Oxford Dance Writers

Dalcroze Eurhythmics: Moving through the archive is a free one-day symposium to celebrate the founding of the Dalcroze Society, and providing a wonderful opportunity to discover Dalcroze Eurythmics; to see, hear and feel its history up-close, and to learn about current Dalcroze practice.  If you are a student, practitioner, teacher or researcher interested in music, dance, theatre or movement, join a distinguished international team for the day to explore how Dalcroze Eurythmics helps develop deeper musicality and creative expression through whole body movement.  Find potential new ways to enhance and enrich skills, performance and creativity, and discover the wealth of resources held in the Dalcroze UK archive.  Activities include:

• A Dalcroze practical workshop (join in or just observe)
• Presentations from international Dalcroze scholars, teachers and students
• A performance of plastique animée – a movement response to a piece of music or another art form according to Dalcrozian principles
• A tour of the Archives & Special Collections held by the National Resource Centre for Dance, University of Surrey Library
• A display from the Dalcroze UK archive

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Whether you’re a dance enthusiast, fanatic about the film, or looking for a girls’ night out, Dirty Dancing, currently showing at Oxford’s New Theatre,  is a must-see.  It echoes the film’s fantastic dancing and wonderful plot, but adds excitement through live music, special effects and staging. It is worth seeing this company tour; they impress with a sleek performance and flawless production.

Based on an iconic film, most of the audience (me included) arrive with expectations: “the summer of 1963 when everybody called me Baby, and it didn’t occur to me to mind.” (more…)

Over the past four weeks the always innovative nocturndance has been posting a series of four short but atmospheric video dances by John Darvell made with creative team Deborah Ann Camp, Ben Johnston and Liz Allum.  The series is now complete and you can find them on nocturndance’s Vimeo page here:

http://vimeo.com/nocturndance

The titles of the films are as follows:

Wound

Torn open…

The slow descent…

A new path

John writes:  “After the moment, raging emotions from the harsh brutal force of change brings to life a new path. Please take the videos for what they are, just fleeting moments of expression, for you to watch and take in.”

Three of the four pieces shown by Phoenix Dance Theatre at the Linbury last week were new (or nearly new) works by Christopher Bruce, Ivgi & Greben and Darshan Singh Bhuller. This year has seen our dance companies commemorate the Great War and Bruce’s Shift (2006) seemed subtly to echo this theme. It opens with three women walking purposefully onto the stage, their hair tied up in headscarf turbans that immediately conjured up images of factory war work. Sometimes they and their male counterparts seemed to operate machines, at others, it was as if they themselves were the machines as they repeated movement sequences in canon. John B Read’s lighting design projected a shadow pattern of small rectangular panes onto the floor of the stage, as though light entered through a high window, adding a further geometrical dimension to the choreography. (more…)