California Connections: Yorke Dance Project at The Mill, Banbury, 6th December 2023 – Maggie Watson reviews

Yorke Dance Project is a small company with huge impact, and their 25 year anniversary programme, California Connections, is of exceptionally high quality and interest. On 6th December at The Mill, Banbury, they showed three works honouring pioneering women of dance: a one-act ‘chamber’ version of Kenneth MacMillan’s Isadora (based on the life of Isadora Duncan); Martha Graham’s Errand into the Maze, and Bella Lewitzky’s Meta 4. Progressing from narrative, to metaphor, to the abstract, the evening tracked a passage through some of the many ways in which dance can capture and express the essence of human experience.

MacMillan’s Isadora is a choreographic tour de force in which the complex partnering seems driven by power-relationships. Through dance, we see Duncan’s raw desire for Gordon Craig (Eric Caterer Cave); the agonised grief she shares with Paris Singer (Edd Mitton); her attempt at distraction with the Beach Boy (Pierre Tappon), and finally her emotional subjugation to Sergei Esenin (Harry Wilson).

 

DANSOX Autumn 2023 season: Four events in the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building (JdP), St Hilda’s College Oxford, featuring Professor Stephanie Jordan lecture ‘Serial Stravinsky Dances: Choreomusical Discoveries with Balanchine’, new film of MacMillan’s ‘Sea of Troubles’, ‘Homage to Nijinska’, with Avatâra Ayuso & Dame Monica Mason, and ‘On Bella Lewitzky’, Yolande Yorke-Edgell and dancers with John Pennington – Maggie Watson reports

The DANSOX Autumn 2023 season looks both forward and backwards, exploring ways in which scholarly investigation and practitioners’ bodily memories can enable today’s dancers and audiences to rediscover the life and meaning of 20th century dances in new cultural contexts.

Professor Stephanie Jordan’s lecture ‘Serial Stravinsky Dances: Choreomusical Discoveries with Balanchine’ (10 October 2023), drew upon her analytical film project with New York City Ballet (NYCB) dancers, ‘Music Dances; Balanchine Choreographs Stravinsky’ (2002). Jordan started working on Agon (1957) in 1993, and her presentation showed how musical analysis, allied with meticulous attention to detail, clarifies the structural patterns within the dancing. Clapping and counting, she explained how the dance moves around and within the music, criss-crossing it in a dynamic interaction, finding the pulse in moments of silence and making the musical score visible. Snatches of film contrasted performances by Wendy Whelan and Violette Verdy, and showed how the dance had changed over time; Jordan singled out a particular plié in second position on pointe, and noted that there is a lot of room in Balanchine to do things in different ways. Richard Alston, speaking from the floor, described watching NYCB performances during Balanchine’s life time, and reminisced about dancers such as Allegra Kent, who seemed to inhabit the music without recourse to counting, and Suzanne Farrell, who was always taking risks and pushed her balance to extremes.