Red Dive is a New York based team of choreographers and theatre artists concerned with rediscovering overlooked neighbourhoods and addressing marginalised social issues. Red Dive aims to demonstrate that a radical re-envisioning of how and where art is presented can have a significant impact on human and social issues and can engage wider audiences. Red Dive engages viewers in visceral, often physical ways and gives form to multiple points of view by seeking to redefine the relationship between artist and audience.

Community Engagement
The concept and role of citizenship is central to Red Dive’s programme. Community aspirations for future development and ideas about positive change can be limited by existing perceptions and prejudices about specific sites.

By exploring the untold histories, fears or biases of a place, Red Dive challenges audiences to expand their knowledge of their own communities and environments, whether in large urban centres or small towns. Audiences are encouraged to participate in journeys to explore these peripheral sites and issues. In this way, neighbourhoods, social issues and human experiences can be unearthed. Additionally, increased awareness and new and more inclusive perspectives can be generated.

Artistic Methodology
Red Dive seeks to invert the default characterisation of the performing arts: situations where passive audiences watch active performances in a theatre venue or an auditorium. By redefining the relationship between artist and audience, the group believes that intellectual and emotional barriers may be broken down and new community structures built. By asking audiences to become part of the performance piece, Red Dive breaks down the traditional audience passivity and creates a new media which engages artist and audience member in a dynamic relationship. Thus, Red Dive sees itself as creating a new artistic language as well as a forum for multiple points of view.

Process
Projects are initiated through a series of site visits, investigations, meetings and recorded documentary-style interviews with a wide range of people and organisations connected to a place. This part of the process can take between one week and six months. Once complete, Red Dive constructs a narrative relating to the place, which then forms the basis of the project.

The final event becomes a considered response to a particular site or location and may involve a number of different artists and performers across various artistic disciplines.

Artists are invited to collaborate in the creative process through informal networking or through a call for submissions. Red Dive then organises and facilitates the collaborative process, liases with outside organisations and choreographs the final event.

Projects/Events
Current projects include Peripheral City, a programme of activity developed in collaboration with members of the community, organisations and professional artists, to create events and guided tours which expand the audience’s perception and enjoyment of their environment.

Rediscovering the Gowanus Canal is a Peripheral City event which took place in Brooklyn in 2003. Red Dive invited members of the public to take an intimate journey along this neglected industrial waterway. An audio documentary of local stories, myths, dreams, hopes and fears told by local residents, business owners and environmentalists was amplified on the boat, and a succession of unexpected performances took place on bridges along the route. The journey represented the first experience of this historical estuary for many of the participants. To produce the event Red Dive worked in collaboration with local residents and groups, the Hackensack Riverkeeper, Inc. and the U.S Army Corps of Engineers.

City of Refuge (June 2004) was a walking tour guided by a procession of live musicians and storytellers through the lesser-known streets of Lower Manhattan’s Chinatown. Unlike conventional landmark tours City of Refuge visited peripheral sites, like the underside of the Manhattan Bridge. City of Refuge was developed in collaboration with multi-ethnic artists and community centres to explore timely themes of security and safety as experienced by Manhattan’s immigrants past and present.

www.reddive.freeservers.com