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The Scooter Ballet is a piece of balletic choreography for large groups of people – anything from 10 to a few hundred – using street scooters, wheelchairs and mobility scooters.

We were commissioned by Emma Dolman at the Cornerstone Arts Centre in Didcot, Oxfordshire, to create an outdoor version of the Scooter Ballet in June 2010.

Children and wheelchair users are often left out of many kinds of dance work. But with this project they are at an advantage, since most children can use a street scooter extremely proficiently and many wheelchair users can grasp a wide range of balletic, sweeping moves with just a little practice. Only on wheels can you recreate the kind of gliding moves you see in ice dance that on land are so fantastic to watch.

There are several different ways we can create a scooter ballet: for Cornerstone, we rehearsed with a group of local young adults and wheelchair users for six weeks, running up to 3 performances in the precinct outside the theatre.

But we’re also interested in creating more immediate versions of the ballet – working with a group for a week during the school holidays then performing the ballet at the end of the week, or recruiting interested volunteers at a festival and rehearsing them for a day or a morning, and performing a piece in the evening.

We can also just turn up with a small group of pre-rehearsed dancers/scooterists, and deliver a number of performances for your festival, or event, or street parade, or we can create a bespoke ballet for your particular venue – we can even tailor it to the geography of your town!

So if you’re interested in either booking a scooter project or participating in one, get in touch with our producer Emma Dolman – emma@slotmachinetheatre.com.