contemporary dance
judith.flanders
The first time you see a Shechter piece, you feel it, literally as well as figuratively: percussive is a mild word for his forceful choreography, the stamping, churning, yearning of his sweeping shapes and rhythms. Percussive is the music, too (Shechter played drums in a rock band), which he co-writes, and it is played at volumes that make it vibrate through the theatre.Percussive, too, is his view of the world. Not for Shechter polite abstraction, or even angst-filled explorations of his own psychodramas. His interests turn outwards, to the world around him, and his works are explosive Read more ...
Ismene Brown
William Forsythe and Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker in a week - it has to be Sadler’s Wells, the theatre to sample some of the world’s best dance stuff. De Keersmaeker’s Rosas are briefly here to take part in Sadler’s "Sampled", a new thread of summer performances surrounding a single famous piece with chat, film, interactivity and other related things.Forsythe’s equally brief company visit last week was a sampling too, the major work being a medley of chunks. Dance is always most illuminating when you can find contrasts, and to hold the laddish playfulness of the American’s work in mind when Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Victims driven to death by the mob, women and men violently rutting in animal costumes, a black comedy about a snatched baby, a naked man dancing alone in his own fantasy - many and varied are the images in the nearly 200 danceworks created to the notorious Rite of Spring since its premiere exactly a century ago. Nothing created in performance art in the 100 years since has had so decisive an aftermath as this seismic work. Nothing has liberated creators from rules quite as emphatically as the uncategorisable theatre piece put before shocked audiences in Paris and London in the late Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Music is the food of dance - music as either an emotional language to speak back to, or an environment to set a mood or find associations in. The former is highly demanding, and Henri Oguike and Richard Alston are two who are clinging to the wreckage of British contemporary dance as art, not theatre. To see them on consecutive nights is to be reminded how ambitiously contemporary dance can aim, when the imagination reaches with a limited body language to try to link into a parallel world of utterly different definitions.I try to think what good dance feels like to watch - and I say, “feels Read more ...
james.woodall
Batsheva Dance Company is reaching its half-century, which makes it, as one of the world’s leading dance brands, not quite as old – or as young – as Israel, but Martha Graham helped launch it several years before the 1967 Six Day War. An international mix, it is in fact two companies, the senior one and the Ensemble, currently touring Britain and made up of youngsters who might or might not graduate to the main, Tel Aviv-based troupe. Ohad Naharin has been in charge since 1990, which was also when the junior fraction was created.Naharin’s choreography is inventive, funny, self-interrogative, Read more ...
Matthew Paluch
The Jasmin Vardimon Company bring their latest creation, FREEDOM, to Sadler’s Wells this week for two nights only. The work is best described as a collection of vignettes (supposedly) discussing the subject of freedom, and any conflicting conditions. The programme literature confirms that Vardimon is assessing “political systems, social conditions and personal philosophies” within the piece – which is seriously fighting talk that wasn’t necessarily backed up.The work starts well with a diversely textured set (by Guy Bar-Amotz and Vardimon) suggesting a natural locale, all tactical green moss Read more ...
judith.flanders
Well, if De Keersmaeker made us work hard for our enlightenment earlier in the week, we more than get our reward with her triumphant, astonishing Cesena in the second part of her double-programme designed for the Avignon Festival.Both pieces are built around the form of 14th-century polyphony sung in the south, known today as the ars subtilior, the subtle art. While in En Atendant De Keersmaeker focused on the structure of the music, in Cesena she, together with Björn Schmelzer, founder of graindelavoix, a collective for musicians with an interest in physical theatre, concentrates on its Read more ...
judith.flanders
No one ever accused of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker of thinking small. Or not thinking, for that matter. Her international career began with a bang, when with only her second work she created Fase, Four Movements to the Music of Steve Reich. And Reich’s music, filled with repetitive figures, harmonic rhythm and canons, is not a million miles – even if it’s 600 years – away from the ars subtilior of Avignon, De Keersmaeker’s new musical focus.A type of 14th-century polyphony, the songs of this mannerist style are highly complex technically: difficult to perform, they are more like 20th-century Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Imagine that Rodin’s Thinker gets bored with sitting, head-on-hand, contemplating the folly of humankind and, springing to life, descends from his lofty perch above The Gates of Hell. Having been immobile for a century or more, he is extremely stiff and needs to limber up: cue for some first-rate body popping interspersed with the kind of heroic poses usually reserved for life drawing classes. This surreal scenario provides a glimpse of the contrasting ideas and impulses informing Russell Maliphant’s latest work. In The Rodin Project, images from the sculptor’s drawings and bronzes are Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Waves of modern dance history beat upon the shore this week with Rambert at Sadler’s Wells offering four works going back nearly 40 years, and Michael Clark’s newest Britdance creation at the Barbican. The hip people will be at the Barbican, of course, of which more further down. But if you think Clark is a shock jock, you must be as middle-aged as he is - just turned 50 he has, the man with the child in his eyes and nappy pin in his ear. Shocks, by their nature, don't last. Other things matter, like freshness, the capacity always to be new.At Rambert’s four-bill it’s the American veterans Read more ...