In partnership with the International Agatha Christie Festival Dance in Devon host a family friendly tea-dance style event with live music and dancing as part of the bi-annual festival in Torbay. Debuting in 2017 ‘Come, Dance With Me’ returned in 2019 and back for a third time this year!

Come Dance With Me 2021 was commissioned by IACF via The Linbury Trust.

Returning to the Festival for the 3rd time, we hosted an intergenerational tea dance event with live music and dancing, celebrating Agatha Christie’s love of dance and sense of adventure. We were delighted to be entertained by The Drat Pack for an afternoon of live music and social dancing at this celebratory event in Torquay!

We brought together a fabulous community cast who entertained our guests with a 30 minute performance inspired by Agatha’s sense of curiosity and adventures into wild swimming, dancing, music and rollerskating. You can watch their performance here.

This year’s event was dedicated to our dear friend and dancer, Elizabeth.

Alongside the event, we connected with our Torbay based care homes to bring them Agatha inspired dance and music performances in their gardens and through the windows. To find out more about this go to our Arts on Call project page. We then created a video of the community performance from the Come Dance with Me event and sent it to them to watch and join in with and feel a part of the activity.

Come, Dance With Me 2019… a family-friendly community dance and music event building on the success of Come, Dance With Me 2017.

Dance in Devon hosted an afternoon of performances, live music and dancing at this celebratory event in the beautiful surroundings of the Spanish Barn, Torre Abbey. Joined by critically acclaimed, Impermanence Dance Theatre and local performers aged 9-90 who entertained us with episodes of a specially created performance. Moments of tension and suspension, hints of crime thriller and cyanide….all wrapped up in family friendly social event.

Impermanence worked with a diverse community cast aged from 9-90 over 2 weekends leading up to the event to create a number of performance interventions to share at Come, Dance with Me 2019. We did a Q&A with Impermanence so you can find out more about the company and why joined us on this project.

We were also delighted to once again be entertained by the fabulous Drat Pack who provided funky tunes for us all to dance away to.
Commissioned by International Agatha Christie Festival and supported by Arts Council England.

To celebrate the International Agatha Christie Festival 2017 Dance in Devon was commissioned to make a contemporary performance, inviting young and old to come together in Torbay to create a new dance piece for the festival. With choreographer Richard Chappell, the new company known as The Agatha’s, each with a story to share, created a new performance. The dancers from Torbay, aged between 12 – 94 years old were inspired by Agatha Christie’s book ‘Come, tell me how you live now’, and Agatha’s strong love of dance and music.

The Agatha’s shared their moving performance as part of Dance in Devon’s Tea Dance at Torre Abbey on the 17th September 2017 at Spanish Barn to close the bi annual festival. The tea dance saw big band The Drat Pack set the scene for traditional social dances and Sue Smith led young and old through different dance styles.

17 dancers participated in the project and we saw 120 people attend the tea Dance.

The Agatha’s reunited to share their performance at Dance in Time in November 2017.

Artists: Richard Chappell, Tamsin Bone, Sue Smith, Rosie Perdikeas, Anne George, Cally Warman, The Drat Pack
Supported by The International Agatha Christie Festival, Torre Abbey and South Devon College.

Photographs by Sally Wawman / My Little Eye Photography 2017 and Dan Martin 2019.