October 2010
Daniel Leveille Danse at The Place
‘The 60-minute piece is most effective when the dancers are still or moving slowly. Marc Parent’s amber lighting gives their bodies a sculptural nobility, which is reinforced by the grounded choreography.’
Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Nearly Ninety at Barbican Theatre
‘The mood keeps changing. Cunningham’s dances can look like wildlife films, the dancers as creatures caught going about their business.’
Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Nearly Ninety at Barbican Theatre
‘Of course Cunningham was a hugely important figure, his dances and his ideas about dancing defining a grand area of 20th-century choreography. But this late Nearly Ninety, with its déjà-vu and unpruned air, seems to me to be more pietism than memorial to a gr…
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Iphigenie auf Tauris at Sadler's Wells
‘You can understand why she wanted this pivotal work to be more widely seen: it is a huge undertaking to stage, but its value lies not only in its own fierce beauty and rich allusiveness but also in the insight it gives into the development of a woman whose visi…
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Iphigenie auf Tauris at Sadler's Wells
‘The most obvious difference with her later style, which borders on the surreal, is that Iphigenie auf Tauris is much more dancerly, and more literally danced.’
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Iphigenie auf Tauris at Sadler's Wells
‘One of the most dramatic moments comes when Bausch actually pauses both the music and the dance. It’s the scene where Iphigenia has been ordered to kill Orestes, not yet knowing he is her brother, and it’s handled by Bausch with surreal, haunting po…
Review: Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Nearly Ninety at Barbican Theatre
Reviewed: 26 October 2010 *Nearly Ninety**, Merce Cunningham’s* final work, premiered in New York on his 90th birthday, just months before his death. Dancers in the company who were trained personally by … Continue Reading
Review: Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Iphigenie auf Tauris at Sadler's Wells
Reviewed: 27 October 2010 It is both a coincidence and a paradox that the companies of Merce Cunningham and Pina Bausch have opened shows in London on consecutive nights this week. How lucky are we, by the way?… Continue Reading
News: New Chair for IDMN
Joe Bates is to be the new Chair of the Independent Dance Managers Network, succeeding Gwen Van Spijk who has led the group for the last five years. He says: “I am really excited about driving the network … Continue Reading
Jonathan Burrows & Chrysa Parkinson in Dogheart at The Place
‘Their new work Dogheart rambles more than those earlier duets, with some of the charm but much less focus.’
Jonathan Burrows & Matteo Fargion in Cheap Lecture / The Cow Piece at Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells
‘..the double-act of Burrows – a care-worn yoga teacher to Fargion’s droll mafioso – is as sparky as ever.’
Jonathan Burrows & Chrysa Parkinson in Dogheart at The Place
‘Despite a certain childlike charm and pretty piano music, Dogheart, at The Place, feels over-earnest.’
Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Nearly Ninety at Barbican Theatre
‘The piece, like its creator’s extraordinary life, concludes in absolute mid-flow – just right. And, sad as it will be when (at his insistence) his 12-strong Dance Company disbands at the end of 2011, none of its members, on this evidence, will have …
Merce Cunningham Dance Company in Nearly Ninety at Barbican Theatre
‘The poignancy of seeing what is now Cunningham’s final work is intensified by the discovery that it contains some of the most limpidly beautiful movement of his career. Imaginatively, he was far from exhausted.’
Review: Jonathan Burrows and Chrysa Parkinson in Dogheart
Reviewed 25 October In a post-performance discussion, Jonathan Burrows paraphrases Seamus Heaney in saying that choreography, as poetry, is “To arrive somewhere I could not have expected to arrive but that… Continue Reading