Long established and highly respected Oxford dance makers Cecilia Macfarlane and Joëlle Pappas join together this spring to curate a three day festival of professional, adult community, and youth dance at the Old Fire Station under the title Life Line. The three shows, suitable for audiences of all ages, comprise:
Life Line
This evening of dance with live music is curated by Cecilia Macfarlane and Joëlle Pappas who relish the opportunity to share the passion and deep artistic values that they hold in common. Their careers as dancers, directors, teachers and mentors are rooted in the knowledge that Dance is the key to healthy living and our surviving on this planet.
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” ― Martha Graham
Thursday 31st March 7.30pm
Venue: Arts at the Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford OX1 2QA
Book online here
Curious Dancing: DugOut Adult Community Dance
DugOut Community Dance Group present Curious Dancing, an evening of dance created and performed by its members and guests with direction from Cecilia Macfarlane. All the dancers celebrate how powerfully dance can release expression, feed the soul and entertain others. We celebrate difference; the excitement is not in uniformity but unique individuality that can powerfully change lives. Find out more about Dugout here.
Friday 1st April 7.30pm
Venue: Arts at the Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford OX1 2QA
Book online here
Ripples, Echoes…: Tac-au-Tac Youth Dance and guests
“Look out, now! We’re ready to jump!
Because the rhythm is jumpin’, jump session
Doo wadda doodoo wadda doodoo wat doo wah” ― Slim & Slam
Tac-au-Tac Youth Dance and Joëlle Pappas present two entertaining programmes of contemporary dance.
Ripples of the past, echoes of the present, dance carries us forward…
Saturday 2nd April 4.00pm
Venue: Arts at the Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford OX1 2QA
Book online here
Richard Chappell’s work Infinite Ways Home opens with five dancers grouped upstage right in a partial darkness that is pieced by beams of light. On a day when the news was filled with terrible accounts of the citizens of Mariupol sheltering in basements, this felt like a cave, in which people awaited salvation from the world above.
The creative team, led by choreographer Richard Chappell, have drawn on ideas of community and ritual, finding links between the Druids’ ancient connections with the natural landscape and the collective experience of rave culture. The work follows the arc of a trip, as dancers and audience share an intense multi-sensory experience. Towards the end, violinist Enyuan Khong comes on stage, raising the intensity of the sound to a level that feels almost unbearable. At the after-show discussion, led by Miranda Laurence, Chappell described how he had worked remotely with composers Matthew Allmark and Kai Hellstrom (collectively known as Larch) during the first lockdown, as they developed the pulsating electronic score. Remarkably, the superb lighting design by Joshua Harriette, which felt intrinsic to the production, was created afterwards.
Chappell’s collaborative process fully involves the dancers (he generously acknowledged previous dancers on the programme sheet) and he ran an exciting workshop the following day at the United Reformed Church Hall in Oxford for advanced and professional performers. His choreography involves strong, supple and sensual movements with full use of the entire body to shift smoothly between upright positions and the floor with energy and dynamism. Although he has to work with free-lance dancers, they all take company class together and their performance showed a powerful sense of shared purpose and commitment. Looking around the auditorium, it was clear that Chappell’s work reaches audiences that might not ordinarily attend dance works, and at the end dancers Fay Stoeser, Iris Borras, Edd Arnold, Imogen Alvares, and Theo Arran received wild and enthusiastic applause.
Like Chhaya Collective, which appeared at The Mill Arts Centre Banbury the previous week, Richard Chappell Dance is based in the West Country: we owe a big ‘thank you’ to the Dancin’ Oxford Festival for helping to bring these companies to Oxfordshire.
Maggie Watson
20th March 2022
On Thursday evening, The Mill Arts Centre presented three dance works for the Dancin’ Oxford 2022 Festival. First, local dance group The Remarkables raised the curtain with a work created during one of the Chhaya Collective’s ‘Wild Workshops for Women’. Five mature dancers used rhythmic, grounded movement to tell stories that connected their day-to-day lives with their inner feelings and the joyful experience of discovering and releasing them. There followed two works on related themes danced by the Chhaya Collective: Hymnos, for two dancers, and Khaos for six dancers and three musicians.
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Alastair Macaulay delivered the first face-to-face DANSOX lecture of 2022 against a background of loss and tragedy. The loss was the death of the critic Clement Crisp at the age of 95; the tragedy, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. Macaulay dedicated his lecture to the memory of the former, and acknowledged his initial difficulty in speaking to a topic that might have seemed trivial against the background of the latter.
He then delivered a talk that proved quite the opposite. Taking inspiration from Arlene Croce’s assertion in 1973 that ‘Swan Lake is not a drama about birds – it’s a drama about freedom’, Macaulay cogently argued that it is a ballet about power and subjugation; bondage and liberation; trust and betrayal, which extends beyond the personal tragedies of Odette and Siegfried into the wider social and political domain.
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Oxford Dance Writers 