Reclaiming Rave, Reimagining Dance in 'Over and Over (and over again)'

Candoco Dance Company and Dan Daw Creative Projects’ Over and Over (and over again) is a bold, immersive production on rave culture and the lived experience of disabled dancers. Co-directed by Dan Daw and Stef O’Driscoll, this work’s structure mirrors a night out: arrival, anticipation, ecstatic release, and introspective comedown. However, it transcends traditional dance performance, offering a collective act of resistance and reimagining who belongs on the dance floor, and what liberation feels like when bodies move together in unapologetic pursuit of joy.

The scenography is conceptually rich yet minimal: four pairs of standing light poles, an L-shaped platform with a ramped extension, two pleated opaque sheets for projection, and a suspended rectangular screen. These are more than backdrops: through projecting words including ‘Dreams’, ‘Abandon’, ‘Second Wind’, ‘Love’, ‘Unity’, etc, they actively shape the emotional and physical landscape of the rave. 

 Image: Over and Over (and over again) | Photographer: Hugo Glendinning

Lighting design is central to the dramaturgy. The opening, with four beams converging mid-stage as four dancers enter one by one, establishes a sense of anticipation. The pleated backdrops serve as both projection surfaces and shadow screens amplifying bodily presence. While the four dancers’ silhouettes move on the shadow screen, Maiya Leeke, in her cambered wheelchair and silver-beaded top, transforms into a living disco ball, radiating

defiant energy as she moves to the lyric “I want to feel everything”.

A particularly resonant sequence is the “chill-out” session. Dancers collapse together on beanbags and each other, while the phrase “rest as an act of resistance” is projected on the backdrop. This is not merely a pause for performers but an invitation for the audience to reconsider the politics of rest, especially in a world where disabled bodies might often be denied the right to both exertion and recuperation.

Image: Over and Over (and over again) | Photographer: Hugo Glendinning

Emerging from collective rest, the choreography shifts. Annie Edwards, rooted yet reaching upwards, moves with a somatic intensity entirely her own. The music morphs into a '90s R’n’B groove; the group rises, illuminated in soft white light. The projection of “Desire” and the line “I want to be thrown around and held” imply not just a sensual longing, but the deeper, often unspoken, desires of disabled people to be seen, touched, and treated with dignity. The dancers’ buoyant, swinging movements become a metaphor for shaking off societal constraints.

The last session echoes the aftermath of a night out: the dance floor empties, lights shift from disco to master room lighting — we see James Olivo is left dancing alone. This final image appears solitary yet not alone, lingers as a testament to both vulnerability and resilience at the heart of the work.

Over and Over (and over again) resists conventional staged choreography, proposing the rave as a radical, inclusive space where disabled and non-disabled bodies can comfortably experience pleasure, connection, and freedom on their own terms. The production does not dwell on limitation; instead, it fiercely reclaims the nightclub as a site of possibility, where “Unity” is not just projected but embodied.

 Image: Over and Over (and over again) | Photographer: Hugo Glendinning

The presence of the BSL interpreter, whose body becomes a vessel for the music’s energy, underscores the show’s commitment to accessibility — not as an add-on, but as a generative force within the work. This is dance as embodied activism: a reminder that only when everyone can move with pleasure and freedom does the revolutionary potential of dance truly emerge.