The first of Volcano’s new season of specially-commissioned original short performances in the Solo Duets for the Future series. Performed in the Seaside Gallery at Volcano Theatre.

RAIN POURS LIKE COFFEE DROPS is a meditation on an office world where it always rains, contemplating the workplace worries we face through a sensory movement experience. In the Letters to the Rain installation, a version of the work created specially for the Seaside Gallery, Billy Maxwell Taylor utilises writing, ambient scores and time-suspended movement to invite a moment of stillness, whilst coffee brews slowly.

Billy Maxwell Taylor is an interdisciplinary movement artist who strives to inspire stillness and sensation in a world on the move. As a choreographer and director, Billy has created work at Now & Then Theatre, Yos Theatre, Hijinx Theatre and National Dance Company Wales. As a performer, he has moved for Frantic Assembly, Motionhouse, Divadlo Continuo and Created a Monster Theatre.

Solo Duets for the Future is a series of short original performances for some of the many strange spaces within our labyrinth of a building in Swansea High Street. We wanted to make it possible for people to see unusual and interesting new work without the risk, ritual and expense of a whole night out at the theatre.

All of these pieces are around 30 minutes long, and have been crafted by one or two performers to make apt and surprising uses of cupboards, galleries, corridors, bars and even garages. You can catch them at lunchtime, just after work, or as a break from whatever else you are doing. It’s a chance to be surprised, entertained, energised, amused, infuriated, delighted, awakened, or baffled – for a short while in the course of an ordinary day in the life of the city.

The shows in this series are all very different – we’ve got robots, rain, rising sea levels and unaffordable homes, musical agony aunts, chocolate cake, and averted apocalypses. What connects these diverse works is that they all look towards the future – imagining new possibilities (or catastrophes) or exploring other ways of being.

Check out the other Solo Duets for the Future.