About RESOLUTION 26: Room Dance Company, Kirstin Halliday and Lilah Bobak

Three people sitting, wearing white tops and short red skirts, stretching their legs and arms forward with fingers spread, caught amid a network of red and white strings cascading from above.

Room

Room explores birth through the lens of motherhood, inviting the audience into a process of re-birth and a return to the very first ‘room’ we all once inhabited. The performance unfolds with the rhythms of labour inside a monumental red-thread installation. As performers entangle, struggle, and emerge, the space transforms into a living symbol of the womb.

Inspired by a memory of a red dress passed from mother to daughter, Room weaves together threads of maternal memory and collective rebirth, asking how we might reconnect with the moment of our own beginning.

About room dance company

Room Dance Company is a London-based contemporary dance collective led by independent choreographers Xintian Zhao and Xinyi Du, with producer Hongrui Yao.

The company creates work inspired by the essential rhythms of life, exploring memory and the philosophy of the body through an interdisciplinary performance language. Their members have performed internationally at festivals and venues including the Edinburgh Fringe, Camden Fringe, The Place, and major theatres across China.

Recent works include Weaving Me, Weaving Mum (2025, Edinburgh Fringe, shortlisted for the IC Award), Room (2025), Cacti by Alexander Ekman (2025), and Streams of Yesterday (2024).

Instagram: @room_dancecompany

cast and creatives

Choreographers: Xintian Zhao, Xinyi Du

Dancers: Xintian Zhao, Wendie Hou

Producers: Hongrui Yao

Prop design: Yuqiu Wang

Sound design: Ruaridh Summer

Art consultant: Yachao Zhu

Cinematographers: Cong Le, Yuyan Zhang, Jiacheng Chen

Editor: Xintian Zhao

Special thanks: Siyuan Zhang

Two people caught in a prowling motion in a dark theatre setting, wearing skintight grey-and-white costumes with matching caps, makeup, and gloves tipped with long, spiky fingers, evoking lizard-like creatures.

Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1

Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards are an all-female species that live in the deserts of New Mexico. Notably, they reproduce without fertilisation, but still stimulate each other to bring on ovulation. Near the laying period, one lizard will mount another. This has earned the species the reputation of “lesbian lizards.” Dance Artist Kirstin Halliday’s Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1 is a dance-drama that reimagines this species as an all-lesbian fantasy world.

Co-choreographed with Aniela Piasecka and combining absurdist choreography with documentary style storytelling, Desert Grassland Whiptail Lizards: Act 1 is the first segment of a body of work that will culminate in a triptych, exploring the fetishization of lesbians and the active reconfiguration of the cisheteronormative male gaze.

About kirstin halliday

Kirstin Halliday (they/them) is a dance artist and performer based in Glasgow who has choreographed, facilitated and performed in diverse contexts including; visual arts, music videos, club nights and community dance workshops.

Grounded by their research background in Geography, their movement practice is motivated by the co-generative relation between moving bodies, social space, and interpersonal relations and identities. Their research at University of Glasgow and University of Iceland focused on emotional geographies, the geographies of the body, gender and movement. This research ignited questions relating to bodily agency, identity and resistance through movement, questions that drive their work to date, as they consider the dancing body as a site of queer potentiality and gender fluidity.

cast and creatives

Director and choreographer: Kirstin Halliday

Co-choreographer: Aniela Piasecka

Producer: Amy Lawrence and Kirstin Halliday

Costume and Make-up: Sgàire Wood

Sound: Char Bickley

Set: Molly M. Whawell

Dramaturge: Emma Lewis-Jones

PR Associate: Joy Parkinson

Mentorship: Eve Stainton and Lucy Suggate

Supported by: Creative Scotland, Take Me Somewhere, The Work Room and Tramway.

Blue-filtered image of two people wearing black tops, one also in grey tracksuit trousers, with one carrying the other on their shoulder and both holding a forward gaze.

remains still

With themes of longing, indulgence and intimacy, this work explores the interplay of music and movement, creating a sense of otherworldliness.

Dancers will explore their visceral reactions to the distorted, post-rock guitar music, following the droning intensity and curvatures of sound, feeding off costume design, movement and lighting within a performative setting.

A continuation of Lilah Bobak's costume design project at London Contemporary Dance School, titled entanglement, which integrated these abstract garments, tethering dancers together throughout the contemporary dance choreography, the piece involves multidisciplinary art forms, culminating in an experimental descent into orchestrated chaos.

About Lilah Bobak

Lilah Bobak is a multi-disciplinary artist originally from Los Angeles, now based in London with nineteen years classical training as a Contemporary Dancer, and a broad performance history spanning the US, UK and Europe. She holds BA with First Class Honours from London Contemporary Dance School (LCDS) (2025). She has worked with notable directors and choreographers in film and dance, including Matt Reeves, Ethan Colangelo, Peter Chu, Ekleido, Yuval Pick and Becky Namgauds. She is the bassist and vocalist in noise-rock band, green star.

These broad artistic endeavors all influence her hauntingly intimate and intense choreographic work and contemporary dance style.

Lilah Bobak is supported by The Place's Artist Development Propeller Programme for London Contemporary Dance School graduates.

cast and creatives

Dancers: Lilah Bobak, Benjo Aptroot, Elfin Bonome and Phoebe Woodthorpe

Musicians from the band Greenstar: Pedro Soler, Alberto DeTorre and Daniel Rowson

Costume design and creation: Lilah Bobak