Founded in 2002, Instant Dissidence is a Leeds-based Dance Theatre company that creates work exuberating theatrical tension, romantic visual designs and intricately choreographed movement. It distorts reality with a dreamlike logic and it seduces audiences with beautiful images that have a dark depth.

The company’s vision is the investigation of the human condition, and it makes use of performativity as a ‘safe’ space of play from where to explore the most uncomfortable parts of our humanity.

One of the strands of the work of the company is small-scale work emphasising choreography as autobiography. This is intimate work, taking the audience on a journey inside a person. The company stages ‘real life’ stories by bringing the ‘real life’ protagonists of those stories into the performance arena. For this area of work, the company works both with trained and untrained dancers and performers.

A second strand relates to the staging of larger choreographic productions, where the emphasis is in facilitating the devising of a common narrative by a larger group of dancers/physical performers.

Under the artistic direction of Rita Marcalo (winner of a Lisa Ullman Award), the company has developed a unique aesthetic drawing on a blend of raw physicality, strong contemporary dance technique, theatrical narrative and highly visual imagery. Over the past 10 years Marcalo has developed a career both as a performer and a choreographer. She has danced with companies such as Carol Brown Dances, Lisbon Dance Company, Emilyn Claid, and I.O.U. Theatre, and she features in the recently made dance film 'Remember to Forget', choreographed by Emilyn Claid and directed by Lucy Baldwin. Her choreographic work has been commissioned by Leeds University, Ferens Arts Gallery, York St. John University, Community Dance York, Yorkshire Dance, and it has been toured in the UK and abroad (Portugal and Belgium). Marcalo currently features in the book 'Performing Nature. Explorations in Ecology and the Arts'. (2006) by Gabriella Giannachi and Nigel Stewart (eds).

Instant Dissidence is regularly supported by Yorkshire Dance and York St. John University, and funded by the Arts Council, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the New Deal (Department for Work and Pensions).