1, 2, 3 resilient mushrooms! is an homage to the mushroom 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.

 

It 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.

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This performance tells the epic tale of the tiny fungal communities that grow in littered roadside ditches, in waste, in millimetre-wide cracks, in the peripheries of the world. To us, the mushroom's mycelium, this genius and inspiring underground system of communication, embodies collaborative survival and ideas of interdependent care. Mushrooms show the cruciality of community, and demonstrate resilience that spans centuries. The performance begins with two lonely mushrooms roaming an empty and poorly treated landscape, searching for a companion, because, after all, the cold, the rain and the dark don't feel too bad when you've got a friend sitting next to you. The live fiddle accompanies this journey.

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Our starting point for this project 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 disaster and interspecies care for a very young audience in a way that was intriguing, accessible and somehow playful yet not less meaningful.  We share writer/artist Janice Pomer’s thinking that nature, just like dance, is a universal, and therefore accessible language, welcoming those for who English isn’t their first language and engaging with non-verbal participants/audiences. Although we don’t believe in reducing children/family theatre to an educational tool, we believe it has an enormous amount to offer in ways of development of self, of understanding the world around us, and the 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 “landscape as the protagonist of an adventure” (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing).

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When developing this performance, we shared ideas of what the most joyful, the most celebratory, the most hopeful dance might look like. Again and again, we came back to memories of social dancing at school and ceilidhs in community halls. Our contagious joy, giddiness, sense of togetherness and sweaty exhaustion, paired with our refusal to stop, are overwhelmingly vivid in these memories. It’s these sensations we want to share with the audience through our performance.  In our experience of ceilidh dancing, the most definable characteristic isn't the steps themselves but the sense of togetherness, belonging and joy that the dance brings. We want to make space for choices: for smaller/closer moments of dance between babies, toddlers and their carers as well as circles of giddy skipping, stomping and swishing. We believe this structure will wholeheartedly welcome people/children with ASN and/or sensory sensibilities who may find the organised dancing and traditional audience participation overwhelming and unaccessible. After all, ceilidh is a gathering and everyone is invited to ours.

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Performances:

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1, 2, 3 Resilient Mushrooms ! has been performed at Paisley Book Festival, Pollok Kite Festival, and Edinburgh International Children's Festival family day (all in 2025). ​