everything that rises must dance is a dance project celebrating female movement and the way women have danced throughout history. The piece is created with 100 to 200 women reproducing the minute movements of daily life while weaving in fragments of folk dance from around the world. The spectacle sets expressive, physical action to an evolving sonic score.

“We wanted to create a living archive of contemporary female movement and to celebrate its history and future. It’s a political gesture, an anthropological exercise and an attempt to locate the individual within the collective. When 200 women occupy a space we begin to ask – how do the gestures we make express our identity? Is movement – non-verbal communication – a hidden code to understand a culture, a society, our ancestry or our future? Quite apart from the larger political themes, the piece is a joyous communion, the creation of a new ritual.” Sasha Milavic Davies and Lucy Railton

Produced by Complicité
First presented as part of Dance Umbrella 2018

We partnered with ResCen, Middlesex University to create an online movement archive of all the filmed sequences from each iteration of this project. Explore the online archive here.


Created by
Sasha Milavic Davies & Lucy Railton

Choreographed by
Sasha Milavic Davies

Composed by
Lucy Railton

Choreographic consultant
Frauke Requardt

Cast 2020 - online version Covid 

Associate choreographers
Antigone Avdi, Jennifer Irons, Camilla Isola, Claudia Palazzo.

Cast 2018

Dance Captains
Antigone Avdi, Makiko Aoyama, Amanda Dufour, Valentina Formenti, Jennifer Irons, Camilla Isola, Ciara Lynch, Gabrielle Nimo, Claudia Palazzo and Inês Pinheiro

Guest Artists 2018
Noora Kela from Shobana Jeyasingh, Ceyda Tanc, Charlotte Vincent, Marie Gabrielle Rotie, Jamila Johnson-Small, Vanessa Fenton, Manuela Benini

Guest Artists R&D 2017
Liz Aggiss, Avatâra Ayuso, Kamala Devam, Rosemary Lee, Jamila Johnson-Small, Marie Gabrielle Rotie, Hagit Yakira