★★★★★ Starting 2022 on an optimistic footing for dance and performance that centres on the work of black artists from the African diaspora, interdisciplinary performer and choreographer Toussaint Buck curates a spectacularly rich programme at the Lilian Baylis...
Author - Josephine Leask
★★★✰✰ Akram Khan dedicates his solo Xenos to the anonymous Indian soldiers who lost their lives in the trenches of WW1 fighting a battle that wasn’t theirs.
★★★★✰ Stunning performances, an inspired choice of choreographers and a surprise film, remind us that Scottish Dance Theatre is a company to celebrate and get very excited about.
★★★✰✰ Rubinstein, the performers and her creative team are good climate change ambassadors as Dance No 2° reminds us how to live sustainably on our land... Ultimately the tone is one of optimism, a meditation on how people can live together, work together and nurture planet home
★★★★✰ James Cousins Company celebrates life and love in a delicious immersive dance work which mobilizes over 70 dancers across the multiple spaces of Battersea Arts Centre.
★★★★✰ Having missed ever seeing Shobana Jeyasingh’s TooMortal live, it was a treat to experience her site-specific work in the hallowed nave of the lofty St Pancras Church in Euston.
★★★✰✰ Choreographer, performance artist and curator Christopher Matthews occupies both the public and private spaces of Sadler’s Wells and the Lilian Baylis inviting us to feast our eyes on bodies - live, filmed and narrated.
New Movement Collective’s interactive, online project Project XO Remote asks many questions not just about wearable technology, what it can do and how it affects both dancer and viewer but also about the responsibility of the spectator...
★★★✰✰ Overflow will certainly not let you escape into a nicer world with messages of hope and regeneration. It will however impress you with its sci-fi dystopian visual and aural landscape.
The inaugural Women in Dance Award has recently been announced at a well attended virtual ceremony. A significant event and huge congrats to winner Vicki Igbokwe and to Avatara Ayuso for making it all happen.
Including works by Antonio Branco and Riccardo T. / Xavier Singer-Kingsmith / Luke De Kock, Sarah Golding, Teresa Phuti Mojela and Yukito Masui / Katie Beard, Naomi Turner and Liv Lockwood / Ana Paz / Andy Field and Beckie Darlington...
★★★★✰ 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?
★★★✰✰ 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.