★★★★★ Thanks to Yolande Yorke-Edgell and her company, Robert Cohan was able to continue creating dance works for performance up until his death in January this year at the age of 95...
Tag - London Contemporary Dance Theatre
★★★★✰ By swelling the numbers of her small touring company, Yolande Yorke-Edgell was able to mount a revival of Kenneth MacMillan's Playground and a 10-strong ensemble for Robert Cohan's Communion. The programme also included new works by Sophia Stoller and Yorke-Edgell herself.
For around 80 minutes, Namron entertained his audience, largely comprising past and present luminaries of London contemporary dance, with stories and reminiscences, often breaking into movement, before finishing with a brief question & answer session...
★★★✰✰ Mats Ek’s "Axe" could be the beginning to a new Scandi Noir TV series. There is a man, an axe, a huge pile of wood that he starts to chop with repressed intensity and a visibly distressed wife. It doesn’t look like it will end well.
★★★✰✰ Yorke Dance Project is unusual, among small modern dance companies, in its respect for musicality and for the demands it makes for skilled partnering.
The opening and closing pieces showed how skilfully Cohan responds to dancers whose training and experience are very different from the Graham-based technique on which he drew for many decades.
Heralding the celebrations of Robert Cohan’s 90th anniversary year Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s enterprising company, founded in 2009, is touring a programme, Figure Ground, containing two of his works.
Funding is my biggest frustration. Compared to others, we receive peanuts. We have to strip everything back. That can be healthy – forcing me to scrutinise why I want something and concentrating on production values.
In a life at the BBC the director, Bob Lockyer, was an outstanding champion of dance for the camera. Now 70, he is still indefatigable in his enthusiasms