Leap Day Dancing, Old Fire Station 29th February 2016

Leap Day Dancing is a special programme of works by Oxford artists featuring dance, live music and film to join Dancin’ Oxford’s tenth anniversary celebrations.  Guest performers will include Crossover Intergenerational Dance, Joelle Pappas Projects and Jos Baker presenting the UK premiere of his new solo Of No Fixed Abode.  Full programme:

Allan Hutson with his solo performance Am I Real! which takes the Idea of objects having a soul from the ballet Petrushka.  Left on the shelf in the toy shop, a lonesome figure is destining to venture out and explore the beauty life has to offer.

Taut from Cecilia Macfarlane’s Crossover Intergenerational Dance, explores architectural forms and archetypal relationships between generations. Inspiration is taken from the live music of the cello, the sounds that emerge as the strings meet is echoed in the dance.

 

Moving With the Times, Pegasus Theatre 27th-28th February 2015 – Ana Barbour reviews

I arrived late to find myself in the middle of Selfies x4 by Marina Collard Company. On stage were 4 young female dancers Lorea Burge, Alice Labant, Mathilde Lepage Bagatta and Carolina Ravaioli – dressed in jeans and a pairing of blues and reddish tops. Sometimes they stood and gazed vacantly, other times they preened, sat, walked, jumped or danced; some lovely consecutive moves, responses, stopping and starting between the pairs. Behind them, ‘selfie shots’ – pictures of faces – built up in a mosaic of squares over the back screen and disappeared again to reappear in another configuration. The soundtrack a hubbub of background noise: talking, sometimes in English, sometimes in a foreign language, a lot of giggling and awkward noises, the clattering, clanking sounds of a canteen. The whole aptly expressing the isolating (alienating?) contentment and self absorption of selfie culture.  At the end we were treated to the two pairs becoming a four and posing for each other and us; a connection warmly appreciated by the audience. This work was a collaboration between Marina, Paul Whitty (sound/music) and Vicki Rucinska ( film/projection).