Igor and Moreno – BEAT – London
★★★★★ Cool, intelligent, thought-provoking, BEAT excels because of its fantastic creative team and its absolute superstar dancer, Margherita Elliot.
Sung Im Her – Nutcrusher – London
★★★✰✰ 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.
Jonathan Goddard and Lily McLeish – While You Are Here – London
★★✰✰✰ While You Are Here is disappointing despite using a cohort of the best contemporary dancers in the country, working with theatre director Lily McLeish and featuring fine design and lighting.
Lucy Guerin – Split – London
★★★★✰ 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.
Gary Clarke Company – Wasteland – London
★★★✰✰ Clarke doesn’t pull any punches with his ending …once again, a community is left defiant but defeated.
Impermanence – Baal – London
★★★✰✰ Baal conveys a convincing Brechtian essence framed through a contemporary gaze. It’s an intriguing work that celebrates the company’s wild creativity…
Birmingham’s DanceXchange Launches Ambitious Plans to Support New Artists
Diane Parkes talks to Lucie Mirkova, Head of Artistic Programmes at Birmingham’s DanceXchange, about their forward thinking new approaches to artist development including linking with others across the UK to do better for new artists…
AVA Dance Company – ORIGINS Festival: No Woman’s Land – London
★★★★✰ Ava Dance Company’s essay on the tribulations of the Inuit people from the northern-most reaches of Canada is appropriately a mix of dance theatre and spoken text…
Lost Dog – Juliet & Romeo – London
★★★★✰ Juliet and Romeo is a clever work on many different levels.
Seeta Patel – The Rite of Spring, Dance Dialogues – London
★★★✰✰ 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.
Fuel and Encounter – The Kids Are Alright – London
★★✰✰✰ The main story revolved around bereaved parents who had lost their ten-year old daughter, Sophie, on a daytrip to the Natural History Museum, in London….
Alleyne Dance – The Other Side of Me, A Night’s Game – London
★★★★✰ Both sisters were competitive athletes before turning to dance and catching a flying chair is just one of many signs of their mutual sporting prowess…
Corali Dance Company with Thick & Tight – Technicolour Everyday bill – London
★★★✰✰ Even as I leave the show not really having understood every bit of it, I’m touched by the multi-skilled performers and their unforced honesty.
Woman SRSLY – Takeover: Wildlife in Strange Waters – London
★★★✰✰ Woman SRSLY’s feminist energy exploded all over the Place last Thursday. The foyer and bar area were transformed into a colourful pink fun-fair.
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.
5 Questions to Choreographer James Cousins about his new Touring Programme of Duets – Epilogues
James Cousins is unusually touring a bill of three contrasting duets – called Epilogues it has a London run at The Place from 6-8 March 2019.
Uchenna Dance – Hansel & Gretel – London
★★★✰✰ Vicki Igbokwe’s bold dance retelling of the classic fairytale Hansel and Gretel has a sense of playfulness at its heart, and something of a political message for adults to chew on too.
Memorable Performances of 2018 – London
Semperoper Ballett Dresden were another new visitor in the summer, with a programme of Forsythe works, some not seen here before. But Forsythe is a theme this year in himself.
Umanoove / Didy Veldman – The Knot – London
★★★★✰ Dutch choreographer Didy Veldman has picked a rich subject to mine in The Knot: marriage in all its starry-eyed, nerve-wracking, life-altering glory.
