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.

 

Twenty: Yorke Dance Project’s 20th anniversary season, Swindon Dance, 26th April 2019 – Maggie Watson reviews

This was a stunning evening of new dance works, alongside extracts from Kenneth MacMillan’s newly revived ballet Playground.  The curtain raiser Who’s It?!, choreographed collaboratively by Edd Mitton and Jordi Calpe Serrats with students from the Centre for Advanced Training at Swindon Dance Centre, was an ingenious preparation for MacMillan’s deeply disturbing work with its references to children’s games. In the duets from Playground that followed, Oxana Panchenko as the Girl with make-up and Jonathan Goddard as The Youth portrayed an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship, enmeshed within violent and coercive social forces, in a ballet that pushes game-playing to a horrible conclusion.