About THE HEAT

Inspired by Paula Rego’s Dog Woman paintings, THE HEAT by Becky Namgauds is a visceral dance theatre piece that fractures the expectations of the home as a place of comfort.

Set in a surreal domestic dreamscape where the familiar warps, something primal is seeping out — dark psyches uncoil, desires smolder, and absurdity slices through the ordinary. The domestic space becomes unstable — a place where comfort and confinement blur and where tension verges on erupting.

With wild hair, bared teeth and raw physicality, the performers conjure striking imagery that bring the audience on a journey through an unflinching portrait of the wild forces just beneath the surface.

Rebecca Namgauds is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in London, originally from the North of England. With over a decade of experience spanning choreography, performance, and visual art, she creates visceral, movement-driven works that explore themes of feminism, ecology and transformation. Drawing from her varied background in movement disciplines, her practice engages the body as a site of resistance, intimacy, and ritual, often in direct dialogue with nature and the elements.

Rebecca was a Time & Space commission artist at Sadler’s Wells for 2023/24 and continues to develop innovative dance-theatre projects. She has worked as an invited choreographer for Anjali Dance Company, collaborated with Paraorchestra and musician Liza Bec and choreographed a visual work for 12 Ensemble Orchestra’s tour of Metamorphosis. Alongside her artistic practice, she is a guest lecturer at London Contemporary Dance School and Trinity Laban MA programme.

Her independent works have toured internationally, premiering at major festivals and institutions including ‘Like Honey’ which was featured in the British Council Edinburgh Showcase 2019, and ‘Rodadoras’ (2018), an outdoor performance featuring women performing floor work in half a tonne of soil. Her solo ‘Exhibit F’ debuted at Dance Umbrella 2019, and she has since created original works for The Place (LCDS), Emergence and Centre for Advanced Training. Works for galleries include Walsall Art Gallery where she created an original performance for DanielSilver’s solo exhibition and more recently the V&A Friday Late: Diva.

Her latest work, THE HEAT, delves into themes of domesticity, the mundane, survival and endurance, channelling both urgency and raw physicality.

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