The Chosen, Company Chordelia at The North Wall, 14th September 2019 – Susie Crow reviews

Company Chordelia arrived for their third visit to Oxford’s North Wall with their latest production The Chosen garlanded with four and five star credits following a successful opening at this year’s Edinburgh Festival. While touring extensively north of the border this Scotland based company does very few performances in the south, so Oxford audiences are lucky to see it, and to have been able to trace the development of the company’s distinctive style through earlier works about legendary dancer Nijinsky, and Lady Macbeth. Director Kally Lloyd-Jones’ latest piece is a moving meditation on life and death, an intense hour which nevertheless reaches out directly to engage emotionally with its audience; a company of fine dancers come across as believable individuals whose moods and travails we can all identify with.

 

Company Chordelia presents The Chosen, The North Wall, 14th September 2019

The award-winning Company Chordelia (Nijinsky’s Last Jump, Lady Macbeth: Unsex Me Here) return to The North Wall with their latest production, direct from its world premiere at Edinburgh Fringe 2019.  Created and directed by Kally Lloyd-Jones, The Chosen is an intensely moving dance piece about dying and embracing the art of living.

How do we choose to live in the face of the inevitable and how do we think about the final stage of our life cycle? Increasingly, as medicine advances, knowledge of imminent death has become a reality for everyone; The Chosen addresses our individual mortality from the shifting perspectives of ourselves and our loved ones.

“elegant and eviscerating” ***** The Stage

Performance:  Saturday 14th September 8.00pm

Venue:  The North Wall Arts Centre, South Parade, Oxford OX2 7JN

Tickets:  Full Price: £16, Concessions: £14, Members: 15% off

Available online here, or call the Box Office on 01865 319450

Age Guidance: 12+

Dance Audience Club 6.30pm

If you are curious about dance, but sometimes feel a bit stumped about how to process it or talk about it, then Dance Audience Club is for you! A friendly, informal opportunity to give language to an art experience that can sometimes feel a bit difficult to pin down.

This pre-show discussion is an independent project led by Miranda Laurence, supported by The North Wall and Oxford Dance Forum. It’s free to take part, with discounted tickets to The Chosen. To book your place, email Amy Walters on waltersa@thenorthwall.com

Open Rehearsal 2pm – 5pm

Drop in to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of The Chosen as part of Oxford Open Doors.

Find out more about Company Chordelia here

 

Lady Macbeth: unsex me here. Company Chordelia at The North Wall, 26 October 2016 – Maggie Watson reviews

Kally Lloyd-Jones’ Lady Macbeth: unsex me here is a riveting exploration of the psychology of Lady Macbeth, which both moves and shocks, exposing the vulnerabilities that lie beneath the face of evil. The work opens with three men, seated at their dressing tables, one behind the other across the back of the stage, preparing their makeup. A long white nightgown hangs beside each mirror, and we know that they are transforming themselves from man to woman. As in Nijinsky’s Last Jump (shown at The North Wall in May this year) Lloyd-Jones blurs the line between preparation and performance and uses simultaneous portrayal of the same character by different performers to illuminate hidden layers of her subject’s personality.

 

Company Chordelia present Lady Macbeth: unsex me here, The North Wall, 26th October 2016

Following the success last year of Nijinsky’s Last Jump Company Chordelia return to The North Wall for the only performance of their new dance theatre show south of the border.  Lady Macbeth: unsex me here is an exciting and unique piece of dance theatre is created and directed by award winning company Artistic Director Kally Lloyd-Jones and presented in co-production with Solar Bear.

Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and programmed here as part of Shakespeare Oxford 2016 celebrations, Lady Macbeth: unsex me here explores one of Shakespeare’s most complex women. Ambition, power, guilt, remorse, loss, death. Paralleling Shakespeare’s time, a cast of three male dancers all play Lady Macbeth, exploring the relationship between masculinity and femininity.  Using Shakespeare’s language as the source, British Sign Language is used to create choreography, producing a piece of visceral dance & movement theatre which will reach D/deaf and hearing audiences alike, in different ways.

Kally Lloyd-Jones said, ‘Lady Macbeth is a fascinating character but her story recedes into the background in Shakespeare’s play and I wanted to shine a light on it, colour it in, bring it to the fore. I am sure many people, like me, find themselves fascinated by the BSL interpreters at performances. It is a visual, movement language and I have wanted to explore how that might become a foundation for choreography. I was thrilled when Gerry Ramage, Artistic Director of Solar Bear, loved the idea so much that the company became our invaluable co-producers.  Using Shakespeare’s text as a starting point enabled a process that is part BSL-based choreography, part dance and part physical theatre, as universal visual languages.’

Gerry Ramage, Artistic Director Solar Bear said, ‘Solar Bear is delighted to be working Company Chordelia on Lady Macbeth: unsex me here. This ground-breaking new work, which explores how British Sign Language may be interwoven into the physical language of the piece, continues our journey towards enriching the theatre going experience for D/deaf and hearing audiences alike. It is a stunning, powerful and very moving piece of dance and theatre and we are proud to be associated with it.’

Date:  Wednesday 26th October, 8.00pm

Venue:  The North Wall Arts Centre, South Parade, Oxford OX2 7JN

Tickets:  £16, £13 concessions

Book online here or by telephone: 01865 319450

You can find more information about Company Chordelia here

Read Maggie Watson’s review of Company Chordelia’s previous performance at The North Wall of  Nijinsky’s Last Jump here

 

Nijinsky’s Last Jump: Company Chordelia at The North Wall, 4 May 2016 – Maggie Watson reviews

We know a great deal, yet very little, about Nijinsky.  The traces of his life, his dancing and his choreography have been used to create biographies, reconstructions, plays, films, novels and documentaries, but we can never, of course, recreate the experience of watching him dance.  Kally Lloyd-Jones’ work addresses a very specific aspect of Nijinsky’s life; his tragic descent into madness.  Nijinsky’s Last Jump asks what happens when someone loses touch with what the rest of the world considers to be reality.

At the start, we encounter Old Nijinsky (James Bryce), confined within a set that represents both the asylum and the theatre (the flowers, the dressing table, the posters), before his younger self (Darren Brownlie) leaps through the window stage right and collapses panting on the floor.  We know from Old Nijinsky’s ports de bras, the costume and the music that this is Le Spectre de la Rose, and throughout the work Lloyd-Jones uses musical references to conjure up instantly the ballets that shaped and punctuated Nijinsky’s life.

 

Nijinsky’s Last Jump: Company Chordelia at The North Wall, Wednesday 4th May 2016

The North Wall is delighted to announce that Scotland-based Company Chordelia will bring Nijinsky’s Last Jump to Oxford as the only English venue on its UK tour.  At Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015, the show gained wide acclaim amongst critics, described by The Guardian as ‘one of the gems of this year’s Edinburgh fringe.’

Created, directed and choreographed by Company Chordelia’s Artistic Director Kally Lloyd-Jones,  Nijinsky’s Last Jump combines theatre and dance to evoke the legendary 20th Century dancer Vaslav Nijinky’s journey from global success to the desolate isolation of mental illness. As the passionate obsession of the young Nijinsky (Darren Brownlie) comes face to face with the searching inner life of the older Nijinsky (James Bryce), this sharp and tender show portrays a poignant intimacy of genius and madness, youth and age, both the performing and private self.  Inspired by the rhythmic obsession of Nijinsky’s diaries, Young and Old Nijinsky consider their life together, on and off stage, trying to make sense of the loss of self.