Shotput’s new dance-theatre production, Totentanz (meaning ‘dance of death’), wants to confront our oddly contemporary taboos around the subject. In this immersive and intimate duet, dark humour, music and dance are an attempt to engage with death. Instead of fearing it, Shotput ask, ‘what if we celebrated it?’ 

‘In recent years particularly, fear of death, fear of killing, has kept us boxed into our little squares,’ say creators and performers Lucy Ireland and Jim Manganello by email. ‘As a culture, we’ve become peculiarly bad at dealing with death. We fetishise youth. We tear down old things. Totentanz is our antidote to all that. Here we use death not as a moment of severance but of connection.’

The performance will also feature a photographic exhibition, displayed in the venue before and after this live show. Members of communities around Scotland were invited to create their own images of death and commemorations of those who are now gone: another way to connect with the living. 

‘These past few years we’ve asked ourselves what really matters to us about dance, about theatre. The answer that returns again and again is sharing a space with people right now. It must be live; which is ironic for this “dance of death.”’ 

Totentanz will tour Scotland until Sunday 15 October.