Tom Dale Company Step Sonic, Resonance of Air, Escape, Surge ★★★✰✰ London, The Place 14 November 2019 tomdale.org.uk www.theplace.org.uk This two-part programme of work in progress further enhances Tom Dale’s reputation as a cutting-edge choreographer, busily shaping his own innovative dance aesthetic. The opening piece, from which the programme derives its title, was a long exploration of the...
Tag - The Place
★★✰✰✰ Blind Trip was longer than it deserved to be and mixed too many ideas to be compact and coherent, while Letlalo left me wanting more of the performance on stage but less of the filming going on beside me.
★★★★★ Cool, intelligent, thought-provoking, BEAT excels because of its fantastic creative team and its absolute superstar dancer, Margherita Elliot.
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★✰✰✰ 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.
★★★★✰ 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.
★★★✰✰ Clarke doesn’t pull any punches with his ending ...once again, a community is left defiant but defeated.
★★★✰✰ Baal conveys a convincing Brechtian essence framed through a contemporary gaze. It’s an intriguing work that celebrates the company’s wild creativity...
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’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...
★★★★✰ Juliet and Romeo is a clever work on many different levels.
★★★✰✰ 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.
★★✰✰✰ 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....
★★★★✰ 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...
★★★✰✰ 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’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’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.
★★★★✰ Cousins and company both surprise and stir us.
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.
★★★✰✰ 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.