Frederick Ashton Foundation with DANSOX present An Evening with Frederick Ashton at Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, 24th April 2024

An evening not to be missed, celebrating the great British ballet choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton: for the next Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX) event the Frederick Ashton Foundation presents an Ashton masterclass with dancers from the Royal Ballet introduced by Alastair Macaulay, and a screening of Lynne Wake’s film Frederick Ashton: Links in the Chain. The event will be followed by a Q&A and refreshments.

Date: Wednesday 24th April, 6.30-8.45pm

Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Music Building (St Hilda’s College), Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Booking: Free of charge, but please book your place online via Eventbrite here

Find out more about the Frederick Ashton Foundation here

And about Dance Scholarship Oxford here

 

Northern Ballet present Tortoise and the Hare, Oxford Playhouse 29th March 2024 – Susie Crow reviews

Time was when theatres closed on Good Friday, but no longer; and this year I took my small granddaughter to her first ballet as an Easter treat. Northern Ballet have since mid February been touring their ballet made specially for children Tortoise and the Hare, with a full schedule of performances up and down the country till the end of May.

The show choreographed by Dreda Blow and Sebastian Loe tells the classic fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, where slow and steady wins the race over fast and flashy. Set in a picture book colourful forest of lush green vegetation we see the hare waking in bed, donning his running kit and warming up, confident of victory. We meet the bumbling tortoise and his enthusiastic friend the mole; two cheerleading bunnies publicise the forthcoming contest. When a fellow competitor injures himself the tortoise volunteers to race, to the mirth and scorn of his rival the hare.

 

Graziano di Prima in Believe: My Life on Stage, Oxford Playhouse, 27th March 2024 – Susie Crow reviews

Spin-offs from the perennially popular Strictly Come Dancing now form a significant part of Oxford’s theatre dance programming. Over the years public awareness and interest has grown in the professional dancers who partner the celebrities, becoming ever more skilful in their ability to coax out hidden talents and present them to best advantage in sympathetic, entertaining and often inventive choreography within the confines of allocated ballroom dance genres. So it is perhaps inevitable that as well as touring shows combining professionals and celebrities in live performances, some of the professionals now devise and generate their own evenings, taking them on the road to show off their particular talents in a completely professional context. It has been fascinating to compare different approaches to adapting a TV phenomenon to live performance.

 

Hot House – Richard Chappell Dance at Oxford Playhouse, Dancin’ Oxford Spring Festival, 4th March 2024 – Maggie Watson reviews

Richard Chappell’s Hot House uses every shade of red to convey the idea of heat. At first the empty stage is dark. An illuminated exit sign upstage right, and a pinpoint of light that might be coming through a keyhole, suggest a commercial or civic setting. Then light slowly suffuses the space, as if clearing away mist, to reveal solo violinist Enyuan Khong and a single dancer. We might be in a night club, or an abandoned warehouse – we just don’t know – as dancers gradually join in, until there are five of them that seem simultaneously to represent the flames of a fire and the participants in a rave. All dressed in red costumes that are individually styled, they dance silently with fluidity and control, accompanied by Khong’s live performance, and backed by recorded ‘electronica’. Their movement is strong and gracefully gymnastic as they circle the stage and each other, turning and spinning like planets. The choreography is relatively ungendered, but the women also arch and stretch in supple backbends and, ‘walk-overs’, and one raises her leg above her head in a backward arc, like a figure skater.

The central section of Hot House feels like a party, the five dancers working in vigorous rhythmic unison, as if warmed by overhead orange discs or the radiant heat from electric bar heaters that seem to glow high above them. It was like watching the embers of a fire, where each coal is both a separate entity and part of the whole. At the end, the work returned to its beginning, with a single dancer and finally the violinist holding the stage until the blackout.

