GOlive Oxford Burton Taylor Studio 18th July – Nicholas Minns reviews

Critic turned critic-entrepreneur Donald Hutera is creating and curating opportunities for dancers to perform who might otherwise have few occasions to show their work. Oxford is a first for GOlive and there is a further outing at the Chesil Theatre in Winchester on July 24. The venues are small — the original GOlive venue at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town holds 60 people and the Burton-Taylor studio seats 50 — but their intimacy works well for the small-scale works Hutera is presenting. One of the advantages of this proximity is the value given to the subtleties of communication; there are elements of this evening’s program that provide a master class in the art of integrating the head and eyes in the moving body, a vital aspect that is all too often overlooked in dance training.

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Dance Traditions with a Mythical Bite: GOlive Festival 2015 Burton Taylor Studio 17th July – Barbara Berrington reflects

Getting a ticket to a dance programme arouses comfortable expectations of pleasure – of colour, patterning and conformity. In Oxford’s Burton Taylor studio last week, Donald Hutera’s GOlive programme was satisfyingly full of all of these – but it was also never predictable, oddly fragmented and often deeply unsettling. And in my head the after-images are of faces as much as of body shapes – a heat of emotional impact – a sense of hope – a touch of catharsis.

The very ordering of the programme forced strange juxtapositions. It began with what Shane Shambhu described as his “lecture-demonstration” – a cogent dance drama through which his personal narrative wove a coherent thread. Twenty-seven years of bharatanatyam dance gave his work an assured technical underpinning. But it was its immediacy and variety that made it so accessible to academic, pensioner and child in the fifty-strong studio audience. For this was a narrative that flowed by Nritta – by taps and clicks and thumps – through sounds vocal and guttural – as well as by the mime and dance of Natya, the shifting registers of formal delivery, of conversational English, of interactive name games and the musicality of Shane’s native Kerala tongue. Never before have I been more aware of dance as one member of so intimately interconnected a family of languages.

 

GOlive Festival 2015 Burton Taylor Studio 18th July 2015 – Philippa Newis reviews

We are up close and personal in the Burton Taylor Studio at the Oxford Playhouse.  Presenting dance in small space makes fresh demands on performers as well as those of us watching.  The proximity of the dancers intensifies the experience. The degree of intimacy is a little unsettling, but we are a friendly crowd and a warm camaraderie fuels goodwill.

Curated by Donald Hutera, GOlive is in its third year.  Introducing the programme Hutera is like a kid in a sweet shop and his enthusiasm is infectious.  All six works had something new to offer.  My Own Private Movie choreographed and performed by Susan Kempster involves some of the audience entering the performance space and engaging in very simple improvisations. Kempster gives us all MP3 players with unique soundtracks.  In something akin to my daily commute, my head and my body are in two different places.  And perhaps this is Kempster’s point, the delicious contradiction of social media: together and not together, caught between the virtual and the physical but unable to belong wholly to either.

 

GOlive Oxford 2015, curated by Donald Hutera. Burton Taylor Studio, 15 July 2015

Donald Hutera has brought Oxford a remarkable programme of innovative dance, which is also an exciting opportunity to see local artists’ work in a broader context.

The evening opened with Marina Collard’s And So It Goes On, a beautifully thought out dance that combined live performance and film. Collard danced in relation to her filmed image, projected onto the brick wall at the back of the stage, in a work full of subtle reflections and repetitions. Elegant, intense, yet restrained, the vertical focus of the live dance on the flat floor in front gained an added dimension from the video beside it, not only because there seemed to be a second dancer moving in a different plane, but also because the feeling of a raked stage at a different angle behind. Next, Oxford hip hop dancers Beat Street followed with Heart Cry, a graceful and surprisingly gentle work performed by three young men, who used the genre in an original and unusual way.