Colliding Lines pioneer innovative, cross-disciplinary performance that explores the fringes of dance, music, spoken word, interactive theatre and live film. Our productions are live entities that evolve across time as performer and project develop; we find joy in producing work which takes creative risks, challenging both artist and audience to go further.

Artist Residencies & Mentoring

Each year we open our Cambridge studio to a small cohort of residencies for practitioners whose work resists easy categorisation. Over two to four weeks, residents are given uninterrupted time to develop a fragment of performance, a sound installation, or a moving-image score. We provide rehearsal space, access to our modest equipment library — including contact microphones, portable projectors, and a four-channel mixer — and regular dramaturgical conversations with the Colliding Lines core team. The residency culminates in an informal sharing for an invited audience, after which the work may be considered for future inclusion in one of our productions.

Alongside residencies, we run a one-to-one mentoring programme for early-career artists based in the East of England. Mentoring relationships typically last six months and focus on the practicalities of producing experimental, interdisciplinary work outside mainstream funding structures — from budgeting for site-specific logistics to documenting fragile, one-off performances. Past mentees have gone on to present work at festivals in Norwich, London, and Rotterdam, and several have returned as collaborators on Colliding Lines productions.

We also offer occasional group labs, where up to eight artists explore a shared provocation. Recent lab themes have included "distance and proximity in immersive storytelling", "the afterlives of performance objects", and "scoring movement for non-musicians". These intensive weekends prioritise process over product, and we deliberately avoid recording the sessions so that participants can take risks without the pressure of a permanent trace.

Sound Design & Live Film

Sound in Colliding Lines productions is never an accompaniment but an active participant — a material to be stretched, layered, and fed back into itself. We frequently work with found objects as instruments, attaching contact microphones to floors, windows, and even the audience's chairs, so that the architecture of the venue becomes part of the score. Musicians are asked to perform alongside dancers rather than for them, and much of the audio in Time Now For Ghosts, for example, is generated live from the audience's movements via pressure pads and infrared sensors.

Our approach to live film is similarly tactile. Rather than relying on pre-edited video, we use two or three projectors operated by performers in real time, mixing between analog transparencies, digital loops, and live camera feeds. A hand held over a lens becomes a dissolve; a sheet of tracing paper becomes a screen; a torch beam becomes a travelling matte. This means the visual element of a performance is as volatile and unrepeatable as the movement or the spoken word, and each night's imagery is unique to that particular room and that particular audience.

We are particularly interested in the point where sound and image begin to interfere with one another. In our work with feedback systems, for instance, the volume of a room's audio can directly affect the brightness of a projection, or the frequency of a loop can alter the speed of a video sequence. These causal loops create moments of genuine unpredictability, and we design our productions to accommodate and even celebrate that instability.

Site-Responsive & Public Engagement

Many Colliding Lines productions begin not with a script or a score but with a building. We have made work in a deconsecrated chapel, a disused Victorian swimming pool, a working boatyard, and a forest clearing near Ely. Each site suggests its own choreography: the echo of a stone vault becomes a rhythmic constraint; the slippery tiles of an empty pool become a floor score for dancer and audience alike; the movement of water against a hull becomes a bass line. Before any rehearsal, we spend days simply listening to and walking through the space, mapping its acoustics, its sightlines, and its hidden corners.

Public engagement is not an add-on but part of the creative process itself. We hold open rehearsals where passers-by can enter, observe, and sometimes join in a simple movement or vocal exercise. For Tall Tales Lab(yrinth), members of the public were invited to contribute their own short stories, which were then transformed by our artists into micro-performances hidden throughout the maze. We also run free "make your own instrument" workshops for families, using found objects and simple circuitry to build contact microphones and resonant boards.

• Open rehearsals and work-in-progress showings
• Community story-collection projects feeding into productions
• Family workshops on sound-making and projection mapping
• Audio-described performances and relaxed sessions for neurodivergent audiences

We are committed to keeping a proportion of every project's activity free at the point of access, and we work with local community groups to ensure that our site-responsive work is not only seen but also shaped by the people who know those places best.

Archive, Publications & Recordings

Because our live performances are often ephemeral and site-specific, we place great importance on the traces they leave behind. Each production is documented through a combination of multi-channel audio recordings, photographs taken by invited visual artists, and written reflections from both performers and audience members. These materials are gathered into a growing digital archive, extracts from which are occasionally released as limited-edition CDs, cassettes, or risograph-printed booklets.

In 2021 we launched a small imprint, Colliding Lines Editions, to publish the sound works and texts that emerge from our performances. Releases so far include a three-track EP of generative loops taken from Time Now For Ghosts, a bilingual poetry pamphlet from Tall Tales Lab(yrinth), and a hand-bound score book for one of our site-responsive works in a former swimming pool. Each physical edition is produced in small runs of between fifty and two hundred copies, and includes a download code for high-resolution audio where relevant.

We also maintain a public online archive of selected performance documentation, available free of charge for research and teaching purposes. Whenever possible, we include the raw, unedited field recordings from our site visits, so that listeners can hear the acoustic environments that shaped each piece. This archive is not a substitute for the live event, but we hope it offers a useful point of entry for those who were unable to attend.