Plastic Swan

Plastic Swan is an interactive solo dance installation, choreographed by Sam Quy. A fun-loving Beatrix Potter style swan is in search of food along the Thames. To her demise, she naturally mistakes plastic for foodstuff. This dramatized intervention addresses the challenges of plastic pollution in our contemporary waterways and offers a radical new take on the dying swan.

Sam Quy is a freelance community dance artist, choreographer, boater and wildlife conservation activist. She is a child scholar of Royal Academy of Dancing, London Contemporary, and Musical Theatre, graduating with MA Dance distinction and Specialist Dip.Arte flamenco. Sam danced professionally from the age of eleven in many theatrical contexts and over the past decade in productions at the Royal Opera House. She is also the flamenco dancer in BBC Strictly Come Dancing.

With such a diverse background has given Sam a highly unusual perspective on the world around her. Sam sees dance in everything, everywhere. While this makes for terrible pies, it also makes for innovative choreography.

In Plastic Swan incredible continuities are found between flamenco dance and the natural movements of swans. Flamenco enters the unfamiliar territory of storytelling. Vocabulary from other dance forms along with theatrical tools of gesture, mime, costume and mask synergise in an attempt to interpret the swan and her message truthfully.

Over 90 percent of our seabirds have plastic in their stomachs. They mistake it for food. Animals can climb inside plastic bags and suffocate, or eat them and choke. Birds can eat plastic and starve. Plastic pollution affects us all, worldwide. One plastic bottle can take 400 years to decompose.