Produced and presented by Andreas Bedorf, Dance Again follows Noa through one night at a music festival — a psychedelic celebration of love and unity that collapses into a massacre.
It’s part of this year’s Camden Fringe.
“The play explores an unfolding terror attack from the perspective of a brain under the influence of mind-expanding drugs.
The play oscillates between ecstatic peaks and traumatic episodes, fracturing Noa’s reality until she can no longer tell trip from truth.
All while confronting the vanishing of her partner, her friends, the very idea the dance floor represents.
What follows is a reckoning with irreversible loss and the question of whether joy can ever be reclaimed.”
Where: The Cockpit
When: 10-12 Aug
https://camdenfringe.com/events/dance-again/
What’s your show about, and where did the idea come from?
Dance Again follows Noa through one night at a music festival. She is deep into a psychedelic trip seeking joy and unity but collapses into a massacre.
Told through the distorted lens of LSD, with a live DJ performing throughout, it explores what happens to a person when the space they love most becomes the scene of the worst humans are capable of.
It asks whether joy can be reclaimed after such horror, and what it means to survive.
The idea came on my way to a psytrance festival. I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened at Nova and other music gatherings.
About what the dance floor meant to these people and what it means to me. The people I was about to dance with were just the same as those who went through that experience.
They were seeking the same unity, listening to the same music. I couldn’t deal with that in any other way than writing about it and tell their story.
Sell it to the potential audience in one sentence.
A memorial, a rave, and a refusal – live, with a DJ on stage, inspired by real events, and asking whether the dancefloor can still be ours after it has been turned into a battlefield.
Why did you want to be part of the Camden Fringe?
Because the festival thrives on taking risks on new work and new voices, and this show needs exactly that. Dance Again is my writing debut, it’s formally unique, carries a heavy topic, and is emotionally demanding for the audience and actors alike.
The Camden Fringe creates space for work like this and offers the opportunity to present it with limited resources. It felt like exactly the right place to bring it first.
What’s your favourite memory of Fringe theatre?
Last year I performed in a show called Panacea. I was playing a character at a very traumatic point in his life, something that closely resembled an experience I’d been through myself.
It became a way of processing something deeply personal while simultaneously using it to inform the character from the inside.
I’ve never experienced anything quite like it: the emotional value of that, the risk fringe theatre was willing to take, the way it touched the audience and me at the same time.
It became a major motivation to explore the painful experiences at the heart of Dance Again. It showed me that Fringe theatre can hold something real and difficult and make it mean something.
What’s next for you/the show?
We hope that the Cockpit run is the beginning. I’d love to take Dance Again further to other venues, potentially a tour. And the show itself has more to give! The 60-minute format means that Noa’s journey back to the dance floor has a few angles we cannot properly explore. A longer version, with room to really sit in crucial moments of her return, feels like the natural next step.