★★★★✰ In a touching and inspiring weekend of audio works, panel discussions, films, a Zoom workshop and live performance, dance artists respond to how we care for each other. The Place’s mini-digital festival is a timely reconsideration of care following the year we’ve just had. Has the pandemic made us more caring or less?
Author - Josephine Leask
★★★✰✰ Episode One of Dancing Nation contains works by Matthew Bourne for New Adventures, Yasmeen Godder for Candoco Dance Company, Breakin' Convention - curated by Jonzi D, Humanhood (Júlia Robert and Rudi Cole) and Stina Quagebeur for English National Ballet.
★★★★✰ Never has the time felt so ripe for queer work to be celebrated and how fitting that Rubby Sucky Forge is the first performance to be presented live at The Place since lockdown.
★★★★✰ Lost Dog’s short film, streamed for free by The Place Online was made at the beginning of lockdown and is a eulogy to live performance before the pandemic but also a rumination on life without human contact.
'X6 Dance Space (1976-80): Liberation Notes' is a well overdue exhibition profiling the groundbreaking work of the radical 1970’s dance collective, X6. The group of revolutionary dance practitioners sought dance liberation through redefining the body in dance while documenting that process through writing a magazine...
★★★★✰ Revisor is a strange and complicated piece of dance theatre. Watching it requires peeling away the many layers that constitute the work and it feels like trying to find someone hidden under many different disguises.
Heavy Handed We Crush the Moment, an immersive performance is fittingly programmed late at the Barbican Pit. It’s a relaxed and fluid set-up with dim lighting, a DJ’s deck and sculpted podiums on which the audience can sit.
★★★✰✰ Fernanda Munoz-Newsome's unconventional set up in the Lilian Baylis transformed the studio into part nightclub-chill-out lounge, part sensual art installation and featured a line-up of intriguing guest artists.
★★★★★ Cool, intelligent, thought-provoking, BEAT excels because of its fantastic creative team and its absolute superstar dancer, Margherita Elliot.
★★★✰✰ Sung Im Her’s Nutcrusher is a dance work which adds a valuable contribution to the #metoo movement with its gritty aesthetics and undoing of the sexually coded body.
★★★✰✰ Gregory Maqoma’s theatrical storytelling, a potent mix of a capella, dance styles and scenography, projects a strong universal theme - grief.
★★★★✰ Fascinating for the duration of its 50 mins, Split focusses on duality – charting the shifts between Ashley McLellan and Lilian Steiner as they negotiate their space, timing, movement and relationship.
★★✰✰✰ Seven international companies appeared on the Sadler’s Wells main stage, all of whom are prize winners of the bi-annual international competition Danse Élargie: Dance Expanded - the brain wave of Boris Charmatz and director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota...
★★★★✰ Masilo and company unpack this famous story of a wronged woman, establishing a refreshingly black, South African and feminist perspective.
★★★✰✰ Baal conveys a convincing Brechtian essence framed through a contemporary gaze. It’s an intriguing work that celebrates the company’s wild creativity...
Interview - Claire Cunningham's latest work "Thank You Very Much" uses the phenomenon of Elvis Presley and Elvis tribute artists as a springboard to explore impersonation, identity, acceptance and the challenges of being yourself. Josephine Leask finds out more from the lively Cunningham...
★★★★✰ Juliet and Romeo is a clever work on many different levels.
★★★★✰ Over the years that I’ve seen them, this extraordinary company of quirky individuals have become more adventurous about what they perform and flexible in how they perform...
★★★★✰ Three short but densely packed ballets infused with a strong Russian flavour were at the heart of the Royal Ballet’s last bill of the season.
★★★✰✰ Rite of Spring: Through the perspective of a South Asian gaze, the brutality and finality of the original ballet’s pagan sacrifice is tempered by a rich spirituality and the optimistic suggestion of an after-life. It’s still scary but less barbaric.