Review: Dancing with the Orange Dog

Theatre in the Mill, Bradford

The 154 Collective, a group of artists from across the North who work in different disciplines coming together, reveal their latest piece of theatre work in Bradford. A story about stories, it is the sort of boundary-pushing work that Yorkshire is gaining a reputation for creating at the moment – and key venues such as Bradford’s Theatre in the Mill are the epicentre of this bold new movement.

Dan Mallaghan and Lucy Hind are the performers in this piece, playing a father and daughter at different stages in their lives. Mallaghan tells the stories of his life, his adventures with his dog, and he tells them to a video camera while his unborn daughter sleeps in her mother’s womb. When it is his daughter’s turn, she – Lucy Hind – retells those stories and some of her own, recording them now on an iPhone. She is recording the stories to pass on to her own children – and so the cycle continues. The lesson? Change all the technology you like, the things that bind us, like stories, are immutable. The medium might have changed but we will always have stories, just as we did when we sat around campfires outside caves to share them.

This special piece of work is revealing if only it shows a brilliant level of creativity sitting at the heart of Yorkshire’s cultural boom, it is also a deeply moving piece of art.

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