Remembering Sir Robert Cohan: Yorke Dance Project presented by The Grace Project, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building 28th-29th 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

 

Figure Ground: Yorke Dance Project at Swindon Dance, 27 February 2015 – Maggie Watson reviews

Yorke Dance Project’s Figure Ground is a glorious evening of pure dance. To see three really good new dance works and a revival of another in one programme was a rare treat.

The evening at Swindon Dance opened with a short original piece by students, that drew on ideas and movement motifs that would be seen later on. The programme proper then began with Charlotte Edmonds’ No Strings Attached to a score by Michael Gordon. It opens to the sound of rainfall with three men (Jonathan Goddard, Benjamin Warbis and Edd Mitton) powerfully dominating the space in full pliés in second with their arms extended, seeming to fill the stage. They are joined by Laurel Dalley Smith, Amy Thake and Hannah Windows, but the dancers work more as a group than as three pairs. Edmonds’ response to the music is subtle, using the underlying pulses and not just the more obvious surface rhythms for her movement patterns. Nothing is predictable, there are hints of narrative or relationships – here, the notion of the group and those outside the group; there, the suggestion of a couple – and she creates balance on stage without resorting to the purely symmetrical in this very satisfying work.