May 2015
Monthly Archive
May 31, 2015
Where does emotion reside? How do we share it? To whom does it belong? Programmed by the recently formed Body and Being Network, the event Embodying Emotion offers a chance to explore these fascinating questions this coming 3rd June. Performing an original piece based on Ovid’s tale of Myrrha (developed as part of Avid for Ovid), choreographer and dance artist Marie-Louise Crawley and composer Malcolm Atkins will explore the embodied expression of emotion. The performance will be followed by facilitated audience discussion.
Date: Wednesday 3rd June 5.30-6.30pm
Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford
Attendance is free, but please register for this event on the Body and Being Network website by 1 June: http://bodyandbeingnetwork.org/2015/05/20/event-announcement-embodying-emotion/
This event is generously supported by a research award from St Hilda’s College.
The Body and Being Network is a new research initiative that aims to develop innovative interdisciplinary dialogues about the body. Co-founded by Karin Eli (University of Oxford) and Anna Lavis (University of Birmingham), the network instigates and supports collaborative encounters between scholars and performing artists, and challenges participants to develop analyses that involve their own embodied experiences. Find out about The Body and Being Network here
Find out more about Avid for Ovid’s work, and read Marie Louise Crawley’s reflections on portraying Myrrha here.
May 30, 2015
Entitled Mapping motion: impulse, object and trajectory, this talk and demonstration opened with a discussion of the need for the creative artist to identify and then focus on the ‘object’ of his or her work. For choreographer Kim Brandstrup, the ‘object’ is a single movement that stops. Working with Royal Ballet dancers McNally and Sambé, he demonstrated how a series of sustained movements constrained by predetermined periods of time can become the building blocks of a dance work. Just as a poet may work within a strictly defined verse form, using its rigour to release the inner voice, Brandstrup uses time, broken down into specified sections of related lengths, to set free choreographic creativity. (more…)
May 28, 2015
Another unique opportunity to get an insight into the work of a major current choreographer. Cathy Marston will be undertaking a week long residency at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, APGRD, 1-5 June 2015, with the support of St Hilda’s and DANSOX. Working with 2 professional dancers and a group of Oxford scholars, Cathy will spend the week choreographing to the ancient Greek text of Odyssey Book XI. The aim of this project is to explore how the mythical content of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld (the katabasis,) as well as its dactylic hexameter metrical form, can be translated into the medium of dance.
As the culmination of this week’s residency there will be a lecture demonstration on June 5th at 5pm in the Lecture Theatre, Classics Centre, in which Marston will discuss her approaches to adapting works of literature into dance performances with APGRD Visiting Scholar Tom Sapsford. Cathy will then also show and discuss the material which she has developed throughout the course of the week with performances from professional dancers Charlotte Broom and Aaron Vickers.
CATHY MARSTON has made works for several major European ballet companies, was director of Bern Ballet Switzerland (2007-13), and most recently was a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow (20013-14). Cathy has a long history of adapting literary texts into unusual and thoughtful dance adaptations and has previously made works based on Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Ibsen (Ghosts, A Doll’s House), and Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) amongst others.
Date: Friday 5th June, 5.00pm
Venue: Ioannou Centre, 66 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LU
Free, all welcome; no booking required.
Find out more about the APGRD here
May 26, 2015
To end the half term break on a high note Dancin’ Oxford presents a free aerial dance performance by the amazing French aerial dance company Compagnie Retouramont, returning to Oxford to perform Gravitational Waves in the atmospheric environment of Oxford Castle Quarter on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th May. Compagnie Retouramont transforms outdoor spaces with a thrilling combination of video projection, sound and aerial dance. A sculptural framework attached to the facade of a building provides the dancers with a unique performance space to explore the interaction between architecture, sound, projected images and movement. Dancers animate the space in multiple dimensions where the movement is not only seen but heard as the sculpture transposes their every move into sound, and creates a virtual gravity.
Probably the best spectacle in Oxford this summer – don’t miss it!
Performances: Friday 29th and Saturday 30th May, 9.30pm
Venue: Oxford Castle Quarter
Watch a video of Compagnie Retouramont here
May 26, 2015
Hard on the heels of its recent highly popular event featuring choreographer Kim Brandstrup, DANSOX supported by the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH) brings another distinguished guest to St Hilda’s Oxford on Thursday 4th June. Professor Mark Franko, internationally renowned dance scholar of Temple University and Middlesex University, presents an illustrated lecture on The Fascist Legs of Serge Lifar: French Ballet under the Occupation emerging from his recent research on this important and controversial early twentieth-century director and choreographer. Professor Franko will share fascinating new sources for evaluating Serge Lifar’s life and work during WW2 at the Paris Opera and illuminate the relationship of neo-classicism and dance.
Date: Thursday 4th June 2015, 5.30-7.00pm
Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford
This event is free and open to all and will be followed by refreshments.
