Without Walls
Activate's Role: Artistic Directorate
- Location: National project
- Date: Activate joined the Without Walls Artistic Directorate in 2025.
What is Without Walls?
Without Walls is a network of festivals committed to working together to jointly commission and support new outdoor work by UK artists. By collaborating as festivals, artists benefit from a series of presentation opportunities across one ‘season’, enabling new work to develop and gain the momentum needed to sustain viable touring.
As part of the Without Walls Artistic Directorate, Activate play a key role in providing Research and Development (R&D) funding and commissions for a broad range of artists including those who identify as being deaf, disabled, neurodivergent and from the Global Majority, all of whom are underrepresented in our sector.
The Artistic Directorate / commissioning festivals are Brighton Festival, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, Stockton International Riverside Festival, Birmingham Weekender, Certain Blacks – Ensemble Festival (London), Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (London), An Indian Summer Festival (Leicester) and Freedom Festival (Hull) and Activate/Inside Out Dorset.
From dance to clowning, afrobeats to durational installation, audiences can expect a rich mix of styles and genres that celebrate the vibrancy of modern outdoor arts. The work that Activate/Inside Out Dorset has commissioned – which will feature in our 2027 Inside Out Dorset festival – is listed below.
ElevateHer - Daughters of the Wire
ElevateHer is a joyous all female wire walking show, played out across three multi level interconnecting wires telling the stories of six performers through music, spoken word and movement. Celebrating female camaraderie and sisterhood.
Daughters of the Wire are a female led company with a strong belief in female empowerment, community and equality. Supporting Female artists, mothers and neurodivergent women to have a strong voice in the worlds of circus and outdoor arts.
STICK AND STONE - Ferdinando + Bernstein
We have lost 50% of all wild things. What are we going to do? Communicating through physical comedy and visual imagery, Ferdinando + Bernstein face the climate breakdown with the joy of idiocy and play. They invite all citizens of this place to discover the simplicity of a stick and stone. Feel the rough bark in your hand and let it be a guide back to the woods. Hold the stone, it is the mountain and the shoreline. Doom scrolling is over. Ferdinando + Bernstein are two people who have enjoyed the carefree nature of comedy and improvisation, mainly physical. They write words to inspire their actions. Some get used in their projects. They both live in woods and gardens, nurturing nature connectedness. They draw, they create prints, they sing sometimes.
Quingo - Emergency Exit Arts
Quingo is a 5 metre tall mechanical puppet, co-designed with learning disabled (LD) adults and children. An awe-inspiring, 5 metre tall, motorised giant, vibrating with a built-in sound system and dancing to the beat of their own drum – which hosts a DJ(s). They have 4 interactive faces, one of which is interchangeable and responds to the people and places they visit.
Founded in 1980, Emergency Exit Arts (EEA) began as an artists’ collective born out of a desire to radically transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
CHAIR! - Geraldine Pilgrim Company
CHAIR! celebrates the act of sitting down. When did our public seating disappear and what would happen if we brought it back? Set in a dreamlike world, CHAIR! imagines how we could once again have public spaces that care. Where people can sit uninterrupted, ready to relax, work, remember and have time and place to dream. This performance features everyday and surreal objects and activities – and chairs – and shows that everyone has the right to sit down.
Geraldine Pilgrim is a site-specific director/designer and installation artist. She is known for socially engaged participatory performances creating contemporary dialogues with occupied and empty buildings, landscapes and historic houses. She uses their architecture and history (both imagined and real) as inspiration and narrative.
Tender Exchange - Radical Ritual
Tender Exchange invites you to pause for a moment of connection in the midst of a busy world. Whisper something that matters to you into a carved wooden heart – a hope, a truth, a memory, or a thought you want held – and pass it to someone you trust. The heart beats gently in your hands, and as more voices gather inside it, the rhythm shifts, signalling that it is full and ready to return.
Radical Ritual creates inclusive folk artworks that reweave connection in a fragmented world, inviting people to gather, be seen and heard, and build deeper relationships with one another and the places they share.
Garbh - Shyam Dattani & Mira Salat
Garbh (womb) is an innovative, in-the-round, outdoor dance work that reimagines ancient Gujarati Folk Dance ‘Garba’, giving voice to this underrepresented ancestral form through contemporary choreography and immersive design. Honouring divine feminine energy ‘Shakti’, Garbh embodies the source of life, force of transformation, and essence of motherhood. The ensemble, orbiting a lit, central clay lantern that signifies life within the womb, explores themes of community, creation, resilience, and unity, transforming public spaces into vibrant sites of shared celebration and embodied ritual.
Shyam Dattani is a London-based mover and maker whose practice is grounded by strong technique, training and choreographic thinking in Kathak, while training professionally with Urja Desai Thakore, Pagrav Dance Co. His work is grounded by collectivity, care and the community, reflecting the cultural significance of being a diasporically-trained dance artist and is informed by his queer experience.
Mira Salat is a choreographer, performer, and educator with over 18 years of experience in South Asian dance. Her work blends the refined intricacies of classical Kathak with the rhythmic vitality of folk traditions, creating a movement language that is both grounded in heritage and responsive to the present.
Activate will be working with Garbh choregraphers, Shyam and Mira on an engagement programme that result in their performance being enriched with community performers and offering an additional audience experience.
