PRODUCING AND CURATING ALTERNATIVE WORDS, ALTERNATIVE ART AND ALTERNATIVE PERFORMANCE.

We are a live arts collective with a wide circle of collaborators, bringing to life the best performances for curious artists and curious audiences looking for more. We come from various artistic backgrounds and work beyond them, blending individual art forms to create something new.

What We Do

Colliding Lines produce high quality, cross-disciplinary live shows and projects that draw together artists from different fields, including dance, music, spoken word, interactive theatre and film. Together we publish, promote and curate new collaborations, taking joy in creative risks and producing work that matters. By working collectively, we create a space for artists to develop and innovate, exploring new ideas and unfamiliar territories together. The unifying characteristics of every Colliding Lines performance or project are that they are immersive, challenging, and unique.

Our live productions are major-scale projects developed between artist and producer. With a long history of delivering live events – from interactive film scores to festival stages to live installations – we curate each aspect of our programme and performance to a high standard, with special attention paid to the aesthetic quality of an event. We believe in the power of challenging situations to catalyse great performance and exciting art; the edge present in improvisation creates a friction between intention and action that surprises artists into producing unforeseen work. If it feels fresh and exciting for the performers, it feels fresh and exciting for the audience.

Colliding Lines also work as a publisher commissioning and promoting experimental literature, interactive art objects and collaborative live sessions on film and record. We sell bespoke, limited edition physical releases created by our artists for you, as well as a growing range of zines and music. We sell digital downloads of our favourite live recordings and studio sessions, available on our our online store page.

Our commitment is to making live art engaging for as wide an audience as possible. Good art is about inviting audiences in and creating immersive, emotionally resonant experiences that stay with you. Whether it’s music, dance, film, spoken word or all of the above, we want to share it with you.

Who We Are

Colliding Lines is a nonprofit organisation composed of international artists. A wide circle of collaborators make our work possible, from supporting artists to sound technicians, photographers and promoters.

The collective was founded by Wesley Freeman-Smith, is designed by Angharad Hengyu Owen, and developed conceptually from previous collective SHINDIG in collaboration with Abi Palmer.

Our Production Process

Every Colliding Lines production begins with a period of open, cross-disciplinary research. Artists from different fields spend time in shared studio space, testing ideas without a fixed outcome, allowing unexpected connections to emerge between movement, text, sound and image. We do not impose a single house style; instead, each project develops its own internal logic through dialogue, improvisation and structured experiment. Producers work closely with artists from the earliest stage, shaping budgets, timelines and technical requirements alongside creative decisions so that practical realities never arrive as an afterthought.

Development workshops are central to our method. A musician might respond to a dancer’s phrase, a writer might rework text in response to a lighting cue, and a filmmaker might cut footage live as a performance unfolds. These sessions are recorded, annotated and fed back into the next stage. We deliberately build in moments of public testing—scratch nights or open rehearsals—where an audience can see work in progress and offer structured responses. This process keeps our productions responsive rather than fixed, and it means that by the time a full piece reaches a festival stage or gallery space, it has already been challenged and refined many times over.

• Initial research and cross-disciplinary exchange
• Development workshops with embedded technical support
• Public scratch nights for early audience feedback
• Intensive final rehearsals with full production values
• Post-performance reflection and documentation

Live Formats and Sites

We work across a deliberately wide range of live formats because each format changes what an audience can see, hear and feel. Interactive film scores remain one of our signature forms: musicians and sound artists perform new compositions live to a film, often with the projection as a co-performer rather than a backdrop. The audience is seated in the same room as the performers, so the relationship between screen, sound and room acoustics becomes part of the work itself. In some versions, audience members are invited to influence the score through simple physical actions or vocal responses, never breaking the film’s atmosphere but adding a layer of shared agency.

Live installations occupy a different territory. Instead of a fixed start and end, these works unfold over several hours or days, allowing visitors to enter, leave and return at their own pace. Performers may be present with a structured score, or they may respond to the movement of the audience through the space. We have staged installations in galleries, warehouses, basements and outdoor squares, often using found objects, cheap materials and simple lighting to create immersive environments that do not depend on expensive technology. Festival stages remain a vital part of our calendar, where we compress longer works into focused sets and collaborate with other artists at short notice.

• Interactive film scores for cinemas and screening rooms
• Long-duration live installations in non-theatre spaces
• Festival stage sets with cross-disciplinary collaborations
• Site-specific one-off performances responding to place and history

Publishing and Documentation

Performance is ephemeral by nature, but we believe that the ideas, images and sounds generated through our work deserve a second life. We publish a range of materials alongside our live events, from small-run artist booklets and zines to digital recordings, video documentation and photographic essays. These publications are not simple souvenirs; they are co-created with the artists involved and often include scores, interviews, rehearsal notes and critical responses that open up the process behind the performance. We work with designers, printers and web developers who share our commitment to high visual standards and accessible distribution.

Our online archive functions as a growing repository of past projects, including full-length audio recordings, short films and written reflections from artists and audiences. We do not gate this material behind paywalls or registration walls, because we want anyone who saw a live event to be able to revisit it and anyone who missed it to understand what happened. We also collaborate with small independent publishers to release limited-edition objects—cassette tapes, annotated posters, hand-bound scores—that carry the tactile quality of a live encounter into a reader’s hands. Documentation is not an afterthought but a parallel creative practice within the collective.

Audience and Community

We do not think of audiences as passive receivers. Many of our performances include structured opportunities for participation, whether that means moving through an installation, answering a question during a film score, or joining a post-show conversation with the artists. We are interested in the moment when a spectator becomes a co-creator, and we design our work so that participation is always a genuine choice, never a forced activity. For those who prefer to watch quietly, that option remains fully available; the important thing is that the room holds different kinds of attention at once.

Alongside our public programme, we run a small but consistent strand of workshops and mentoring for early-career artists. These sessions focus on cross-disciplinary collaboration, production skills and the practical realities of making live art outside large institutions. We also offer relaxed performances with lower sound levels, dimmed lighting and freedom to move in and out, as well as audio description and captioning on selected events. Our ticketing is structured on a sliding scale wherever possible, and we offer free places to local residents and students for many of our neighbourhood projects, because we believe that financial barriers should never be the reason someone misses an unforgettable performance.

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