomes opened FKA Twigs’ exclusive album launch party organised by Glasgow-based collective Pony Boy, curating movement for the evening. This adds to her work with cutting-edge multidisciplinary artists across art, music and visual performance, including collaborators Alberta Whittle, Sabrina Henry and Sekai Machache.
Mele Broomes said: “I’m proud to launch moniqux ensemble as its founding Artistic Director. Our work reflects on legacy, lineage and collective power, bringing artists across the diaspora into dialogue and marking the beginning of ambitious productions, starting with Dictations, the Heart of the Sea, premiering in Scotland.”
For more information and tickets for Dictations, The Heart of the Sea: https://www.tramway.org/event/2ca5c981-a5de-48e9-95af-b3f30104d03c/