Sing Child Sing explores how we carry the past within our bodies and what it takes to loosen its hold.
Rooted in autobiographical experience, Olivier award winning choreographer Botis Seva traces how abandonment, faith, and frustration become physically embedded, surfacing as both function and fracture.
How do we protect ourselves as we learn from the past, without living forever in its shadow?
Performed by Seva and created with Far From The Norm, this new solo work is an unfiltered exploration of healing, identity, and the invisible legacies passed from one generation to the next. Set within a shifting interior landscape, part room, part memory, animated by sound and light, Botis’ distinctive movement language, merging hip hop and contemporary practice, becomes a site of recalibration.
Sing Child Sing is a portrait of a man suspended between memory and possibility, anatomically rebuilding himself as he loosens the patterns that have shaped him.
Sing Child Sing is a co-production with Dance East, Kurtheater Baden, The Lowry, Sadler’s Wells, schrit_tmacher Festival (NL), Tanz Köln, Theater Rotterdam, Rum för Dans and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg.
Sing Child Sing is commissioned by the Carmen Mateu Young Artist European Award and
supported by Arts Council England.
Sing Child Sing is a work that has quietly existed within Botis Seva's creative practice for more than a decade. It has resurfaced through conversations, research and early explorations, only to be set aside as other works demanded his attention. While the timing was never quite right, the desire to create it never disappeared.
The journey towards Sing Child Sing began with Botis' early solo works, Place in Between (2013) and Virtue (2016). Created during the formative years of Far From The Norm, these intimate performances introduced themes of identity, faith, memory and belonging that would come to define his choreographic voice. As his practice evolved into increasingly collaborative work over the following decade, the ambition to return to the solo form remained.
After years of making work through the ensemble, Botis steps onto the stage alone. The questions that have long underpinned his choreography become deeply personal, embodied through his own history, faith and lived experience. It is his most exposed and vulnerable work to date.
Following a significant knee injury in 2024, the urgency to create this solo became impossible to ignore. Recovery transformed both the process and the purpose of the work, making this the moment to realise the piece that had waited so long to be made. Sing Child Sing is both a physical and emotional reckoning, a meditation on resilience, memory and healing and the culmination of a decade-long artistic journey that brings Botis' choreographic practice back to where it began: one body, one voice, one story.
The Team
Director & Choreographer: Botis Seva
Set & Costume Designer: Ryan Dawson-Laight
Composer: Torben Sylvest
Lighting Designer: Chris Burr & Tom Visser
Executive Producer: Lee Griffiths
Senior Production Manager: Andy Downie (Velocet)
Producer: Gabija Cepelyte
Strategic Associate: Sri Sarker
Rehearsal Directors: Victoria Shulungu & Jordan Douglas
Far From The Norm Dance Artist: Joshua Shanny Wynter
Touring Production Managers: Andrej Gubanov, Chris Burr, Seth Rook Williams
Associate Set Designer: Christophe Eynde
Costume construction: Kate Healy, Julie Sayers, Katie Vacara, Lou Petty, Hannah Trinkett
Mr Hope construction: Props by Eve
Set Build: Set Blue Scenery
Sound Design - Pär Carlsson
Musical contributions from: Clarissa Shulungu, Gamaliel Traynor, Jan Brzezinski
Additional voices from... The Seva Family, Victoria Shulungu, Jordan Douglas, Joshua Shanny-Wynter
Production Mental Health Support - Applause for Thought
Production Wellbeing Leads - Victoria Abbott and Wammi Amos for Applause for Thought
With thanks to Brui5er for his contribution during the R&D process.
Sing Child Sing premieres 10 & 11 November at Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg