Seated Stories - Reflection on our Chair Based Choreography for Wycombe Museum in 2024

We had the wonderful priviledge of creating a chair based dance for Wycombe Museum's Chair Festival back in July 2024.

An exciting adventure that brings High Wycombe's famous chairmaking history to life through a fun and engaging dance performance in a 10-minute solo contemporary dance.

To create this piece, we did research based on text and stories from Wycombe Library and the Wycombe Museum, went on a tour of the William Hands chair factory and used prompts relating to chairs and chairmaking. An example of a prompt we used was "A swift, slicing motion saws through the beechwood, shaping the elegant legs of a new chair." Can you find where in the dance we might have used this?

We also looked at many pictures of chairs and tried to mimic shapes based on the different parts of chairs. Some chairs are rigid and angular whilst others are curvy and have intricate details carved into their wooden elements. We had a lot of fun coming up with tricks we could do using the chair and also thought of how we could make movements with the chair as if it was a dance partner. 

Seated Stories performed by Liezl de Wouters at the Wycombe Museum in July 2024

We were really priviledged to have a glorious sunny day allowing us to perform in the garden of the museum to passers by and to a local church group having a picnic on the grounds. We used an array of music for the piece and had the wonderful Lin Instone narrate a custom poem about chairmaking in Wycombe, which was used as part of the musical. Furthermore local filmmaker Verdun Luck professionally recorded the piece and we were able to livestream on Instagram. Thanks to funding from Buckinghamshire Culture, we were also able to get an audio described version up on our website.

To date, we've had 167 people view our performance and we've had some lovely feedback on the piece:

‘Fascinating new experience watching dance movements with the chair’

'Unexpected interlude’

‘Great choreography’

You can view the piece at www.dewdance.co.uk/seated-stories and read more about it in our post event case study