If you ever thought artists like Kraftwerk were the first to embrace the machine aesthetic in their dance and music, this curiosity might interest you.

This fascinating dance piece uses steps that directly mimic the sounds and actions of mill machines. Although these steps were danced a century ago by female cotton mill workers, they seem strangely ahead of their time, forerunners of today’s machine-inspired dance music. You can think of this dance as steam-powered Kraftwerk – or techno 80 years before Detroit.

We’ll be performing The Machinery live in the Central Library, Birmingham UK, 13:30 prompt on Saturday 18 September
, admission free
. For the British Science Festival 2010.

Yep, I did say clog dancing.

This dance piece uses a combination of live, solo clog dancing, video loops and audio which plays at overwhelming levels, revealing a danceform that was directly inspired by the machines of the industrial revolution. With performer Caroline Radcliffe.

Lancashire clog is a deeply unfashionable dance form, often misrepresented as a pastoral dance – a sub-genre of Morris dancing. If you’re put off by the faux nostalgia of the Sunday afternoon clog dancing brigade, see us take Lancashire clog back to its genuine roots, as we evoke the sights and sounds of the industrial cotton machinery that inspired it. I’ll stick my neck out and say Lancashire clog is a pre-electronic forerunner of the industrially-inspired music of Kraftwerk and the noise music of bands such as Coil.