Josephine Leask is a dance writer and lecturer. Having written for a range of dance and art publications, she currently writes for Londondance and the Dance Insider. She lectures in cultural studies at London Studio Centre. Follow her on Twitter @jo_leask
Under are the articles written for DanceTabs.
Vincent Dance Theatre – Virgin Territory Film Installation – Margate
★★★★✰ Vincent Dance Theatre’s visceral and timely response to how social media is wrecking our children, hypersexualising them and stealing their childhood co-opts the very technology that it warns us about.
James Cousins Company – Epilogues bill of duets – London
★★★★✰ Cousins and company both surprise and stir us.
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch – Since She – London
★★★★✰ Papaioannou weaves in many references to Bausch’s work and deliberately asks us to find them, the work is fuelled by his love for her. But he also invites us to move on from the nostalgia trip.
Forced Entertainment – That Night Follows Day – London
★★★★✰ Performed by a cast of seventeen children ranging from ages 5 – 15, Forced Entertainment’s delightfully humorous and poignant work reveals how adults shape children through their projection of values and beliefs.
Luke Brown Dance – For You I Long the Longest: Second Self, Princess – London
★★★★✰ Luke Brown Dance’s For You I Long the Longest is an intense and intimate work that needs to be experienced in a small, contained theatre.
GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui & Antony Gormley – Icon – London
★★★★✰ Sidi Larbi Cherkaouis’s work is full of surprises. Icon, first premiered in 2016 is another fruitful collaboration between Anthony Gormley and Cherkaoui in which clay moulds both the theme and the dancers.
Rosie Kay Dance Company – MK Ultra – London
★★★✰✰ Rosie Kay’s MK Ultra is an ambitious project which tackles complex thematic sources – conspiracy theories, brain washing and mind-control, not to mention myths about secret societies such as the Illuminati…
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance – Contagion – London
★★★★✰ Overshadowed by the atrocities of WWI, which is commemorated loudly and frequently, the killer Spanish Flu, which killed an estimated 50-100 million people, is at last fittingly acknowledged on its 100th anniversary in Shobana Jeyasingh’s work Contagion.
Sasha Milavic Davies – Everything that Rises Must Dance – London
★★★★✰ One of the highlights of Dance Umbrella’s 40th anniversary was watching 200 women perform Everything that Rises Must Dance…
Hauptaktion at London’s Collisions Festival 2018 – Examing cultural appropriation and Minstrel shows
Thoughtful report about thoughtful work that probes and presents how the dance of yesterday and today borrows and distorts the culture of others. Makes you think!
Sarah Blanc – My Feminist Boner – London
★★★✰✰ Blanc shares her struggles with dieting, exercise regimes and the pressure to look perfect to the point where she has an epiphany which she calls her feminist boner.
Boy Blue – Blak Whyte Gray – London
★★★★✰ Directed by Kenrick ‘H20’ Sandy and Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante, the return to the Barbican of Blak Whyte Gray, is again a triumph.
Voguing at the Southbank’s Ulimited festival – “Vogue: The Unlimited House of Krip”
Part lecture and panel discussion, part documentary screening and part performance “Vogue: The Unlimited House of Krip” was a good introduction to voguing culture, presented as part of the Southbank’s Unlimited festival and built around the deaf and disabled dancers that form the House of Krip.
Pierre Rigal – Scandale – London
★★★✰✰ Rarely seen in London apart from performances at Breakin’ Convention, French choreographer Pierre Rigal brings something different to the hip-hop dance theatre scene with Scandale.
Woman SRSLY – 1st Birthday – London
★★★✰✰ What I loved about it was that none of the acts fitted into neat categories but spilled out through porous art boundaries.
East London Dance, Hofesh Shechter Company & LIFT Festival – East Wall: Storm the Tower – London
East London Dance, Hofesh Shechter Company and LIFT Festival East Wall: Storm the Tower ★★★★✰ London, Tower of London eastwall.org www.hofesh.co.uk www.liftfestival.com www.eastlondondance.org Sitting outside on a balmy summer evening in London, watching…
Alexandra Waierstall – And here we meet – London
★★✰✰✰ Waierstall explores themes of extinction through the impact of humans on the earth’s geology and ecosystems. While thematically and visually intriguing, And here we meet lacks coherence…
Rhiannon Faith – Smack That (a conversation) – London
★★★★✰ Rhiannon Faith’s hard-hitting show coats the horrors of domestic violence in the saccharine sweetness of a girly party.
Splayed Festival with Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Sheena McGrandles, Hilde Ingeborg Sandvold – London
★★★✰✰ Curated by dance artist Amy Bell, Splayed seeks to mess up stereotypical, heterosexual representations of the female body and replace them with other dynamic alternatives.
Festival of Korean Dance – Jinyeob Cha X Vakki and Lyon Eun KWON – London
★★★★✰ Two works by up-and-coming female Korean choreographers hint at South Korea’s progressive and rich dance culture.
