"1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms!"  is a pop-up performance that combines physical storytelling, dance and live music for ages 3+, featuring audience participation. This joyful, considerate and comedy-filled performance is an homage to the mushroom, to friendship and a hymn for hope. This performance tells the story of a landscape, treated poorly and almost abandoned, but not just yet, not by the mushrooms. Through ceilidh dancing, physical storytelling and Scottish traditional music, we show the underdog journey of three resilient mushrooms that not only survive but thrive, the only way they can, as a community. 

 

What begins as a misty melancholic tale quickly turns into a clownesque ceilidh, with a splat of slapstick. Live fiddle accompanies us on this journey, from sorrowful and lonely notes to a giddy, dance-inducing and positively jolly jig. By the end of this performance, the mushrooms, and the audience, can't help but dance and are invited to do just that, whether that be a finger, a foot, a hip and any bit in between, whether you're sat, standing, lying down or a bit of all three. The audience, the children and their families, can go wild, linking arms and spinning until their hair stands up on its ends, or they can just nod their heads and tap their heel like a merry little mushroom. In this participatory section that ends the performance, we want to make space for choices: for smaller/closer moments of dance between babies, toddlers and their carers as well as more collective circles of giddy skipping, stomping and swishing. The performance is a dance-inducing celebration of life, an invitation to care for the smaller pockets of the world, and an opportunity to hold hands and be together, because there can never be enough of those. We think the photos we have attached reflect this aim.

 

1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms! tells the epic tale of the tiny fungal communities that grow in littered roadside ditches in the peripheries of the world. To us, mushrooms embody the cruciality of community, and demonstrate resilience that spans centuries. Our starting point was 'The Mushroom at the End of the World' by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and how she describes the mushroom’s survival as fantastical and fabulous because “how else can we account for the fact that anything is alive in the mess we have made?”. We were curious as to how we could translate the complex ideas of collaborative survival, environmental issues, and interspecies care for a very young audience in a way that was accessible and playful yet not less meaningful.  We share artist Janice Pomer’s thinking that nature, just like dance, is a universal, and therefore accessible language, welcoming all and engaging with non-verbal audiences. We believe dance has an enormous amount to offer in ways of development of self, of understanding the world around us, and the intertwined relationship between the two. For children “to imagine themselves a pinecone, or grain of sand on the beach, to consider what it would be like to live in water, soil or sky” is a great practice of empathy, perspective and care for the world around us. In this performance, we challenge ourselves to create a story with “the landscape as the protagonist of an adventure” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing). 

 

This performance was made with fiddle-player Eilidh Inara and costume designer Kiera Saunders. It was originally commissioned by Imaginate and OneRen, supported by the Village Storytelling Centre, in 2025. We performed at 4 festivals over the summer: Paisley Book Festival, Pollok Kite Festival, Edinburgh International Children’s Festival’s family day (Imaginate) and Merchant City Festival’s family day. The costumes were recently exhibited at Odd Fabrication’s Wearable Art Show in East Sussex.