Who We are

Rough & Tumble Productions is an interdisciplinary ensemble dedicated to presenting original, honest, highly-physical performances.

We aim to give voice to emotions and experiences that are often suppressed in the dominant American culture, including grief, ambiguous loss, shame, sexuality, rage, and longing.

Our performances, workshops, and advocacy initiatives invite others into a space of awareness and acceptance.  Through ensemble collaboration and the power of the performer-audience connection we offer a pathway to integrating these vulnerable, essential parts of ourselves and our human experience.

What We're Doing

Riding the momentum of Good Grief!'s recent tour to Baltimore, we are gearing up to remount Good Grief! back in Philly in summer 2023 and develop and present a new work for kids for this year's Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

The grief of children is often overlooked. Because of this, as adults we don't know how to process, be with, and accept our grief.  

We are interested in the emotional experience of children, as well as how to develop this work with and for them.To accomplish this, we plan to create story-sharing workshops with youth in Philadelphia. We want to transform the images, stories, and characters they come up with into the exciting world of Magic Trash Day.

Our Goal

With your help we can meet our fundraising goal of $10,000 to develop and present our new kids' show, Magic Trash Day, for the 2023 Cannonball/Philadelphia Fringe Festival and to remount Good Grief! in Philadelphia this summer. These funds will pay for venue fees, rehearsal spaces, technicians, design, marketing and print materials, and our creator-performers and director fees.

More about our new shows: Magic Trash Day  and Good Grief!

Magic Trash Day is a dance-theater/clown immersive performance. It will be presented in Cannonball Festival 2023 in Liberty Lands Ampitheater.

The story follows a kid in Philadelphia who finds a piece of magic trash amongst the rubble. This magic trash helps them move through and metabolize their feelings around loss, longing, and grief. This piece is in collaboration with dancer and trash artist Mehgan Abdel-Moneim. It’s also part of the Theater for Youth track of the Cannonball Festival of Philadelphia Fringe.  Stay tuned for performance dates of Magic Trash Day in September!

Keep your eyes peel for tickets to our homecoming Philly performance of Good Grief! 

GOOD GRIEF! is an up-close-and-(hyper)personal mobilization of the joy, companionship, pleasure, rage, and vulnerability in grief. This 60-minute, deeply heartfelt dance-clown-theater-burlesque duet performance lays bare how pain is so close to pleasure, loss so close to  love, and grief an absurd mixed up process of clinging tight & letting go. Moving through despair towards a love large enough to carry both grief and celebration in life together as one, Good Grief! invites the jostling loose and letting out of laughter, tears, and anything else that might be shed, lost, or set free.

Created by Lillian Ransijn and Dylan Smythe, and directed by Francesca Montanile Lyons, Good Grief! is an amalgamation of artistic parts developed over the past five years. Previous works include: Rough & Tumble, Show & Tell in Philadelphia’s SoLOwfest (2017), Rough & Tumble as part of the ONE Movement Project Atlanta-San Diego-Philadelphia (2017-18), Good Grief!, an Artist-in-Residence workshop showing, Urban Movement Arts (2020), and Rough and Tumble: Pickled Peaches and Herring in Cannonball Festival in Philadelphia Fringe (2022).