Propel Dance, a brand-new professional all wheelchair-user dance company based in Birmingham concluded their short tour of The Snow Queen last night, bringing the run of the company’s first ever live performances to a hugely successful close.

The company secured investment from Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grants in October 2022 to pilot the tour to three venues in April. Led by an all-female leadership team, the company was instigated and founded by Helen Mason, a Birmingham-based Dance Artist with a track record of making dance for and with disabled people for over twenty years.

Propel Dance’s version of The Snow Queen is a captivating and enthralling dance production which focuses on the origins of the queen who brings endless winters. Brought to life by a talented company of professional wheelchair dancers, the production is a contemporary retelling through music and movement, based on the Hans Christian Anderson original story.

The Snow Queen visited Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham on Sunday 23 April, and the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton on Thursday 27 April.

The company is the first of its kind in the UK, and the five hand-picked wheelchair dancers alongside a professional wheelchair musician and composer rehearsed at Midlands Arts Centre (MAC), Sense TouchBase Pears and Elmhurst Ballet School in Birmingham for three weeks before taking the show out on tour in front of audiences.

The company features artists Joseph Powell-Main, Kat Ball, Lauren Russell, Ayuna Berbidaeva and Rebecca Fowler.

Propel Dance’s Artistic Director Helen Mason said, “It still shocks me that this is the first time this has been done. I created Propel Dance because there are so few professional opportunities for wheelchair dancers, and we wanted to be that change; to create something that enables progression and inspiration for the future generations. To have performed our first shows of The Snow Queen to sold-out theatres and enthusiastic audiences has been an unreal experience. What a way for the company to start! It has been an absolute joy to witness audience members who knew nothing about us before now come and see what it’s all about.

"Our society is obsessed with what a dancer looks like, so we wanted to change that up. Not only for the dancers themselves and to create more jobs and a route into professional dance, but also for the audiences to see that they don’t have to look this certain way to be able to take part in this brilliant art form. We’ve challenged that stereotype of what society thinks a dancer’s body ‘should’ look like and  we’ve created more diversity on our theatre stages in the process. We particularly chose venues that were able to take out some of their formal seating so that there were more spaces available for wheelchair users to come along. The dancers performed and portrayed the characters exquisitely throughout the run of shows, and I am so excited to see what might happen next for Propel Dance."

For more information, visit: propeldance.uk