Mercurial Dance

Creating outdoor adventure games with a digital dance twist

Mercurial Dance is founded and led by Artistic Director Oliver Scott. We create distinctive performance and produce in-depth participatory experiences in the heart of communities which reaches thousands of people every year. Combining dance with a range of other artforms, the organisations’ work is articulated through three strands: large scale site-specific works, education and small scale touring pieces. 

Mercurial Dance and sister Charity Mercurial Arts, work across the Midlands bringing participants of all ages & backgrounds into active engagement with the arts. The organisations’ work reaches c.4,500 people a year & unites dance with other artforms to offer ambitious participatory projects & public performances. Our work has included a series of past participatory performances, installations and interactive projections, both outdoors and in unusual spaces. Mercurial have also produced several indoor works including touring work to libraries, and a major commission from Coventry Great Places to create Retold (a site-specific event in the Foyer of Coventry Evening Telegraph building in partnership with the Belgrade Theatre), outdoor work with The City Breathes, as well as creating short dance animation film Uplift premiering at Dance Anime international festival of animated dance in France. Mercurial Arts have most recently been focused on producing digital projects alongside dance, including being recently commissioned by Coventry City of Culture with new digital dance project Digi Dance exploring health and wellbeing of communities as an arts-activism project, and also producing our latest project supported by Arts Council England Fame Game a new immersive gaming experience.

Oliver is an active advocate for dance/the arts, and is on the committee group for Dance Hub Birmingham.  

Current Outdoor Touring Work Includes:

NEW FOR 2025

All I Need Is A Sign (Working Title) is an arts activism piece that seeks to bring a change to the high and rising levels of mental health conditions in young people: creating work that seeks to re-address the ways young people regain positive mental health by connecting them to the power of dance, movement and embodiment. 

It is a live outdoor arts performance that integrates choreography and sign spinning with activist messaging: a poetry of single phrases that counterpoints and underpins the piece, making visible inner thoughts of our characters and their relationships. This will be as a c.15 min sited performance and walkabout performance as a lead in/lead out. The piece highlights, how and what we communicate…  [and omit]   …deeply affect ourselves, and our relationships within the places we live in. 

Sign Spinning,  a festival creative Wayfinding offer. Our dancers will engage and direct audiences around a festival geography as a walk about or at key sights with sign spinning, using signs holding your festival identity and messaging. Research has shown Sign Spinning at events offers a 90%
message retention post event compared to traditional event marketing, and a 5 fold increase in footfall of new audiences into venues. Mercurial Dance hold sole licence, as the only company in the UK with rights to offer Sign Spinning, and are part of a global community of spinners.