Booking essential at: https://eventbrite.co.uk/event/16611691015/
You can find more information about DANSOX and TORCH here
May 26, 2015
The Yuka Kodama Ballet Group once again presents its annual performance, in association with Oxford University Ballet Society. This year’s programme on show at Wychwood School on Friday 29th and Saturday 30th May is made up of two new works by Yuka Kodama, The Wonderful Wizard of Ox and Italian Symphony.
The Yuka Kodama Ballet Group is an informal group which brings together people of all ages who enjoy dancing classical ballet, studying technique and performing. The group began its life in Japan several years ago, and is now based in Oxford offering a range of ballet classes mainly for adults (including pointe work, pas de deux and men’s classes) to ballet enthusiasts from all over the world. The group’s dancing is very much in the classical tradition, with a strong bias towards Russian technical schooling.
(more…)
May 12, 2015
Posted by susiecrow under
What's happening | Tags:
Arthur Rimbaud,
Benjamin Britten,
Burning,
Christopher Smart,
contemporary dance,
Dante Sonata,
Franz Liszt,
Hölderlin Fragments,
Illuminations,
Martin Lawrance,
Oxford Playhouse,
Rejoice in the Lamb,
Richard Alston,
Richard Alston Dance Company |
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Described by the Times as a “choreographer for whom every dance is a love affair with his chosen music”, Richard Alston brings his acclaimed company back to Oxford’s Playhouse with a stunning mixed bill. Alston’s superbly skilled choreography combines three pieces of music by Benjamin Britten and three very different poets. Rejoice in the Lamb is danced to Britten’s joyous setting of the fervent words of Christopher Smart. Hölderlin Fragments is inspired by Friedrich Hölderlin’s enigmatic lyrics, and Illuminations paints a vivid picture of the wild young genius and misfit Arthur Rimbaud.
In addition to the trio of Britten pieces, the bill is completed by Associate Choreographer Martin Lawrance’s latest piece, Burning, which is as passionate and turbulent as its music, the Dante Sonata of Franz Liszt, played live on stage. (more…)
May 7, 2015
Up and coming Oxford contemporary dance company Lunas Dance Project lead by Ellie Aldegheri will be performing in London as part of the Wandsworth Fringe Festival on Friday 8th May. New work Of Myths, Perspectives and Transformations explores the transformative effects of emotional change; desire and resistance, and all the difficulties a new path brings. Inspired by Franz Kakfa’s Metamorphosis and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World, EIlie Aldegheri revisits choices that led to personal transformations. The company is energetic and dynamic, invoking past experiences by exploring the sensations associated with them through connected and flexible movements. The dancers excite the curiosity of their audience and engage their empathy.
Performance: Friday 8th May, 6.00pm
Venue: St Paul’s Church, Welham Road, London SW16
Get your tickets here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/of-myths-perspectives-and-transformations-tickets-15676941153
For a free short taster, please join Lunas at St George’s Hospital Tooting at 2.30pm, 3.00pm and 3.30pm
St George’s Hospital, Blackshaw Road, Tooting, London SW17 0QT
Wandsworth Fringe, London
http://wandsworthartsfestival.com/2015/event/of-myths-perspectives-and-transformations1
Find out more about Lunas Dance Project here
Read Jane Connelly’s review of Lunas Dance Project’s previous show here
May 4, 2015
Dance and warfare are two human activities in which human beings engage their bodies; train them, refine them, discipline them. What is the place of the human body in war in our day and age, asks choreographer Rosie Kay? And how are our attitudes towards war shaped by our own experience of being are lived bodies, always in danger of harm, but also able to work within our embodied experience, train the body, work within it, push it further? Rosie Kay’s work The body is the frontline: 5 Soldiers engages those questions- and other layers related to warfare in a subtle, nuanced and sensitive way.
Recent debates on modern warfare, from the invasions to Iraq and Afghanistan, to possible intervention in Syria, often neglect the effect foreign policy, weaved together in Cabinet Offices has on living, breathing bodies that execute them. The term “boots on the ground” is a strong example of that; we too often do not think of those who fill those boots as well as those who will be harmed by them. Rosie Kay’s work does just that. (more…)
May 4, 2015
Posted by susiecrow under
reviews | Tags:
autobiography,
Bess Kargman,
Dutch National Ballet,
Elaine DePrince,
Faber & Faber,
First Position,
Hope in a Ballet Shoe,
Mabinty Bangura,
Magali Messac,
Maggie Watson,
Michaela DePrince,
Youth America Grand Prix |
1 Comment
This book tells the extraordinary story of how Mabinty Bangura from Sierra Leone survived war, famine, cruelty and prejudice to end up dancing with Dutch National Ballet under the name Michaela DePrince.
Born in Sierra Leone, DePrince saw and suffered things that no-one, let alone a child, should experience, from the brutality and misogyny of her own uncle who virtually sold her, to witnessing the murder and mutilation of a beloved school teacher. It is sometimes hard to believe that she really remembers all the conversations that she records (she was so very young at the time), but there is an immediacy about her account that is gripping. (more…)
Oxford Dance Writers 