Dream Again Dance Company Presents Dull Roots, Spring Rain

Dream Again Dance Company is a new student dance company, founded in September 2012 by Emily Romain and Martha Masoero. The focus of the company is contemporary dance, the majority of the dancers come from a classical background, and the aim is to create an environment in which Oxford University dancers can maintain technical training whilst also fostering creative and performative skills through choreography and improvisation.

Dull Roots, Spring Rain is a poignant exposition of the universal theme of growing up, leaving behind past innocence and reconciling oneself to the present. The show is comprised of three separate, although thematically corresponding, dance pieces, and features film projection and one piece with live drummer.

The first of the three pieces which make up Dull Roots, Spring Rain is called simply Spring. It is a balletic, abstract piece which expresses conflict between a mature self, saddened and hardened by a painful past experience, and the memory of a younger self, innocent and ignorant of the hardship to come in life. The piece moves through the various emotions, sadness, frustration, anger, nostalgia, which one feels towards a happy memory, now viewed though a sour lens, and resolution is finally found when the mature self is able to embrace its memory as a positive, rather than a debilitating, force.

In the second piece, Roots, we revise the ancient Greek story of Persephone, a young innocent maiden who is abducted by the god Hades and taken down into the Underworld. There she is seduced and forced to become his mistress and, through her premature sexualisation, loses all sense of self, until she finds a token from her mother, who is searching desperately for her in the world above, and remembers herself. She escapes from the underworld and is reconciled with her mother and friends in the world above, although the reconciliation is not without bitterness, as they find Persephone irrevocably changed and matured by her experience.

In the climactic piece, Rain, we bring the journey full-circle, explicating that moment of psychological crisis which leads to a conflict between our past and present selves, and exploring the process of rebuilding and regaining a sense of self, to finally find peace at last.

Creative Team:

Artistic Director: Emily Romain

Co-Choreographers: Martha Masoero and Emily Romain

Producer: Guillaume Lefevre

Film: Tom Edkins

Cast:

Columba Achilleos-Sarll, Emily Bridger, Asya Gutnikova, Ruth Morgan, Lara Sirimanne, Katherine Skingsley, Bronwyn Tarr, Anna Torvalsden, Imogen Truphet, Iona Twaddell

Performances:

8.00pm 5th – 9th February (Week 4)

O’Reilly Theatre, Keble College

Tickets via wegottickets.com

 http://www.facebook.com/events/477600212276711/?fref=ts.

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