Some Memorable Performances of 2019 – London
Lynette Halewood with some reflections on London dance performances over the last year – the good and the less good…
Richard Alston Dance Company – Alston at Home – London
★★★★✰ Richard Alston’s title for his company’s last tour before it closes in 2020 is Final Edition. The autumn run ended with four performances at The Place, in a programme aptly called Alston At Home.
Gregory Maqoma – Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero – London
★★★✰✰ Gregory Maqoma’s theatrical storytelling, a potent mix of a capella, dance styles and scenography, projects a strong universal theme – grief.
Interview: Pam Tanowitz – Choreographer and Director
Pam Tanowitz, well known in New York, just created her first work outside the States – for the Royal Ballet. It’s been a critical success and Jann Parry (who gave the work 5 stars) finds out what makes her tick and why so many directors are seeking Tanowitz out…
Paul Taylor Dance Company – Junction, all at once, Promethean Fire – New York
★★★★✰ In her ‘all at once’, Tanowitz seems to have taken Taylor’s ‘Junction’ as her starting point. Like that work, it is a paean to awkwardness…
Ballet Black – The Suit, Ingoma – London
★★★★✰ Merging these two works onto the same bill created a powerful double-header of impressive and arresting dance theatre.
Faso Danse Théâtre – Kalakuta Republik – London
★★★✰✰ Without help, which was certainly not forthcoming in the programme, most of the action was a mystery in relation to Kuti and the Kalakuta Republik.
Pam Tanowitz Dance – Four Quartets (T.S. Eliot) – London
★★★✰✰ Tanowitz is ideally placed to translate poetry into dance. Her vocabulary is effortlessly fluid with clear Cunningham/Graham/Brown influences and yet her own voice is strongly established.
Merce Cunningham Trust – Night of 100 Solos, Centennial Event – London
★★★★✰ A quote from The Observer’s dance critic, Nigel Gosling, in 1964: ‘Merce Cunningham and his company have burst on the British scene like a bomb …heart-warming proof that here is an art with a future…’
Gallery – Night of 100 Solos in London: Merce Cunningham Trust, Centennial Event
Gallery by Foteini Christofilopoulou…
Ballet Black – Pendulum, Click!, Ingoma – London
★★★✰✰ It’s the spring and Ballet Black has just premiered its latest triple bill. It included new works by Sophie Laplane and Mthuthuzeli November, the former engagingly light and the latter movingly heartfelt…
Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener – Tesseract – London
★★★✰✰ Tesseract is a curious, sometimes disorienting mix of film, live dance, and projections of filmed live dance.
Peeping Tom – Father (Vader) – London
★★★★✰ The stand-out moments in this show came in dynamic bursts of extraordinary movement in which the form of propulsion seemed to be any part of the body but the feet.
English National Ballet – Lest We Forget bill – London
★★★★★ “I cannot recall being so moved at a dance performance for a very long time, if ever.”
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.
Boy Blue – A Night with Boy Blue – London
★★★✰✰ The annual celebration of all things Boy Blue fielded 138 dancers this year – Kenrick Sandy and Michael Asante’s company is one that can wow you through sheer force of numbers alone.
Will Tuckett’s Elizabeth – London
★★★★✰ Was she passionate as well as imperious? Her own letters and poems suggest so: contemporary accounts by others are not to be trusted. Her position of power in turbulent times generated a lot of fake news…
Memorable Performances of 2017 – London
Head and shoulders above other new work this year was Crystal Pite’s Flight Pattern for the Royal Ballet…