The dancers often seemed to sense each other’s presence without engaging eyes or emotion. They lifted, held and turned one another in perfect but detached synchrony, like people on a busy street expertly negotiating their physical surroundings while using a mobile phone to talk to someone possibly hundreds of miles away. The printed programme sheet (and it was great that this was available!) referred to the cost-of-living crisis, which has made warmth a commodity, political protest and celebration of community, but to me the dance spoke above all of the isolation of the individual in the crowd.

Maggie Watson

9th March 2024

You can find out more about Richard Chappell Dance here

 

Dancin’ Oxford performances at The North Wall, Amina Khayyam Dance Company and James Wilton Dance, 1st & 2nd March 2024 – Maggie Watson reviews

Last weekend, The North Wall marked the opening of Dancin’ Oxford’s Spring Festival with performances by Amina Khayyam Dance Company (AKDC) and James Wilton Dance.

AKDC is a Kathak-based company, and when the auditorium opened, musicians Debasish Mukherjee, Jonathan Mayer and Iain McHugh (on tabla, sitar and cello, respectively) were already in place beside the empty, blue-lit stage. Due to a last minute programme change, the show began with an improvisation session in which dancer Amina Khayyam and the musicians introduced some of the musical ideas and rhythms that we would hear again in the main piece. Khayyam, who trained in Kathak with Alpana Sengupta and Sushmita Ghosh, is a compelling dancer, and she has assembled an exceptionally accomplished group of performers.

Story of ONE, Story of MANY is a variation of AKDC’s production ONE, choreographed by Khayyam, who joined the musicians in parhant (the recitation of syllables) at the side of the stage. Three dancers, Abirami Eswar, Mohika Shankar and Jalpa Vala swirled their long dresses, spinning in beautiful swathes of movement, their bare feet beating the ground. Among the images of toil and loss (at one point a dancer seemed to give away her baby), there was also playfulness, when a dancer mimed a juggling game. The allusive nature of the work, somewhere between the abstract and the representational, left it full of uncertainty and ambiguity, perhaps triggering memories rather than telling a story.

The following evening, James Wilton and Sarah Jane Taylor’s LORE offered a terrific theatrical experience in which their gymnastic leaps, lifts and turns and subtle use of lighting created the illusion of many armed monsters and giants in shocking silhouettes. We saw a hideous straw-headed beast, horned creatures and a man turned into a tree. Inspired by pagan mythology this was not cosy folklore but a horrifying account of metamorphosis and terror. Michael Wojtas’ music added to the sense of mystery and oneness with nature by incorporating sounds of the natural world (sea, wind, birdsong, and crackling fire). The minimalist set, designed by Wilton, used vertical poles, resembling tall stalactites or the bare skeletons of trees, interspersed with round flat discs, like stepping stones. There was so much content in this densely packed dance work that at times I felt lost, searching for narrative in what seemed to be excerpts of unfamiliar stories, but the dramatic impact of such a committed and highly professional performance was breathtaking.

Maggie Watson

3rd March 2024

Find out more about Amina Khayyam Dance Company here

Find out more about James Wilton Dance here

And check out further Dancin’ Oxford events here

 

DANSOX presents Yolande Yorke-Edgell and Yorke Dance IMPRINT; Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College Oxford, 9th March 2024

DANSOX is thrilled to welcome back Yolande Yorke-Edgell to discuss Yorke Dance‘s new programme and to premiere an exciting new commission, A Point of Balance.

Yorke-Edgell discusses her influences and inspiration/mentors – Martha Graham, Richard Alston, Bella Lewitzky, Kenneth MacMillan and Robert Cohan, with film and live showings of their choreography .

The programme closes with Yorke-Edgell’s A Point of Balance, an exciting new work commissioned by Dance Scholarship Oxford and supported by Sheila Forbes.

Dancers: Ellie Ferguson, Edd Mitton, Abigail Attard Montalto and guest artist Eileih Muir.

