Oxford Dance Writers

Maurice Béjart’s dance work L’Heure Exquise, inspired by and to some extent based on Samuel Beckett’s play Happy Days, is a totally enthralling theatrical experience.  In the visually spectacular opening scene, Alessandra Ferri emerges like a delicate flower from a vast mound of pointe shoes, which opens at the front, as it if were a huge skirt, allowing her to step out.  Upstage right, Carsten Jung sits facing away from us, plucking a guitar: he might be her lover, her partner, or perhaps even her minder or carer, perhaps all of these.  Ferri’s performance is breath-taking.  She seems to drift in and out of reality, checking a pair of shoes for performance, reciting and singing snatches of poetry, prayers and songs, or dancing fragmentary steps.  Beckett’s character Winnie speaks in clichés that reveal greater truths;  Ferri, as Béjart’s ‘She’, dances them, at one moment indicating a Swan Queen with her ports de bras, at another, dragging her folded red parasol snaking along the stage as Giselle does the sword.  Like Winnie, ‘She’ has a bag of pathetically limited possessions, which she lays out on the stage: there is a mirror, a rose, and (as in Beckett’s play) a gun.

By the second act, Ferri is buried to her neck at the top of the pointe shoe mountain, wrapped in a chiffon veil that could be the skirt of a romantic tutu, or a shroud.  She bravely wears a jaunty white pillbox hat with a feather, but her situation is clearly desperate.  Jung (Béjart’s ‘He’) has become indispensable as he lifts and carries her around the stage.  Ferri’s relentless optimism is heart-breaking; she slowly and carefully enunciates the lyrics of Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow waltz, from which Béjart’s piece takes its name, as if everything is slipping away from her; she sings almost to the end.  We know that when she is gone, the pointe shoes will be her only tangible remains, and the dance, temporarily captured and uniquely embodied within her, will be lost.  Dance is tragically ephemeral, and so is life itself.

Maggie Watson

27th October 2021

DANSOX (Dance Scholarship Oxford) and TORCH (The Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities) join forces to present Yorke Dance Project in a moving tribute to Sir Robert Cohan, as an extension to The Grace Project, continuing the discussion “Dance as Grace: Paradoxes and Possibilities”. Director Yolande Yorke-Edgell will present Cohan’s ideas on grace. On 28th October dancers from the Company will show excerpts from Cohan’s works Canciones del alma and Communion, followed by discussion. On 29th October Yolande Yorke-Edgell will dance, and there will be a special screening of Cohan’s lockdown project – Lockdown Portraits – the last series of solos he created – followed by a discussion with the director of the film.

Dates: Thursday 28th October 4.00-6.00pm, Friday 29th October 4.00-6.00pm

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

Tickets: Admission free, but numbers limited for social distancing: book to reserve a seat by emailing susan.jones@ell.ox.ac.uk
and copying in marcus.bell@st-hildas.ox.ac.uk

The latest work from ‘genre-defying’ choreographer Alexander Whitley harnesses motion capture technology to explore the biological form of the human body. This spectacular new stage production asks, are organisms just algorithms? Is life just data processing? Whitley’s experimental new work Anti-Body uses motion capture technology in a unique and visually thrilling dance experience that sees dancers perform together live and in virtual space.

Renowned for creating ambitious, interdisciplinary, and thought-provoking work with innovation and digital technology at its core, Anti-Body is Whitley’s first new work for the stage since the Covid-19 pandemic and will preview at DanceEast on Friday 8^th October 2021 and Oxford Playhouse, in partnership with Oxford Science and Ideas Festival (IF Oxford), on Tuesday 26^th October 2021.

The play opens with a projected image of Ida Rubinstein’s grave, which morphs into mysterious and exotic visions of Naomi Sorkin, who slowly unwinds and removes one veil after another.  She is at once Cléopâtre, Salomé and Rubinstein, gradually revealing her body, as she prepares to disclose layer upon layer of her past.  Sorkin’s compelling performance exudes magnetic power, as she plays an ageing femme fatale telling her life story to journalist Edward Clement (played by Max Wilson).