Oxford Dance Writers

Last November, Josephine Jewkes’ description of the Boys in Action project in the Dancing Times made interesting reading beside Luke Jennings’ comments in the Observer on the “all-male creative stranglehold” on the Royal Ballet, and his statement:  “It’s a dismaying fact, but no female choreographer has been commissioned to create a ballet on the Covent Garden main stage for more than a decade now.”

When boys are so reluctant to take up dance, particularly ballet, and girls outnumber boys in most ballet classes, why are men so much more successful in gaining recognition as ballet choreographers? (more…)

From the company behind the magical Underneath the Floorboards, comes this stunning new adaptation of the classic Grimm fairy-tale, Rapunzel by company balletLORENT.  Written by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and choreographed by award-winner Liv Lorent, this enchanting new production combines beautiful movement, stunning costumes and original music.  A family show for all children aged 7 and over, Rapunzel tells the story of the wicked witch who tricks a mother to give up her child and the handsome prince who rescues the girl.  Ten young people from the local community have been chosen to dance on stage alongside the professional cast in the opportunity of a lifetime. (more…)

A UNIQUE ENCOUNTER:
The duet of Macarena Ortuzar and New York based Shahzad Ismaily has played in the USA and Japan since 2000.  They have collaborated with Laurie Anderson, John Zorn and Butoh dance maker Min Tanaka among others. This will be their first European collaboration, an encounter not to be missed and a rare opportunity to see these two exceptional performers together. (more…)

Malcolm Atkins has a long experience of collaborative projects with dancers; his dynamic work with Cafe Reason, Ana Barbour and Susie Crow  to name a few, has helped to shape in Oxford a culture of collaboration where the joint creation of dance and music with all its birthing pains is cherished, and thankfully even preferred by some dancers to the outsourcing of music-as-a-commodity.  This CD is a testimony to a lively contemporary dance scene, confident and brave enough to trust and commission new music.

The fifteen pieces on the album were written and realised in the past couple of years for performances by dancers/choreographers Ségolène Tarte (Triple-Entendre), Anuradha Chaturvedi, and Ana Barbour (My Time, Inertia) as part of the Dancin’ Oxford local dance artists’ platform, Moving with the Times, at the Pegasus Theatre. (more…)

In my opinion the most remarkable of this year’s Dancin’ Oxford festival events, out of those I saw, was Decreasing Infinity, an evening of classical Indian dance and contemporary work at the Pegasus Theatre. First came two pieces for a solo male dancer in the Bharatanatyam dance form of the Tamil Nadu region in South India. It is very energetic and virile, with a lot of stamping, turning, and flexing of the hands. The stamps especially show great power, as if the force of the movement goes right into the ground below the dancer. Legs are held bent at the knee for long periods. The strength held in the thighs seems quite superhuman. In the jumps the dancer’s torso remains at the same height, moving only horizontally. He seems held up by the energy he has taken from the ground, while the legs move from stamp to stamp independently. (more…)

Part biography, part memoire, this very enjoyable book gives an account of the life of a dancer about whom we know relatively little in the UK, and offers a new perspective on the history of classical ballet since the 1920s.

Tatiana Leskova was born in Paris in 1922 of “White Russian” parents.  Chance, talent, war and romance led her to settle in Brazil, where she was instrumental in developing ballet at the Theatro Municipal of Rio de Janeiro.  A pupil of Lubov Egorova in Paris, she missed her opportunity to join the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo because her father thought her too young, but a year later joined the rival company that became de Basil’s Original Ballet Russe. (more…)

Freedom is in many ways an idea that can only really ever be expressed fully by dance – the sheer abandon of movement without restriction or concern for social protocols. In taking the concept of freedom as their inspiration, the Jasmin Vardimon Company bravely dived into a bottomless pit of human feeling, for what is more endless, and more important to the human soul than freedom? It is one of these things, much like control, that are only defined by their absence or felt in moments of restriction. Yet we spend a good deal of our time ignoring it, existing in the grey area between, plastering smiles upon our frustrated faces. (more…)

This appeared originally online as part of a series of ongoing reflections on the process of making and performing work for Jennifer Jackson’s mature dancers’ project Dancing the Invisible, which showed work in performance last year at University of Surrey’s Ivy Arts Centre, and at the Michaelis Theatre at Roehampton University.  In a recent blog post Susie wrote:

Ashton used to say that watching The Sleeping Beauty was like having a private lesson in the art of composition in classical ballet (Kavanagh 1996, p.309).  The richness of Petipa’s choreographic text (despite its mutability and variation from one production to another) and the particular poetic and historic symbolism of the work, give it layers of significance and the potential for depth in individual artistic interpretation; to my mind according it the equivalence in status of such canonical musical masterpieces as the Bach cello suites, which invite artists to measure themselves and make a definitive personal statement of their understanding through their performance of the work. (more…)

With spring finally around the corner, Oxford’s very own flamenco diva Amarita Vargas sends word of three forthcoming events to get your feet tapping during March at High Wycombe, Bracknell and in Oxford, beginning with flamenco and tapas at the Wycombe Swan this Friday 15th March, and with tangos thrown in for good measure… enjoy! (more…)