Sequins is one of the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland’s new productions – a hip hop and Congolese Luba dance theatre solo choreographed and performed by Edinburgh-based Belgian artist of Congolese descent Kalubi Mukengela-Jacoby. It is set to the iconic voice of the BBC broadcaster and author Ian McMillan, reading our recently commissioned sequence of 10 rapping poems, entitled Sequins of Poems to Dance To, as well as the soundscape of Robert Wills.

Selected as part of Edinburgh Festival Fringe Springboard‘25, Sequins is amongst a few new works in this programme curated by a panel of artists currently working in the dance sector. Kalubi’s solo is thus showing alongside works by other Edinburgh-based emerging artists and recent graduates working in theatre, dance and physical theatre. The programme is produced by our academic partners at Edinburgh College.

Tickets from £12 (Concessions £9, as well as Fringe Friends) are available for two Sequins performances as part of Springboard’25 showcase over three days: 20, 21 and 23 August 2025 7pm at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Venue 446 in Edinburgh College’s PASS Theatre – a state-of-the-art performance space. Located on Granton Campus, 350 West Granton Road Edinburgh EH5 1QE, it also has excellent public transport access to and from the city centre. 

We started sowing the seeds of Sequins back in 2022 when we issued an open call for the new Traditional Dance Residency through the ongoing partnership between the Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland and Dance Base – Scotland’s national centre for dance. Kalubi Mukengela–Jacoby was selected for this new residency which took place at our partner’s beautiful studios in Edinburgh from 13 to 17 March 2023. It was where Kalubi delved into her Congolese heritage to research, codify and develop the traditional Luba and Kuba dances of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which fed into her choreography of Sequins a few years later.

In addition, back in 2022 we approached Ian McMillan to become our Pomegranates Festival 2023 poet-in-residence – an author of Scottish heritage and Barnsley-based BBC broadcaster. The residency culminated into the special festival commission entitled Sequins of Poems to Dance To – not one but a sequence of 10 new poems by Ian. We gathered them into a new booklet and started to explore them in the festival finale choreographed by Kemono L. Riot.

Fast forward to Pomegranates Festival 2025 when Ian’s Sequins booklet and his iconic voice, reading the 10 poems, provided the fertile ground for Kalubi to continue her Congolese Luba and hip hop exploration. This sprouted in the new Sequins solo show as a curtain-raiser of the festival finale Hidden Faces and now as part of Springboard’25 at Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2025 – fusing Kalubi’s fun folk and hip hop dance with Ian’s funky rhythms and rhymes.

It was in August 2022 when we launched our #traddance campaign highlighting the contribution of trad dance artists in the programmes of the Edinburgh’s summer festivals. We hand-picked just over 10 shows with trad dance roots.

In 2023 we curated a selection of over 20 shows at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe alone, including our own sold-out four-star production Thistles and Sunflowers. It featured a stellar troupe of 17 performers from the lands of thistles and sunflowers who came together to mark the first appearance as a vocalist on an Edinburgh stage of the Bulgarian folk singer-songwriter Angela Rodel, also the winner of the International Booker Prize 2023 for translation. Click on the link below to watch the recording of this unique ‘sonic translation’ of trad dance and music and unravel ‘Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares’.

In 2024 we continued with our #traddance campaign on a whole new level with our first-of-its-kind Traditional Dance Criticism Course, led by dance writer and editor Róisín O’Brien and supported by dance scholar and editor Wendy Timmons, which resulted in 15 reviews of shows with trad dance roots across the Edinburgh’s summer festivals we hand-picked to be published on our new platform https://www.tdfs.org/reviews/. 

One of the reviews by Catherine Coutts was of our Traditional Dance Forum of Scotland production as another sold-out show Stones are Alive. Choreographed and performed by Vassia Bouchagiar-Walker as part of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, Stones are Alive accompanied the Living Stone project by Mairi Campbell – an exhibition of drawings, stones and stories, as well as a music theatre under the same title which went on to win an Edinburgh Festival Fringe First award presented by The Scotsman, in recognition of outstanding new writing premiered at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

From Thistles and Sunflowers at Fringe 2023 to Stones are Alive at Fringe 2024 and Sequins at Fringe 2025, we will continue to contribute to the production, celebration and appreciation of the diverse traditional dance forms practised in Scotland we feel so passionate about and the intangible cultural heritage they embody.