By Damien Barber T
he Demon Barber Roadshow has been developing for about 10 years now and each year we’ve tried to push our boundaries, as individual artists and the show as whole. The Roadshow is a collaboration between The Demon Barbers, a five piece electric folk band,and some of England‘s most exciting young traditional dancers active on the UK folk scene today. The result is the high energy musical and dance spectacular that won Best Live Act at BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2009 and has been nominated again for the same
award in 2011.
The idea of working with contemporary and street dancers first came about not long after the formation of The Roadshow but it wasn’t until Bush Hartshorn invited the rapper sword dancers from the Roadshow to perform at the British Dance Edition, held in Leeds in 2006, that these ideas took a step forward. Bush was then the Artistic Director at Yorkshire Dance and although Bush and Yorkshire Dance have since parted company they have both continued to be extremely supportive and valuable to the project’s development.
After the success of the performance at BDE Bush, I met with Lucy Suggate, a young choreographer resident at Yorkshire Dance, and we
began working on a research and development (R&D) project which culminated in a 10 minute piece being launched at Yorkshire Dance’s 25th Anniversary celebrations in 2007. The pilot was received well but we still had a lot of work to do developing our ideas and so in 2008 we ran a similar project producing another 10 minute pilot which was previewed as part of The Demon Barber Roadshow at York Theatre Royal later that year. This was also received extremely well and gave us the confidence to apply to Arts Council England (who also funded the previous 2 pilots) for a grant to create a full-length theatre show. Both these pilots looked at the relationship between traditional clog and street dance and also included a beatboxer and percussionist.
The Demon Barber roadshow’s central aim is to raise the profile of traditional English dance by promoting it to a wide as possible audience
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