Last time around it was called The Afflicted and enjoyed a run at the 2019 Edinburgh fringe. Now the Groupwork show has been rebooted as The Hope River Girls and is looking bold and confident as it twirls its way towards the Edinburgh international children’s festival. There, it should entrance not only its target teenage market but anyone with a taste for off-centre dance theatre.
In a fictionalised version of a real incident, the setting is upstate New York where, in 2012, a case breaks out of mass psychogenic illness. Without obvious cause or connection, 24 girls in a rust-belt school are beset by a disorder that causes them to dance uncontrollably. [READ MORE]