This week’s Dance First Member Spotlight is from UK-based Lorca Simons, creator of the Live Wire & Wingspan interpretations of 5Rhythms Ritual Theatre.

“I want to feel that we can touch each other through the screen towards a new kind of intimacy. Listening with the ear of the heart, seeing with the eye of the heart, speaking from the voice of the heart through the screens that we share. Let’s find our way into this landscape of creativity and possibility together.” – Lorca.

An eruption of soul straight from the heart
Fueling the spirit & casting edges wide
The magic of theatre begins here…

Introducing Wingspan

Come spread your wings, free your mind, expand your imagination, magnify your curiosity, and illuminate your breath in the beat. Awaken and sharpen those places in yourself that need a rewire, recharge, a realigning back to what is most original and true.

We will meet you here.

WINGSPAN is a physically-based movement theatre lab. We dance deep. We write, utilizing the poetry of the body as our springboard for theatrical expression. We illuminate language, uncover gestures and free the mind through our 5Rhythms practice. We turn our suffering into art and art into awareness, expanding into an ensemble of limitless possibilities.

An intimate sliver of the poetic landscape at the root and heart of our 5Rhythms practice.

In response to Gabrielle Roth’s investigation into what it means to be an authentic human being, Live Wire 5Rhythms Theater is dedicated to creating physical theatre that is both interactive and transformative. Lorca offers labs rooted in a visionary and rigorous technique for people to become true “athletes of the heart.”

Lorca Simons is dedicated to the creation of physical theatre that is both interactive and transformative. She was born and raised in Texas, where she grew up in her father’s experimental theatre company Hip Pocket Theatre. Lorca is now the producing artistic director of the company. She is a graduate of The University of North Carolina School of the Arts theatre conservatory and educated in both experimental and traditional theatre. In New York City, she blazed through productions from Off-Broadway to fringe, television, and film.

Lorca followed her instincts to the unique directing vibration known as Gabrielle Roth, and a 19-year creative collaboration bloomed. Lorca studied and trained with Gabrielle from the mid-’90s and became co-founder and co-director of 5RT, the experimental theatre wing of the 5Rhythms world collaborating on numerous original productions, workshops, and ritual theatre explorations. Most recently, Lorca staged and performed in the ensemble “Love Letters to a Raven” at Hip Pocket, dedicated to Gabrielle and her father, Johnny Simons.

Lorca is dedicated to exploring both the performing and visual arts, awakening each individual’s unique creative potential through the vast landscape of the heart. She actively creates theatre internationally through a series of LIVE WIRE Ritual Theatre Labs: Breath in Motion, Roots, On the Verge, Electric Landscapes, WingSpan, Silhouette, and Soul Threading.

In the Zoom room, Lorca offers intimate 1:1 On-Line sessions; soulfully stripped-down poetic investigations threading story, shape & breath. This year also marks the beginning of a series of On-Line Live Wire Lab investigations titled Listening Faces: Cradling Light, Resilience, Hot Box, Gather, & Whispers of Silver.

Lorca is committed to scattering the seeds of this transformative process, “delivering one’s self back to the artistic nature of the body, sculpting spirit into shape, soul into story, dancing mind into the wind and tracing the heart home.”

“I believe in the healing power of theatre. I believe in a theatre of heart, one that feeds and fuels the soul. A theatre that brings change, mirroring landscapes lost or left behind, one that exposes life from the depths of its core. One that expands imagination through curiosity, breath, physical gesture, and space. From this place of truth, ritual springs into authentic action, and anything is possible.” – Lorca.

“Lorca is a force of nurture. In the body of a practiced shapeshifter with a heart the size of Texas, the mind of a stage director, the soul of an orchestrator, and the spirit of a creative catalyst. She believes in the power of Yes. Gabrielle entrusted her with the continuation of her 5Rhythms Ritual Theater Vision. Live Wire was born to keep that legacy in motion”. – Martha Peabody

Learn more about Lorca Simons and 5Rhythms Ritual Theatre at www.LorcaSimons.com