Date: Saturday 9th March 4.00-5.15pm

Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes

Tickets: You can book your ticket online here

This event is free, but please consider making a small donation (suggested donation £5) to help DANSOX cover costs. To donate, please use this link: https://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/givefordansox

If you have any problems with reserving a space, please feel free to contact Ruth at ruththrush1@gmail.com

 

DANSOX presents Indian classical dance: Alastair Macaulay and Shobana Jeyasingh in discussion. Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford, 19th February 2024 – Maggie Watson reports

Indian dance is a vast topic: aside from the highly sophisticated technique and tradition manifest in the eight ‘classical’ forms, there are numerous ‘non-classical’ forms, and it exists within a complex web of social, temporal, religious and artistic spheres, which Western cultures have historically failed to understand. International dance critic Alastair Macaulay openly and unsurprisingly admitted that where Indian dance is concerned he is an ‘outsider’, but interestingly, Shobana Jeyasingh, who comes from India and trained in Bharatanatyam, said that although she is an ‘insider’, in some respects she too is an ‘outsider’.

Jeyasingh began by explaining the four means of means of communication through the body: tension, rhythm, emotion and decoration. Her demonstration of the rotation of the arm in a gesture that originates in back and makes it strong as steel had many of us in the audience trying it out as we sat. Jeyasingh continued by explaining more about the dance’s rhythmic patterns, its flavours or nuances, and the integral significance of costume and makeup. Macaulay generously shared images of dance and dancers drawn from his own travels, which showed the importance of the often lengthy and elaborate preparation, as well as the dance itself.

 

New Works: Royal Ballet Festival of New Chorography. Royal Opera House, Main Stage, 15 February 2024 – Maggie Watson reviews

On Thursday 15th February, four completely different new works premiered on the Royal Opera House main stage, as part of the Royal Ballet’s Festival of New Choreography. It was an evening of exciting variety, showcasing styles that ranged from ‘neo-classical’ to ‘contemporary’, and from unemotional abstraction to warm theatricality, in a programme that began with Gemma Bond’s Boundless to full orchestral accompaniment, and closed with Jessica Lang’s Twinkle to solo piano. Bond and Lang made full, but contrasting, use of the Royal Ballet’s traditional strengths as a leading ‘classical’ ballet company, acting as bookends to a programme in which the second and third pieces, by Joshua Junker and Mthuthuzeli November respectively, required the dancers to work in very different styles.

 

DANSOX Jane Pritchard lecture: Colour and Costume for Dance: the ‘Colour Revolution’, at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building 13 February 2024 – Maggie Watson reports

The Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition ‘Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion and Design’ is a thrilling revelation of nineteenth-century Britain’s widely unrecognised visual vibrancy. Jane Pritchard’s DANSOX lecture, attended by the exhibition’s curators, took this one step further, demonstrating that a greater understanding of the use of colour on the Victorian stage also overturns many of our assumptions about contemporaneous English ballet. Taking the Ashmolean exhibition as her starting point, Pritchard argued that by thinking across boundaries and following the archival evidence on the use of colour in theatrical design, we can begin to recover the largely forgotten fifty years of dance in England that lie between the romantic ballet period and the arrival in London of the Ballets Russes.

 

Chinese New Year Festival Show; Jinlong Culture and Performing Arts at Oxford Playhouse, 16 February 2024 – Maggie Watson reviews

On Friday night, a packed house at Oxford Playhouse rapturously welcomed in the Chinese Year of the Dragon. The audience was flying, from the moment the curtain rose on a lone acrobat to the glorious conclusion with the full cast on stage carrying an 18-metre illuminated dragon on poles above their heads.

A cross between circus, music hall and pantomime, with a master of ceremonies introducing each act, this was family fun for all ages. The two ‘dynamic lions’- red and gold creations with long bodies and huge masks, concealing acrobats in the manner of a pantomime horse – pranced around the Stalls to the delight of all, before mounting the stage and rearing on their hind legs.