Shovel Dance Collective

A nine-piece band united by a passion for the beauty, force and political charge of traditional music from the UK, Ireland and beyond. Shovel Dance Collective’s practice is a patchwork of fragments, weaving together folk with group improvisations, field recordings and concrète-style tape manipulation. Emphasising the inviting, hopeful and human qualities of folk, their arrangements channel the joy and sadness held in these collaboratively-shaped words and melodies. Balancing dense orchestration with intense fragility, the patchwork is threaded with a deep sense of the ways traditional music carries the voices of all those who have gone before, the oppressed and those who, through their labour, create the wealth of the world. Presented by Southbank Centre and Baba Yaga’s Hut.