Lost Dog Dance presents Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me), North Wall, 19th November 2015

Returning to The North Wall Lost Dog Dance presents Paradise Lost (lies unopened beside me).  Milton’s epic poem is brought to life in this one-man dance theatre adaptation, featuring words, dance and an electric soundtrack.  Tens of characters and tens of thousands of lines of poetry relayed in one hour by one man who promises to dance the complicated bits…

Ben Duke tells the epic story of the banishment of Satan from Heaven, the creation of Earth, the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden through words, music and dance. By himself. Paradise Lost follows Lost Dog’s previous literary adaptation, Like Rabbits, which was based on the Virginia Woolf short story Lappin and Lapinova, and was devised by Ben Duke in collaboration with Lucy Kirkwood (Chimerica).

 

Lost Dog in Like Rabbits at The North Wall, Saturday 24th January – Susie Crow reviews

Male choreographers seem currently to be looking to Virginia Woolf for story lines; later this year Wayne McGregor will be presenting his full length Woolf Works for the Royal Ballet, but right now at a much smaller scale Lost Dog is touring Like Rabbits, a collaboration between choreographer Ben Duke and playwright Lucy Kirkwood based on Woolf’s delicate and dark short story Lappin and Lapinova. This fifty minute two hander performed by Duke and Ino Riga updates Woolf’s story of a relationship in which the fanciful playing out of the roles of King Rabbit and his queen by a newlywed couple gradually give way to a darker reality in their marriage.

 

Like Rabbits: Lost Dog at The North Wall Saturday 24th January

A forthcoming chance at The North Wall to see an award winning dance theatre company for the first time in Oxford.   Artistic Director of Lost Dog Ben Duke collaborates with multi-award winning playwright Lucy Kirkwood on a new work Like Rabbits inspired by Virginia Woolf’s short story Lappin and Lapinova.  In this quietly devastating new work for two performers, a man and a woman meet and have sex and fall deeply in love. Each night the lovers slip away from their real lives into a world that exists only in their shared imagination: a world that belongs to them, in which tax returns and shopping lists and commuting do not exist; a world in which they are not their normal selves, but King of the Rabbits and Queen of the Hares. But what begins as a game soon becomes a battleground, and the couple hurtle towards a tragedy of the saddest, and most ordinary kind.