Through my role as a theatre reviewer and content creator, I end up hearing about various theatre companies that are creating something unique in the industry and dare to push the boundaries of what theatre can be. When an email about the Edinburgh Fringe-bound ‘I Made You A Mixtape’ dropped into my inbox, fusing the Meisner acting technique with dance theatre, I immediately knew I wanted to hear more about the concept from Response Theatre Company. For those unfamiliar, the Meisner technique was founded by Sanford Meisner in the 1930s and encourages actors to be present and reactive in the moment, instead of focusing on a plan on their lines. I recently had the opportunity to ask show creator and choreographer Christie Lee Manning some questions about the finer details of ‘I Made You A Mixtape’ and where the inspiration came from.
What can you tell me about the origins of Response Theatre Company?
Response Theatre Company was born out of my experience working in the Meisner technique with Impulse Company under the leadership of Scott Williams. As a professional dancer, I’d spent years in and out of acting training, but Meisner was the first time acting felt truly alive to me; instinctive, present, emotionally honest, and deeply human. I immediately became obsessed with the idea of translating that same level of impulsiveness into movement and dance.
After graduating from the course in 2020 and spending the following years experimenting with the work, I officially began developing Response Movement Method in 2022, which is a performance method where the music becomes our scene partner and choreography becomes our text. The results were unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Artists became more emotionally available, spontaneous, genuinely individual, and fully connected to both themselves and their audience.
Response Theatre Company was then created as the home for that work, as a space dedicated to developing movement-led theatre that prioritizes presence, emotional truth, and human connection over perfection or aesthetics alone. ‘I Made You a Mixtape’ is the company’s first full-scale production and the first major public test of the method on an audience level.
What inspired you to create shows based around the Response Movement Method, which combines the Meisner acting technique and movement theatre?
Honestly, it came from feeling like something was missing in dance performance for a very long time. I grew up in a generation where technical excellence and aesthetics became the priority, and whilst that created incredibly skilled and athletic performers, I often felt we were losing spontaneity, emotional truth, and genuine human connection in the process.
Then I discovered Meisner training, and for the first time, theatre felt the way I imagined it would feel when I was a child wanting to become an actress: alive, instinctive, unpredictable, and deeply connected to the present moment. I became obsessed with the idea that dancers deserved to understand that same experience.
What inspired me to create work using the Response Movement Method was seeing the transformation it had on artists first. After three years of experimental workshops in London, New York, Vancouver, and Leeds, performers consistently described the work as life-changing. They were moving with more freedom, vulnerability, individuality, and emotional honesty than I’d ever seen in traditional dance training environments.
Eventually I reached a point where I thought: if this work is having such a profound impact on performers, could an audience experience it too? That became the birth of the company’s first production.
‘I Made You A Mixtape’ is described as “a love letter to growing up, growing apart, and the friends who made us who we are”. How are you authentically representing friendships on stage through dance theatre?
One of the reasons friendships feel so authentic in ‘I Made You a Mixtape’ is because we’re not asking the performers to “pretend” to have chemistry or manufacture emotion on command. Through the Response Movement Method, they’re genuinely responding to one another, the music, and the given circumstances in real time.
Every night, the performers are given different circumstances on stage: who’s secretly heartbroken, who’s leaving tomorrow, who’s fallen in love, who feels abandoned, who’s trying desperately to hold together, etc. Because there’s no dialogue, all of that has to play out physically in the way they move, listen, see one another, celebrate, withdraw, and everything in between.
What’s beautiful is that friendship often exists in the smallest details: an eye contact across the room, someone handing you a drink, the way people collapse onto each other laughing, the feeling of wanting one more moment before life changes forever. Dance theatre allows us to magnify those emotional undercurrents without needing words.
The other thing that makes the relationships feel authentic is that the cast genuinely care for one another. The method requires a huge amount of trust, vulnerability, and presence, so over time the performers naturally build incredibly strong emotional connections. Audiences can sense when something is truthfully lived rather than carefully performed, and I think that’s why people often describe the show as feeling deeply nostalgic or emotionally personal to them.
With the show set in a 1990s college dorm room, how are you bringing the spirit of the decade to each performance?
The 90s setting is incredibly important to the emotional heartbeat of the show because it represents a time before so much of modern life became filtered through screens, algorithms, and constant digital distraction. There was a rawness and presence to human connection then, that I think many of us deeply miss.
We bring the spirit of the decade into the performance through everything from the music and costumes to the physical environment itself: cassette tapes, old school camcorders, board games, beer pong and plastic cups, our favourite CDs & DVDs, the return of Hubba Bubba and Dr. Pepper, and of course, our track list.
But more importantly, we try to capture the feeling of the 90s, the aliveness of it. The experience of being fully present in a room together without phones documenting every moment. The excitement of hearing a favourite song come on at a party. The awkwardness, intimacy, and emotional intensity of growing up before social media taught us to constantly filter ourselves.
The soundtrack plays a huge role in that too. Music has this incredible ability to transport us emotionally, and many of the tracks instantly pull audiences back into very specific memories, relationships, and chapters of their own lives. That emotional time travel sits right at the core of this production.
How did you go about choosing a track list for the show?
A lot of the soundtrack came directly from my own experience growing up in the 90s and early 2000s. I wanted songs that immediately transported people back in time, to hopefully some of their fondest and freest memories. They’re not necessarily the most obvious “greatest hits,” but tracks that make your body remember something before your brain does: a bedroom, a friend group, your first kiss, a school dance, your first breakup, a road trip, that moment where you felt completely alive.
We also needed a huge range of emotional textures. Some songs create celebration, some create intimacy, and some create loneliness, yearning, rebellion, silliness, heartbreak, and freedom. Because there’s no spoken dialogue, the music becomes the emotional architecture of the piece.
At the same time, I was very aware that we weren’t building a concert or a jukebox musical. I didn’t want audiences simply waiting for the next recognizable hit. The songs had to serve the emotional truth of the room and create space for the performers to genuinely respond rather than simply “perform to” the audience.
What are you most excited about, taking the show to Edinburgh this year?
I think I’m most excited by the possibility of putting this work in front of completely new audiences every single night and seeing how people respond to it! Because the show is built on spontaneity and truthful response, every audience contributes to that experience. Edinburgh feels like the perfect environment for that because you’re performing for people from all over the world, with different relationships to nostalgia, music, theatre, dance, and human connection. I’m really excited to see what resonates universally and what surprises us.
I’m also excited because this feels like a huge moment not just for the show, but for the company and the method itself. Response Theatre Company is the UK’s first Meisner-based movement theatre company, so taking ‘I Made You a Mixtape’ to Edinburgh feels like the first major public step in introducing audiences to an entirely different way of experiencing dance and movement performance.
And there’s something very profound about bringing a show like this to a festival that in itself is chaotic, overwhelming, emotional, daring, purely present, and absolutely life-altering. It feels like the perfect environment for this production to become fully alive.
Catch ‘I Made You A Mixtape’ at the 2026 festival
It is evident how passionate Christie is about the performance method and the opportunities it brings to dance theatre. The show also sounds incredibly nostalgic and there is clearly a lot of care and detail going into recreating the ambiance of the 90s. ‘I Made You A Mixtape’ is based at Big at theSpaceTriplex (venue 38) from 7th – 29th August (not 16th and 23rd). Performances start at 19:00 (50 minutes), with the show on sale via the EdFringe website now.
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