On Tuesday evening, DANSOX hosted an open rehearsal of extracts from the choreographic research developed by the New Movement Collective (NMC) during a three-day residency at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Introduced by Professor Sue Jones, producer Malgorzata (Gosia) Dzierzon explained that she and the other four dancers (Patricia Okenwa, Gemma Nixon, Juliana Javier and Eryck Brahmania) had been working collectively on a rewriting of Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet Les Noces (1923). This is a completely new dance work, but like Nijinska’s ballet, NMC’s work conveyed a strong sense that it was set in a deeply traditional society in which the wishes and desires of the individual are sublimated to the interests of the group.

Dzierzon described how the themes of love and marriage had appealed to them as the antithesis of the current fractured political and societal relationships precipitated by Brexit and the Pandemic. Yet Nijinska’s ballet does not depict a happy wedding, but confronts us with the rupture of a young woman’s life as she is torn from her family in conformity with her community’s overriding need for stability and continuity. She is the archetype of every woman whose role is to work in the fields for her husband and bear him the next generation of children. The dancers’ movements were so grounded that they seemed to excavate the floor beneath them, capturing the essence of a people rooted in the soil.

NMC works in a shared creative process in which all the dancers contribute ideas and phrases, and which also involves audiences. We were invited to complete a questionnaire listing the words that we associated with concepts that included love, marriage and commitment, and the dancers sought feedback and suggestions after each danced extract. We watched as they experimented with sequences, sometimes in silence and sometimes accompanied by snatches from Stravinsky’s score, curated by musical director Yshani Perinpanayagam.

It was fascinating to see repeated iterations of the same steps as Gemma Nixon and Juliana Javier danced them first as a tactile duet in which they pushed and pulled with and against each other, then revisited the choreography in the form of two solos. Finally, they tried dancing together, but distanced and not touching each other. An excerpt danced by all five dancers stimulated a discussion about how to manage levels of intensity in such a ‘full on’ work, with comments from the audience supporting the need for moments of recovery and relief.

Rehearsals are usually private affairs, and so this was a rare opportunity to watch some wonderful dancers experiment with the dynamic relationship between dance, space and music, as they played with the idea of what a marriage might mean. The session concluded with an eight-minute film of initial work on this project created by NMC last year, followed by a reception offering an occasion for further discussion and discovery.

Maggie Watson

18th July 2023

Find out more about New Movement Collective here

Find out more about DANSOX here