DANSOX presents Yolande Yorke-Edgell and Yorke Dance IMPRINT; Jacqueline du Pré Building, St Hilda’s College Oxford, 9th March 2024

DANSOX is thrilled to welcome back Yolande Yorke-Edgell to discuss Yorke Dance‘s new programme and to premiere an exciting new commission, A Point of Balance.

Yorke-Edgell discusses her influences and inspiration/mentors – Martha Graham, Richard Alston, Bella Lewitzky, Kenneth MacMillan and Robert Cohan, with film and live showings of their choreography .

The programme closes with Yorke-Edgell’s A Point of Balance, an exciting new work commissioned by Dance Scholarship Oxford and supported by Sheila Forbes.

Dancers: Ellie Ferguson, Edd Mitton, Abigail Attard Montalto and guest artist Eileih Muir.

Date: Saturday 9th March 4.00-5.15pm

Venue: Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

Duration: 1 hour 30 minutes

Tickets: You can book your ticket online here

This event is free, but please consider making a small donation (suggested donation £5) to help DANSOX cover costs. To donate, please use this link: https://www.st-hildas.ox.ac.uk/givefordansox

If you have any problems with reserving a space, please feel free to contact Ruth at ruththrush1@gmail.com

 

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.

 

Connecting to Cohan: a special evening of dance honouring Robert Cohan, presented by Yorke Dance Project. The Mill Banbury, 14 May 2022 – Maggie Watson reviews

Yorke Dance Project’s Connecting to Cohan evening at The Mill Banbury fell into three parts: five solo dances drawn from Robert Cohan’s last work Afternoon Conversations with Dancers; an on-stage discussion between Richard Alston, Yolande Yorke-Edgell and Laurel Dalley Smith, and finally Lockdown Portraits, a film showing seven of the solos, filmed on locations chosen by Cohan.

Cohan’s last dances are intensely moving.  He consulted Alston about his recent work shortly before embarking on the project, and Alston responded that the group dances Cohan was creating were similar to his earlier works, but the solos were completely original and new.  Cohan went on to create Afternoon Conversations with Dancers, a collection of eight solos on which he worked collaboratively in dialogue with each dancer, exchanging ideas in words and movement, initially in the studio and then during lockdown over Zoom.

 

‘Dance as Grace: Paradoxes and Possibilities’: two TORCH seminars with live dance performances from Yorke Dance Project. Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College Oxford, 18th & 19th June 2021 – Maggie Watson reports

The Grace Project is an interdisciplinary investigation into the concept of ‘grace’ in all its forms, which evolved from the research of Professor Sue Jones on literature and dance.  Grace has been central to the development of dance aesthetics, but it has also been challenged by practitioners of modern and contemporary dance.  These two seminars, which were attended by socially-distanced groups of academics, practitioners and interested local people, interrogated the question of what constitutes grace by examining five contrasting dances performed by, and discussed with, members of the Yorke Dance Project led by Yolande Yorke-Edgell.

The dancers presented works by Robert Cohan, Kenneth MacMillan and Yorke-Edgell, the latter consciously channelling the influences of Richard Alston and Bella Lewitzky (who was herself influenced by the choreographer Lester Horton).

 

DANSOX Inaugural Summer School, St Hilda’s College Oxford 6th-8th July 2019

The DANSOX Inaugural Summer School will be taking taking place 6-8th July at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, attracting a unique mix of dance academics and artist practitioners in a rich programme of seminars, practical lecture demonstrations and special dance film and book presentations.

Alastair Macaulay, former Chief Dance Critic at the New York Times, leads the three-day event with lectures on three master choreographers: Petipa, Balanchine and Cunningham.  Seminars will include presentations by dance scholars including Julia Bührle, Renate Bräuninger, Gabriela Minden, Margaret Watson, Fiona Macintosh and Tom Sapsford.  Lecture demonstrations will include Moira Goff on 17th century and baroque dance, Susie Crow and pianist Jonathan Still on the ballet class (with dancers Ben Warbis and Ellie Ferguson of Yorke Dance Project), and Jennifer Jackson with composer Tom Armstrong on music and choreographic practice.  Sir Richard Alston will talk about the influence of Merce Cunningham on his work, including a solo performance by Elly Braund.  Lynne Wake will present her recent film Bejart and Queen, and the event culminates in the eagerly anticipated launch of Nadine Meisner‘s biograpy of Marius Petipa.

Dates:  Saturday 6th -Monday 8th July 2019

Venue:  St Hilda’s College, Cowley Place, Oxford OX4 1DY

To celebrate the inauguration of this special event, DANSOX is offering one-off specially discounted tickets: £15.00 daily ticket, £30.00 for a three-day ticket.
All are welcome. Come for a day or two, or for the whole three days. Refreshments and lunch provided for ticket holders.
Booking essential at Eventbrite https://dansoxsummerschool.eventbrite.co.uk

Download the full programme here

Accommodation available in St Hilda’s College – contact Sarah Brett
Further information from the Programme Director: Professor Susan Jones.

We hope to see you there!

 

 

Twenty: Yorke Dance Project in works by MacMillan, Cohan, Stoller and Yorke-Edgell, Mill Arts Centre Banbury 4th April 2019

Yorke Dance Project currently celebrates 20 years of performing inspiring dance by past masters and emerging artists from the UK and USA. This celebratory programme features works by world renowned choreographers Kenneth MacMillan and Robert Cohan alongside emerging Los Angeles choreographer Sophia Stoller with a commissioned score by Justin Scheid. Completing the programme is an exciting new work by artistic director Yolande Yorke-Edgell. April brings a not to be missed opportunity to see the company at the Mill Arts Centre, Banbury.

MacMillan’s Playground is one of the featured works in this anniversary programme, its first restaging since its premiere at the 1979 Edinburgh Festival and performed to music by Gordon Crosse. Costumes and set have been reimagined by Charlotte MacMillan.  Also featured is Cohan’s Communion set to music by Nils Frahm and designed by past Cohan collaborator from London Contemporary Dance Theatre,  John B Read.  Completing the programme is a Cohan Collective commission from Stoller and composer Justin Scheid Between and Within. The final work Imprint by Yorke-Edgell reflects her own experience of working with dance legends Richard Alston, Bella Lewtizky and Robert Cohan.  With highly acclaimed and athletic dancers performing engaging, thought provoking and enlightening new work, this is a rare evening of exceptional dance.

Dancers for the tour of this programme include wonderful guest artists Jonathan Goddard, Romany Pajdak (Royal Ballet Company), Dane Hurst, and Oxana Panchenko (Michael Clark Company). Ben Warbis will be returning to YDP as will last year’s apprentice, Ellie Ferguson, dancing alongside company members Edd Mitton, Abigail Attard Montalto and Freya Jeffs.  Yorke Dance Project is also excited to be working again with lighting designer Zeynep Kepekli.

The performance at Banbury will include a curtain raiser by The Mill’s own Remarkable Dance Company.

Performance:  Thursday 4th April 7.30pm

Venue:  The Mill Arts Centre, Spiceball Park, Banbury, Oxfordshire OX16 5QE

Tickets:  from £15, book online here or call the Box Office on 01295 279002

Find out more about Yorke Dance Project here