We are Shaper/Caper
A multi-award-winning dance company and a registered charity, based in Dundee, Scotland.
Shaper/Caper is an independently led organisation based in Dundee developing the work of multi-award-winning choreographer, BBC Radio 2 Artist in Residence, and Clore fellow, Thomas Small. We were set up in 2015 and we are all about communities!
We won the Overall Winners Award at the Dundee & Angus Chamber of Commerce Awards 2023. We also won the Inspirational Work in Education and Community Outreach Award from One Dance UK in November 2020. In 2022 we were finalists for the Charity/Group Initiative Award from Proud Scotland and the Digital Citizen Award from the Scottish Charity Awards.
We have worked with over 59k children and young people over the last 7.5 years! We have a strong partnership with NHS Tayside delivering the Well Good project in 116 primary schools each year in Dundee, Perth & Kinross and Angus, for the past 7.5 years, reaching over 7000 children each year on this project alone. We also deliver the Dance for Parkinson’s project for the Dundee and Fife hubs, continuing the project that was developed by Dance Base and Scottish Ballet.
We were commissioned by V&A Dundee to choreograph a mass participation performance for the opening of V&A Dundee as part of the 3D Festival at Slessor Gardens. The show was performed for an audience of 10k people, and shown on BBC2. The show involved 500 young people dancing alongside 8 pro dancers and 3 dancers from Scottish Ballet.
Our critically acclaimed performance work, such as ‘Within This Dust’, a piece inspired by the events of 9/11, has toured extensively across the UK over the past 10 years, as well as internationally to North and South America across Europe. We were commissioned by Cumbernauld Theatre to create ‘Paper Moon’, a work for children under 5, which sold out every one of the 55 performances to date.
As part of Tommy’s role as BBC Radio 2 Artist in Residence, we’ve presented work outdoors to audiences of over 30k people.
Creating excellent art that connects with real people drives both him and the company to want to ensure that as many people as possible, despite their socio-economic backgrounds, race, and/or gender, can access high-quality arts for free. We really believe that the arts are an intrinsic part of achieving a cohesive society that can spark civic action for social change. During lockdown, we created and presented Children’s Capers, an online dance class and performance presented on Facebook Live every weekday morning at 10.30am. We presented 100 episodes of Children’s Capers and reached over 100k views so far.