​

​

L'AUTEUR

..

Oliver Scott is the artistic and executive director of Mercurial Dance, and founder of Mercurial Arts Charity. Through our companies we create distinctive performance and produce in-depth participatory experiences. Our work sees us engage 1000’s of young people & develop new audiences every year in high quality arts activities. With a specialism in digital dance, our expertise has grown from choreographing to offer consultancy: strategic development advice; consultancy to schools, development of arts curricula alongside producing high quality participatory arts activities, where people are part of the creative process. We pair participatory experience with the creation of professional work; work that is locally intentional in its themes; work that targets areas most in need.
We collaborate with visual artists, musicians, dancers and coders to deliver the variety of work. Working with other artists is a key part of my practice. Our dancing is informed by embodied, somatic dance techniques, contact (CI) and improvisation. We are driven artistically by the intersection between people, place and performance, helping to shape the projects we produce.
Works include 100 Faces, a dance film installation at the Leamington Gallery (2006). BeRibboned (2007) at the Herbert and Risky Business (2009). 2010-15 our work centred on ‘The Bubble Chamber’- a pop-up arts studio in Coventry which hosted performances & installations including: ‘Hinterland’ a piece, commissioned by Birmingham Hippodrome; ‘Cascades’ an interactive projection piece with Belgrade Theatre & ‘Cascades CODA’ which toured with DanceDigital Festival. Fair Youth in 2015 continued our approach to making work for non- theatre spaces & toured a piece inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnets, around the region’s libraries.

In 2014 we created ‘The Chaotic Liquid Network’ in partnership with mac, Ikon, University of Birmingham & Oasis Academy Hobmoor. This relationship led to arts education work engaging 840 children in over 900 workshops each year, through our Aspire Programme and Every Child Is An Artist Projects, our ongoing programme of arts activities for young people. These projects resulted in launching Hobmoor Community Centre (2015) in which we continue to work in on regular basis now accessed by over 1000 people every week & offers 19000 participant experiences per year. Our recently published book 'Aspire!' documents our innovative education work & partnership with Oasis Academy Hobmoor.

Most recently we managed a successful pilot of Ballet at the Bar(re) (2018) & also produced a new site specific work Retold, successfully premiering a 5 night ticketed performance during July 2018 in the former Coventry Evening Telegraph Building, with the Belgrade Theatre.