MOTIONHOUSE artistic director Kevin Finnan admits his children thought he'd lost the plot when they found him staring at a running tap.
In fact, he was, as he says, simply lost in the miracle which brings us water on demand - something we far too often take for granted.
And that's one of the inspirations for his latest show Scattered which the company bring to Chichester's Miner
va Theatre on February 4 and 5.
"You forget how fortunate we are in having water in our lives. It's a bit like the air that you breath. You forget about it - until you haven't got any!
"The idea of this show is to bring water to the front of people's minds.
"The show is a mixture of dance and film and action. We perform on a giant stage that has a huge curved wall, and we have projections onto that. We interact with the film so that we create an entire water world that we move through. You see water in many different facets and the way that we relate to it.
"It is meant to be thrilling and thought-provoking, but it is also important that it is entertaining.
"We have done a lot of work with the university (in Chichester) before. I have had a long association with some of the staff at Chichester and have been down to give lectures. I know them of old and they know my work.
"With the Minerva we have had long discussions with them.
"We had been talking about doing something with them, but they have got quite a tricky space in that a lot of it is very thrust, so we have been talking about how it might possibly work."
Kevin is one of the company's founders: "We have been going now for approaching 23 years. The idea was to try to create a type of work that really mixes forms. We really wanted to use dance, theatre and music, and we also wanted to use film, just as in this latest show which is really all about water and about our relationship to it.
"It surrounds us in different forms throughout our lives: in birth water ties us to life and on a more elemental scale, in ice, floods and tides, it can sweep our lives away.
"Scattered delves into the majesty and savagery of water, a fundamental force in our lives as seven dancers plunge into an ocean, wrestle a raging tide and slide on an avalanche to a frozen landscape of arctic beauty."
