Shovel Dance Collective

The nine members of Shovel Dance Collective are united by a passion for the beauty, force and political charge of traditional music. Together their practice has emerged as a patchwork of fragments, traditional material sewn together and embroidered with their own ever deepening group improvisations, explorations of field recordings, and concrète style tape manipulation.

Their arrangements emphasise the inviting, hopeful and human qualities of folk, and they channel the joy and sadness held in these collaboratively-shaped words and melodies. Balancing dense orchestration with intense fragility, the patchwork is threaded with a deep sense of the way in which traditional music carries the voices of all those who have gone before, the oppressed and those who, through their labour, create the wealth of the world.