Meet Roseanna Anderson and Joshua Ben-Tovim, co-founders of dance company IMPERMANENCE at The Mount Without.
We moved to Bristol in 2014, we had a three-year-old and had recently been to perform at Circomedia. We’d also been to Mayfest, which was amazing and they had these incredible pastries from Hart’s bakery at one of the events! We thought, ‘Wow, these audiences are super receptive and really open, and the food is great.’ So we moved here, first of all living at Kings Weston House with 20 other people. Some of the things we’ve been doing ever since then include hosting a monthly cabaret lunch for people over 65 – we’ve just got back from one, actually.
The name IMPERMANENCE is a way of emphasising the ‘liveness’ of performance – a moment in time. In our culture, there’s so much ‘stuff ’ and we consume media input from so many different sources, so we’re putting a little circle around that notion of live performance as a really special experience between audiences and performers. No show will ever happen again in exactly the same way. It has an impermanent nature.
Eight years ago we were part of a bid to save Jacobs Wells Baths [which was a former centre for dance in the city]. That fell through after a lot of work and remained derelict, but Trinity Community Arts is now re-energising that project. Then the church (which is now called The Mount Without) became available, and Norman Routledge – who was our landlord at Kings Weston House, where we’d been doing a lot of dance and hosting shows – was up for taking on the project. The building didn’t even have a roof! That was five years ago. During the pandemic, Norman put a new roof on, and since then we’ve been building up the dance programme and working out our partnership with him.
The Mount Without has an in-house events team that does weddings and lots of other great stuff. Now that IMPERMANENCE has raised enough money to build 200 beautiful red velvet seats and a big sprung floor stage, it feels like we’ve crossed the threshold and can really call the building a new home for dance in Bristol – which is something the city hasn’t had for decades. Audiences now have somewhere to come regularly – there will be a pulse to dance programming in the city. We’re going to be presenting a different touring show every month, with the runs getting longer as we go, giving a platform to both national and international artists.
We’re also going to present works-in-progress, so there are opportunities for local dance artists to share work at an earlier stage and be in dialogue with audiences. We’re looking at how we can offer training, classes and workshops, we feel so strongly that all young people should get a chance to dance, and the last 13 years has seen the loss of so much infrastructure for that.
Lots of amazing dancers have come out of Bristol, trained here, or went to school in the city. Many who we’ve spoken to said that they’d love to come back to Bristol to dance, but there’s just not enough here for them, so we’ve got to try and do something about that. Though we have been holding this project, it’s been a massive collaboration with so many people who have helped – it takes a village! We’re so grateful to and humbled by all the people who visited The Mount Without in our opening week; the audience are the power and it is them who will enable this project to fly.
When we want to feel inspired, we’ll head up to Cabot Tower on Brandon Hill for the views. Or down by the big bridges that cross the Severn to Wales, and along the coast way towards Burnham, which feels like a really powerful place to tune into to the big river and all of its history.
We really admire Doug Francisco and the Invisible Circus crew. They’ve contributed so much to the whole cultural feel of Bristol for decades – and, of course, they recently lost their city-centre space. They’re forever trying to make amazing, improbable things happen around Bristol, with the spirit of excitement and entertainment, and finding other ways to live in the world and the city. They’ve been celebrating a decade of The Loco Klub too, so we’re hoping that their audience will keep growing there.
If we could invite anyone, dead or alive, to a dinner party… It would be Cary Grant, who we recently discovered was from Bristol and [German dancer and choreographer] Pina Bausch, and ask them to perform something together!
In the short-term, our hope is that we can have a regular audience every month here, with a run of really incredible, exciting shows, and get to know the people who are coming, and also work out how to get people along who might not have encountered dance before. Then we hope to make bigger shows that can run for two or three weeks. The Mount Without has been a gathering place for nearly 1,000 years, and the way that it’s been decked out now, plus the people that we’re working with, make it feel like there’s every every chance of it being one of the most exciting venues for dance in the country.
Visit impermanence.co.uk for details of upcoming shows at The Mount Without. IMPERMANENCE’s Spring/Summer 2025 season runs from March to July, with an incredible lineup of choreographers presenting world-class dance shows.
