Freedom came when the performers were allowed to dance. And that just wasn’t often enough.
Tag - Pina Bausch
The Dance Section of the Critics’ Circle announced the nominations for the 13th National Dance Awards at a reception held at The Place on 9th November 2012. The winners will be announced 28th January 2013.
It's the name of the game that one does not necessarily appreciate all plans (or indeed how they crystallise out in practice) but I have to say that Sadler's Wells set a benchmark re new work/experiences and for where you want a progressive art to be.
Shivalingappa first caught my eye at the 2007 Fall For Dance festival, where she danced Varnam, a Kuchipudi solo. I was immediately struck by her musicality, the power and precision of her footwork, and the absolute clarity of her movements. And to the grace of her upper body and a jump that seems to comes out of nowhere, light and airy as a cat’s.
The Director of her own company at the Saarbrucken Opera House, she is in London to choreograph a new work, Labyrinth of Love, for Rambert Dance Company, the centrepiece of their autumn tour...
Waltz is about big ideas in 'Continu' but if you don't pick up on them there is not a lot of choreography to keep you going.
This is the third mounting of the work since its première in 1976 at the Avignon Festival, where it quickly became the stuff of legend. What was this strange, endlessly-repetitive, oddly compelling work?
Bausch is a mystery. To some, she represents the summit of poetry and expression, worthy of a cult-like following. Clearly, these dancers derive great emotional sustenance from performing her work. And it suits them. But, with the exception of Gillot’s solo and a few moments here and there, it left me cold.
‘We do not describe a city’, Bausch is quoted as saying. ‘We describe the feelings we have picked up there.’
Nicolas Le Riche was fabulously predatory in Bolero, a raging furnace of self-love and sex appeal. One imagines that after the show he must have ravaged a hundred virgins, but maybe he simply went home and soaked his feet in the tub, but in any case, he was magnificent, good taste (and choreography) be damned.
Half-hidden behind pillars or leaning against brick walls were isolated figures in Tyvek paper suits, nursing private angst, waiting their turn to claim our space. Sometimes only the dancers’ coloured outfits distinguished them from disoriented white-clad spectators, dazzled by beams of light.
Equal parts free spirit and self-disciplinarian, Emery LeCrone manages to make the creative life look easy.
Pina Bausch’s particular brand of dance theatre owns many characteristics that are reiterated again and again throughout her work. The balance of these motifs changed over the years but the act of breaching the fourth wall is generally present.
Sometimes Água’s moving images are dizzyingly beautiful, undulating palm fronds echoing the women’s waving tresses; sometimes they seem reminders that civilisation is only skin deep; or that the untamed jungle is indifferent to human concerns.
Disappointment is an inevitable part of theatre-going - I mean, how often do performances live up to our expectations? - but it is especially hard to swallow when it comes at the hands of one of the artists we most admire....
Pina Bausch and her designer, Peter Pabst, appear to have thrown in the Turkish towel when it came to the company’s evocation of Istanbul. Maybe they were overwhelmed by the overlay of cultures, past and present.
Ten Chi is like a musical composition mostly in a minor key – an accumulation of moments and motifs without a strong sense of purpose. In fact, much of the recorded music seems half-heard in sleep. There’s a pervasive feeling of melancholy, of a culture beyond comprehension except in crass tourist terms.
Once again, the performers of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch win over the audience with an apparently effortless ease.... Anna Wehsarg – a gorgeous statuesque redhead with legs that go on forever - can just walk on the stage, gazing into the audience and she has me captured.
Underpinning all of these familiar devices is the remarkable, intoxicating charisma of this extended family of performers, many of whom have been with the company for 30+ years. They continue to represent, with a comfortable faultless ease, Bausch’s unique cultural legacy...
I have had some of the best dreams ever while wide awake and watching Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. The company conjures imagery that no conscious mind seems capable of assembling.