We’re very excited to have Them Two Dance coming to Lancaster for August’s First Friday to perform Random Acts of Kindness. In our opinion Lancaster is already the best place on earth with wonderful people but we could all do with a bit of extra kindness at times and Them Two Dance will be doing that! So he’s a blog written by Katherine and Connor to tell us a bit more about what to expect!
We are delighted that our final date on our summer Tour De Kindness will be in Lancaster. It will be our only date outside of Yorkshire so we’re excited to be taking the Tandem out of the county. We’re not bitter about the Wars of the Roses….. we’ll be arriving into Lancashire with smiles and kindness.
During the creation of this piece we had been anticipating how audiences might respond, putting ourselves in imaginary best case/worst case scenarios. The work is entirely dependent upon audience interaction so there was a limit to how much we could rehearse in a studio, before we went crazy with ‘will they?’, ‘won’t they?’. Touring throughout Yorkshire has shown us that without the kindness of strangers the work, the art, doesn’t exist. Thankfully, ‘Random Acts of Kindness’ has existed and we are so grateful to our audiences for being so open, kind and accepting.
In the morning of our performance days we base ourselves in a locally recommended cafe for an hour. On the 5th of August well be in The Dukes Cafe Bar at 12pm. During that time we speak to cafe goers and people passing by about random acts of kindness and ask them to suggest RAOK that they would like to see happen in the local community. We’ve had some great suggestions of RAOK throughout the tour. We often get doable acts of kindness but we sometimes get quite outlandish ones. In Grassington ‘Hoggy’ suggested that someone come to his lighthouse and help him replace a bulb ‘to stop the impending doom of ships crashing on the rocks’. In amongst our favourites are these:
We then take those RAOK suggestions, pop them in a pretty yellow envelope and head off on our Tandem. As we cycle around the town, city, village or festival we stop and chat with random people who might be up for giving the wheel a spin.
We are really looking forward to cycling around Lancaster on the 5th August, we’ve heard it’s full of kind people and some random ones too. If you see us cycling about make sure to give us a wave!
