VISION
DeNada Dance Theatre is an independent LGBTQ+ dance company fully committed to the promotion of diversity and inclusion of non-normative identities. Our purpose is to voice underrepresented narratives through high quality dance, performing work in a variety of contexts to offer visibility and representation to the LGBTQ+ community. Stemming from our Hispanic and Latinx heritage, the company also promotes transcultural relations and celebrates the cultural diversity of the audiences we perform for, and the artists we work with.
We fully believe in the transformative power of dance: its capacity to mobilise change, to heal and to cause reflection.
We seek to entertain through extravagant theatricality, kitschy physicality, and accessible narratives.
Based in the North of England, the company tours internationally to theatres, outdoor and unconventional spaces. Nominated as Best Independent Company by the UK Critic’s Circle, DeNada has taken a unique place in the UK dance sector as a company offering poignant, innovative and exciting work that places the underrepresented at the fore.
“Small, bold outfits like DeNada are delivering with an urgency that larger ensembles are not”
WORK
DeNada creates narrative dance works that through highly theatrical, vigorously physical and impactfully poignant productions reflect queer and transcultural experience. We believe in the magic of theatre to create new and exciting worlds; in transporting our audiences to new, absurd and fantastical universes of new possibilities and experiences. Our work aims to entertain and transport, to transform and excite, to challenge and question. The dance works we create entice and delight, while opening doors to new ways of thinking about our world.
We perform across the UK and internationally at venues such as Sadler’s Wells, DanceXchange, The Lowry, the Stanley and Audrey Burton Theatre and the Palace of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo; and at festivals such as Homotopia, International Dance Festival Birmingham and the Ballet Festival of Cali, Colombia, amongst others. Because we believe dance should be available to all, and especially those who do not visit theatres, we also create work for the outdoors and unconventional spaces.
The company currently performs works by Canarian choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra, UK Critic’s Circle nominee in the category of Best Emerging Artist. Our repertoire includes shorter length works and full length narratives, often queer-adapting cultural texts that previously did not voice LGBTQ+ identities; our dance is also committed to decolonising cultural forms and texts. Our creative processes stem from lived experiences of queer folx, and are always aimed at mobilising social change.
“In the years since he founded DeNada Dance Theatre, Carlos Pons Guerra has achieved an enviable reputation as a choreographer. His work combines lacerating social comment with outrageous showmanship. It’s witty, it’s penetrating, and it’s personal.””
HERITAGE
DeNada is interested in celebrating, challenging and subverting Hispanic and Latinx culture.
We are also excited about exploring transcultural and multicultural relations. We do this through the narratives we tell, the artists we work with, the communities we engage and through international collaboration.
Our choreography often draws from folklore: flamenco, Latin dance forms, Caribbean folklore, Hispanic social dances, and more, which we merge with contemporary dance and classical ballet to explore how dance forms an essential part of our cultural identities. Our work deconstructs and reimagines folkloric forms so that they may better speak to us today, and so they may include contemporary ways of understanding gender and sexuality.
“DeNada has a fully formed sense of artistic identity. Its Hispanic heritage, steeped in Catholicism, cured ham and songs of the 1950s, collides with explorations of sexuality, gender and copious carnal pleasure. It’s a hugely atmospheric recipe”
ENGAGEMENT
At DeNada, we are committed to engaging with the communities we create work about and for. We are strong believers in how creativity, the arts, and above all, dance, can promote LGBTQ+ inclusion; forge new transcultural relations; offer a safe and creative space for the realisation of non-normative identities; open up exciting and important dialogues; and educate about gender and sexual identities in dynamic and impactful ways.
Our community engagement takes many forms. From engaging with particular groups in the research and creative processes of our work, to ensure honest representation of underrepresented voices, as well as to fully understand their realities, to exciting, unique and innovative outreach offers that accompany our touring activity. While we believe in the magic of the theatrical experience as something that is transformative and leads us to reflection, we also believe in the huge benefits of continuing to explore a production’s themes through engagement in wraparound educational or artistic activity.
DeNada promotes the acceptance of gender and cultural diveristy both with adults and with young people. This means we are constantly imagining new educational activities tailored for specific groups, so that we can engage as many participants as possible.
We share one message: inclusion. And whether for adults or for young people, we speak it through one language: dance.
History
DeNada was founded in 2012 by choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra and dancers Marivi da Silva and Sabrina Ribes Bonet. Our adventures began performing a duet with a leg of Spanish jamón, Young Man!, in a bedroom in Chapeltown, Leeds. From there, with the support of producer Sarah Shead / Spin Arts, the company began creating work that toured cabaret and unconventional spaces, before transferring onto small scale theatres with its triple bill of dance, Ham and Passion, performed by three dancers. Becoming an associate company at DanceXchange, Birmingham, in 2017, we created our first full length narrative work, TORO: Beauty and the Bull, which toured to midscale venues across the UK to great critical acclaim for the production and its six highly talented dancers. In 2021, the company premiered its most ambitious production to date: Mariposa: a Queer Tragedy Inspired by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, collaborating with award winning composers Luis Miguel Cobo and author Karthika Nair. In 2021, the company also expanded its reach to create queer work for young audiences, premiering The Bull and the Moon at different parks in the city of Bradford, before touring internationally.
The last ten years have seen the company grow from a petite formation in unconventional spaces to a midscale company touring internationally. Garnering several nominations for the UK Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards, it has also received great acclaim from international press. Most notably, the BBC filmed a documentary about Carlos Pons Guerra’s work for DeNada, Prejudice and Passion, which aired on BBC 4 in May 2018 as part of Danceworks: a series of documentaries portraying some of the UK’s most representative voices in dance. Throughout these years, the company has also gratefully received the support of leading dance and arts organisations in the UK and worldwide.
The company aims to continue growing in scale and reach; as well as touring its current productions, it will continue to create queer narratives that voice identities and bodies that have been othered. We will expand our repertoire for young audiences, believing the importance of delivering our messages of inclusion and representation at early stages, and will continue to explore new ways and formats for presenting our work.
