For the Olympics Opening Ceremony I was cast as a flying dementor, and performed in the ‘nightmare’ scene which was in the Swing Out Sister section. This section included hundreds of nurses and NHS staff, and was a celebration of the Uk’s health system. They wheeled out hundreds of beds with light up covers, and spelled out ‘GOSH’ and NHS. A child actor then id filmed reading from a book under the covers, and various evil characters come out to scare the children. The dementor team consisted mostly of trained dancers and acrobats who tapdanced across the stage scaring the nurses and children. Our team developed our own movement vocabularly on spinning harness, which allowed us to pirouette at rapid speeds and perform allsorts of twists and turn combinations whilst flying above the beds. The winch system was computerised to take us up down and across, up to heights of 15-20 metres. At the end of our section of choreography, the Mary Poppins characters were flown in from the roof, and scare away all the bad guys, whereupon the scene changes and the children and nurses dance happily together, before the final bedtime scene.

In the week of the Olympics Opening Ceremony, we had several dress rehearsals with live audience. By the end of the show I had performed in front of a total of about 300,000 people, plus the television audience of millions! The thrill of being part of such a significant event, and working with such brilliant professionals is something I’ll always treasure.