This week, Lizzie Klotz, a North-East-based choreographer will premiere her new work Abundance, an intergenerational live performance inviting audiences to explore care, connections and creative rest.
Ahead of the tour, which starts at Dance City, we caught up with Lizzie to discover more.
Q: Tell us about yourself.
A: I am a dance artist, choreographer, facilitator and producer based in the North East of England, creating work for theatre, outdoor and gallery settings.
My practice is rooted in care, joy and connection, and is underpinned by collaborative processes that bring together professional and non-professional performers to create accessible and meaningful experiences for participants and audiences alike.
I have worked as a facilitator for over 15 years, and have created work with non-professional dancers including Annie Dearnley in To Suit, my Dad in Dancing with My Dad and Luca Rutherford in a really small dance.
Most recently, I have co-created work with intergenerational groups, spanning ages from 11 – 85 in The Answers and Abundance.
You can see more about my work at www.lizzieklotz.com/ or on Instagram @lizzieklotz.
Q: What led you to create your new work, Abundance?
A: The work was conceived in 2023, when I worked with Dance City’s over-55 performance company, Boundless. Together we created a 10-minute work about and titled, Abundance.
We created a list of images or moments that felt abundant, such as an empty supermarket aisle, fields of rapeseed, and a black hole.
Later that year, I took part in a part time residency for parent and carer artists supported by MotherOther at The NewBridge Project, in the weeks and months after the birth of my second son. It was an invaluable opportunity to reconnect with my practice after several years of early motherhood, and to begin to put ideas in motion for a new work.
During this residency I applied for a micro commission from Moving Art Management.
I thought about what I really wanted to make work about, and these moments of abundance came up again. I felt there was more to be said about them.
I received the Moving Art Management micro commission alongside further support from Arts Council England for a period of R&D to integrate a professional cast alongside the cast of Boundless.
We are now into our third period of development for the work, building towards the premiere at Dance City on 2nd April, followed by performances at Queen’s Hall Hexham, Alnwick Playhouse, and as part of Ageless Festival at Yorkshire Dance.
Q: You’re working with an intergenerational cast: three professional dancers and three volunteers. What has this process been like and why was it important to blend the two?
A: This work began as an intergenerational collaboration between an over-55 performance company and myself, a professional dance artist in my 30s. That exchange has always felt central to the work. In many ways, it hasn’t just informed the piece – it has become the work.
Intergenerational practice is a significant part of my wider practice, particularly working with people who don’t identify as professional dancers. From the outset, I wanted the cast to extend beyond what we might usually see on stage.
The professional cast has been brought together with that in mind, ranging in age from 23 to 60, each at very different moments in their lives and relationships to their bodies.
The process has involved developing material with the professional dancers and then opening that out to the volunteer cast, allowing the work to shift in response to what they bring.
It’s important to me that the volunteer performers feel powerful on stage, with real ownership of the work, and are not positioned as lesser than the professional cast. There have been deliberate choices to support that: everyone remains on stage throughout, and each role reflects the performer’s interests, capacities and personality.
We’ve had rich conversations about how abundance feels in the body, and how that shifts across a lifetime. It resists simple narratives about ageing or ability, instead opening up multiple perspectives on what it means to feel capable and connected.
Q: The work involves stillness, resting, leaping and reverberating. Why did you decide to take this approach and what is the impact?
A: The work has been built through two extended research periods with the dancers and wider creative team, beginning with conversations about what abundance means to us, followed by improvisations rooted in those reflections.
Rest and stillness quickly emerged as essential. Many of us spoke about a constant sense of urgency – around work, parenting and daily life – so stillness felt precious, almost just out of reach. It became a way to pause, reflect and quiet a busy mind.
We also explored play and more energetic movement as a kind of flow state – an experience of joy, release and imagination. By focusing on what abundance feels like, rather than what it looks like, we began to generate a movement language that shifts between these states: resting, leaping and reverberating between bodies.
Alongside this, there were ongoing conversations about abundance in a wider sense – how it can be tied to extraction, excess and inequality, both locally and globally. For some, the word carried associations of greed or hoarding, which has been important to acknowledge. This work frames abundance not as an act of taking, but as a feeling of spaciousness – an attention to what brings joy and freedom without taking from someone else.
Q: There are also colour duvets! What kind of environment and experience are you creating for the dancers and audience?
A: A 7 year old audience member at a previous work-in-progress sharing said that they wanted to go home and dance with their duvet too, which felt like a real win!
The duvets are a beautiful material to work with. They offer softness and the possibility of rest, but also transformation – they can become sculptural, playful, or places to hide. For the dancers, they create a shifting landscape that supports both stillness and movement.
They’re also deeply familiar objects. Most people have a relationship to them, so there’s something about seeing them reimagined – to see something everyday become expansive, playful and full of possibility.
Q: What’s next for you?
A: I’m about to move into production week at Dance City, with lighting designer Barnaby Booth kicking off the week in tech, joined by stage manager Andrea Scrimshaw, sound designer Jayne Dent (Me Lost Me), designer Bethany Wells, dramaturg Rosa Postlethwairte and myself, alongside the performers.
Following the performances of Abundance, we’ll develop the work for a gallery context at The NewBridge Project, in collaboration with designer Bethany Wells and participants from NewBridge’s neighbourhood programme. This version reimagines the work as an installation, transforming the gallery into an immersive, soft environment built from duvets.
I am also touring an outdoor work The Fabric of Us, created in collaboration with Luca Rutherford, which premiered at SIRF last August.
I have dreams of a new work about women carrying lots of things, literally.
Abundance will premiere at Dance City in Newcastle on Wednesday 2 April at 7.30pm, before touring to Queen’s Hall in Hexham on Wednesday 22 April at 7.30pm and Alnwick Playhouse on Friday 25 April at 12.30pm.
The live performance is presented alongside a new installation that will be presented at The NewBridge Project in Newcastle from 6 June – 15 August.
For more about Lizzie and Abundance, visit:
www.lizzieklotz.com
@lizzieklotz