★★★✰✰ With works from Yuri Possokhov (Senseless Kindness), Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Laid in Earth), Stina Quagebeur (Take Five Blues), Russell Maliphant (Echoes) and Arielle Smith (Jolly Folly)
Tag - Charlie Chaplin
Heather Desaulniers dips into the San Francisco Dance Film Festival and reviews three programmes: Merely Marvelous: The Dancing Genius of Gwen Verdon (★★★★✰), Dance Goes On (★★★✰✰) and Uprooted – The Journey of Jazz Dance (★★★★★)
★★✰✰✰ Yes, these are incredibly talented artists, doing exceptional things, but their circus skills were presented within an envelope that needed a lot more theatrical clarity.
★★★✰✰ The dance comments, illustrates and riffs on ideas and sounds in the music. Like Marsalis’s compositions, it’s neither banally literal, nor thoroughly abstract, but lies somewhere in the middle, deriving its inspiration and energy from currents in the music.
★★✰✰✰ All the ingredients seemed promising but the evening was disappointing, struggling to recover from the tedium of the dire opening item...
★★✰✰✰ The best moments in The Toad Knew are comic, but there aren’t enough of them. Old-fashioned clowning is sprinkled throughout the production...
★★✰✰✰ There is no sense of who these people are, or why they are there.
Just before intermission Simkin included two film-and-performance works by Alexander Ekman. Simkin and the City, which went viral with the Internet-savvy dance crowd a couple of years ago, always gets a good chuckle.
Lynette Halewood with her personal selection of London dance memories this last year…
If Harlequinade is somewhat less than the sum of its parts, Square Dance (1957), which preceded it on the program, never fails to lift the heart.
If the brand new works were something of a disappointment then Crystal Pite's A Picture of You Falling, created on her own company dancers in 2008, was the outstanding hit.
It takes Thiérrée a long time to make each new work. Tabac Rouge is his fourth production in a decade...
The pleasure lies in the quality of dancing rather than interpretation. Petit was an expert at animating a stage, a musical-theatre choreographer who delivered what audiences expected...
The Cuban schooling of Hopuy is impressive and his variation was expertly danced, including the trademark Cuban flicking over of the take-off leg in a jeté en tournant...