The Invisible String
June 6-8, 2025
The Invisible String
June 6-7 @ 7pm
Ambo Dance Theatre is humbled to close their 2025-2026 season with The Invisible String, their professional company’s evening-length dance production inspired by Attachment Theory. Attachment Theory is a psychological framework that explains how our earliest relationships shape the way we connect with others throughout life. Through evocative choreography and emotionally resonant storytelling, the work explores the four primary attachment styles, uncovering the impact of formative childhood experiences on our mental health, communication, and sense of belonging. At its heart, The Invisible String is a testament to human resilience, emphasizing our capacity to heal from trauma and form meaningful, lasting connections.
The Invisible String Jr.
June 7-8 @ 2pm
The Invisible String Jr. is a family-friendly, sensory-friendly adaptation of Ambo Dance Theatre’s professional company production of The Invisible String. Inspired by and more closely based on the beloved children’s book "The Invisible String" by Patrice Karst, this inclusive version features performers of all ages and abilities from the Ambo Dance Theatre School program. Using accessible choreography and narrative, the piece explores themes of love, connection, and emotional resilience. The Invisible String Jr. invites audiences of all backgrounds to celebrate the invisible threads that bind us to the people we care about—no matter where they are.
Pricing:
$25.00 or pay what you can
About the Production Process
Our revised and restaged production of There Will Always be Strings is entitled The Invisible String. While revising this piece, we use a collaborative dancemaking process to integrate the individual backgrounds, experiences, and identities of the dancers to address the intersectionality of identity and mental health in relation to attachment theory. The professional company will partner with mental health organizations and professionals to integrate research on attachment and healing into the choreographic process and product. The Ambo Dance Theatre School and Pre-Professional Company will likewise engage with age-appropriate and developmentally-accessible mental health materials and literature centered on attachment as a driving place for movement creation.
As a company, we use choreography to touch on issues including (but not limited to) poverty, body image, trauma and attachment style, LGBTQ experiences, and colonialism. We recognize that our emphasis on activism must be handled sensitively to prevent retraumatization. This is part of why we work exclusively under a process-driven, collaborative model that allows for healthy and supportive expression of one’s experiences. Through our work, performers and viewers understand that dance holds power as a personal tool for emotional processing as well as an agent for connecting people in their shared humanity.
Our production of The Invisible Sting particularly centers on self-reflection and translating one's own experiences into movement. Movement is itself often used as a healing modality, so this production encourages dancers to go a step deeper, connecting brain and body by focusing their attention on their attachment style and the formative experiences that shaped it, to then translate that self-discovery to movement. We want to move the idea of attachment from being abstract and theory-oriented to being personal, connecting our attachment style and mental health to the intersections of our identity and identity-based experiences, so that each of our dancers can gain a better understanding of themselves through the creative process, while shedding light on universal truths in the process. For our dancers, the social change comes from the healing and self-awareness this process welcomes, while for audience members the social change comes from the invitation to see themselves in the work, and the destigmatization around topics such as identity, trauma, and mental health in general.
This choreographic work has been revised and reworked since its first performance. When this choreography was originally performed it was titled There Will Always Be Strings and was first performed in 2018. There Will Always Be Strings is an evening-length work that explores Attachment Theory, a psychological theory that identifies four attachment styles and explores their implications for how we build and sustain relationships in adulthood. This work addresses the role of childhood formative experiences and the ways in which our attachment style influence our mental health over our lifespan, while also emphasizing our capacity and power to heal from trauma. When re-staging this work, we are placing a more in-depth emphasis on the intersectionality of identity, attachment, and mental health.