Image Credit: Taken by Tallulah and Mirabelle Haddon.

If you’ve ever wondered what might happen if contemporary dance, live cinema, sculpture, queer performance, mythology and a bucket of melting ice collided in the basement of a Victorian town hall, Mirabelle and Tallulah Haddon are about to show you.

Although their creative paths have unfolded in different directions, the sisters share an extraordinary origin story. Raised between South London and Suffolk in a home where artists, performers and experimental happenings were part of everyday life, they grew up believing there was never much difference between art and life. As Tallulah has reflected elsewhere, “The boundaries between performance and domestic space, between art and life have always been very blurred for me.” That spirit of curiosity, play and fearless experimentation continues to shape both of their practices today.

Mirabelle has quickly become one of the UK’s most exciting emerging dance artists, educators and performance makers. After training with Trinity Laban’s Centre for Advanced Training, the National Youth Dance Company, Rambert School and the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, they have developed a distinctive practice that explores Deaf identity, embodiment and communication beyond words. Whether performing with Candoco Dance Company or creating their own immersive works, Mirabelle’s choreography invites audiences to experience movement as a language of care, sensation and connection.

Tallulah, meanwhile, has built an impressive screen career spanning Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Kiss Me First, Taboo, The Last Duel and The Tattooist of Auschwitz. Yet acting is only one facet of their creative world. As a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and self-described “slug impersonator”, Tallulah creates performances where live video, sculpture, drag, installation and absurd humour collide in beautifully unpredictable ways. Their work embraces uncertainty, inviting audiences into strange, tactile worlds where bodies, objects and images become equal collaborators.

Now the sisters have brought those two artistic worlds together in Open your mouth, it’s snowing, a new work-in-progress premiering as part of Summer in The Ditch at Shoreditch Town Hall. Blending choreography, expanded cinema and live image-making, the performance transforms ice into both collaborator and storyteller, exploring pleasure, pain, memory and transformation through a surreal journey beneath the surface.

For Mirabelle, the collaboration draws upon a lifetime of shared experience. “Growing up as siblings knowing the intimate details of each other’s lives and psyches, the beautiful and the ugly, we are curious about how this intimacy can be injected into the worlds we create together.” Tallulah describes the emerging work as “a journey through a subterranean landscape toward something sacred,” while promising audiences “play, pastorality, tactility, exposure to the elements, pleasure, endurance. Bit of this bit of that.”

Ahead of their performance on Saturday 18 July at Shoreditch Town Hall, we caught up with Mirabelle and Tallulah to talk about sibling collaboration, melting worlds, experimental performance and the joy of making art together. Read on, then step into their wonderfully surreal universe for yourself.

Tell us about yourselves.

Mirabelle: Hi my name is Mirabelle I’m a dance artist, maker, performer and teacher. I work across contemporary dance, live art, community and play work.

Tallulah: I’m Tallulah, I’m an artist, performer and director. I work across live performance, expanded cinema and installation. Together we are making a work in progress called Open your mouth, it’s snowing, which started as thinking about merging two previous works of ours together. My work Scene 1, an expanded cinema performance working with live video and installation Mirabelle’s work In the melt, traces of disappearance, this research focuses on the material ice as a choreographic tool for performance making.

Mirabelle: In Open your mouth, it’s snowing, we have been working with the ice as a generative and restrictive material. Exploring the realities of making images with its ephemeral and contradictory qualities of pain, pleasure, friction and satisfaction. We are working with expanded cinema and live video to capture microscopic worlds within worlds, and experimenting with the painterly quality of projection through ice.

Image Credit: ‘Ice projection’ taken by Tallulah Haddon

How do you find it working as siblings and collaborators?

Mirabelle: This is the beginning of working together as collaborators. Growing up as siblings knowing the intimate details of each other’s lives and psyches, the beautiful and the ugly, we are curious about how this intimacy can be injected into the worlds we create together.

What was the starting point of this new work?

Tallulah: The title came first, and had been consciously and subconsciously informing the trajectory of this new world. I think it’s interesting how we are working with something that’s close to snow but not actually snow, working in the heat, working with the nostalgia of the cold, waiting for snow flakes to touch your tongue or the sweet taste of that brand of ice lolly that’s now discontinued. The act of patiently waiting for summer to come. What is beginning to emerge is a work which invites the audience to follow the group as they journey through a subterranean landscape toward something sacred.

What can audiences expect?

Tallulah: Play, pastorality, tactility, exposure to the elements, pleasure, endurance. Bit of this bit of that.

Image Credit: (hair pull) taken by Dre Spisto, Mirabelle Haddon, Joana Nastari, Tallulah Haddon and Kit Marshall.

What have you found pleasurable about working with the ice?

Mirabelle: I find exploring the qualities of the ice pleasurable, how it can be used to hold onto the body, to heal, but after some time the cold is unbearable and there is a murky point where pleasure turns to pain, I couldn’t tell you the location of its transformation.

Thinking about weather and weather systems, prophetic fallacy which creates atmosphere and tension. Weather and climate as collaborators.

What locations have you performed in before? Which was your favourite, most interesting or weirdest?

Tallulah: We have shown work in a disused morgue, carpark and a domestic house, with the last show we worked on together, I Left My Vibrator In A Cave. Adaptation becomes part of the process. Open your mouth, it’s snowing responds to the basement of Shoreditch Town Hall, adapting it’s disused derelict spaces into portals to a new, surreal landscape.

Tell us about some funny moments in rehearsals so far.

Mirabelle: Costume fittings. Sometimes finding the costumes is the most daunting part of making or is left last minute, but for this WIP we have had fun with it. We have tried lots of skins on…like kids in a fancy dress box. When we were agonising about what to wear, Tallulah left and came and came back into the rehearsal with only a hat, head torch and walking boots on which was hilarious.

Tallulah: Moments where the ice sort of said fuck you and would slip out of my hand or when Dre accidentally almost flooded the whole room with a simple tap of a fragile ice block…

Find Mirabelle at mirabellehaddon.org and on Insta @mirabellehaddon

Find Tallulah on Insta @tallulah_haddon

Mirabelle & Tallulah Haddon
Open your mouth, it’s snowing
Part of Summer in The Ditch
Shoreditch Town Hall
Saturday 18 July, 21:00

Tickets and info → shoreditchtownhall.com

Open your mouth, its snowing is performed and made in collaboration with Kit Marshall, Joana Nastari, Claudia Palazzo and Dre Spisto. Sound design and performance in collaboration with Nicol Parkinson.