FIREDANCE REIGNITE 2023, Karen Hauer and Gorka Marquez, New Theatre Oxford, 5th March 2023 – Susie Crow reviews

Karen Hauer and Gorka Marquez, much admired and loved Strictly Come Dancing professional dancers, are the latest to bring a Strictly spin-off commercial dance show to Oxford. Produced and directed by Stuart Glover, with nimble choreography by Nathan Clarke, FIREDANCE REIGNITE 2023 is an updated version of an already successful show which combines sizzling dancing with spectacular fire performance. Crashing percussion and sudden flares, dancers in rippling silk skirts swirling and shooting upwards like flames in the darkness, heralded an action-packed show. A simple narrative of two dancers from rival houses meeting at the Festival of Fire and forging a passionate connection provides a minimal excuse for a succession of dances which combine a range of latin styles and lyrical barefoot contemporary, set to a playlist of great and familiar songs. A small ensemble of dancers including two expert fire performers switched and recombined and changed costumes to bring variety and visual drama to a simple black stage setting.

 

Varsity Dance Competition. St John’s College Oxford Auditorium, 12th February 2023 – Maggie Watson reports

Hilary (or ‘Lent’) Term can be bleak with its freezing weather and public examinations, so the 7th Annual Varsity Dance Competition on Sunday, at the start of Oxford’s Fifth Week, was a high spot of energy and warmth. This year, Oxford University Contemporary Dance (OUCD) was host to Cambridge University Dance Competition Team (CUDCT) for the event in St John’s College Auditorium, which buzzed with chatter as friends, families and dance fans crammed in. There were tantalising glimpses of competitors, with hair ready dressed and costumes concealed by their team tracksuits, and the audience was bursting with excitement by the time the Presenter, Leah Aspden, took the stage to open the match.

Varsity Dance pits each troupe against the other in seven categories: Tap; Jazz; Solo/Duet/Trio; Contemporary; Street; Ballet, and ‘Wildcard’. The winner must take at least four of them, and both teams were clearly ‘in it to win it’. Supporters cheered them on, whooping at virtuosic feats and applauding wildly after each dance. The judges sat alone and slightly apart from the tumultuously enthusiastic audience in their reserved row of seats, and without knowing which team was which, used clear scoring criteria to award marks for choreography, technique, performance and execution.

 

DANSOX Summer Schools, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford 11th-25th July 2022

Dance Scholarship Oxford (DANSOX) hosts no less than three exciting summer intensives this July. International artists, writers, choreographers and guests explore themes of creativity and dance-making in relation to other arts. Alice Oswald and Saju Hari explore epic through different media; Thomas Page Dances develops current research on Commonalities; emerging dancers at Rambert School and the Royal Scottish Conservatoire make new dance narratives by and about women.  Guest lecturers include international dance critic Alastair Macaulay and eminent biographer Lyndall Gordon. Visitors are welcome to drop in at any time to watch the processes unfolding, but do book places for the public sharing events listed below.

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

Alice Oswald with Saju Hari and Dancers 11th-14th July

Oxford’s Professor of Poetry Alice Oswald collaborates with internationally renowned contemporary Indian dance and martial arts expert Saju Hari, developing work for the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama All-Night Epic project to come in 2023.

Public Sharing including Q&A: 14th July 5.30pm

Thomas Page Dances: Commonalities 15th-20th July

Thomas Page Dances develops new dance work and discusses the themes of commonality in relation to dance theories, histories and practice.

Public Keynote Guest Lecture given by Alastair Macaulay: ‘Commonalities, Communities, Utopia’ 15th July 11.30am

Public Sharing of the work with Thomas Page Dances including Q&A: 20th July 5.30pm

Deborah Norris, Rambert School and Guests: Women and Choreography 21st-25th July

This exciting choreographic intensive brings together a group of students of the Rambert School and the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in classes and workshops with guest teachers Kate Flatt, Jennifer Jackson and Susie Crow, and to make new work.

Public Keynote Guest Lecture given by Lyndall Gordon: Charlotte Brontë (Villette) 21st July 5.30pm

Public Sharing of Woman-Made! An evening of new short ballets created by women including Q&A

25th July 5.30pm

To book for Keynote Lectures and Public Sharing events please email Professor Sue Jones here

 

Dance in Littlemore presents Dances for Peace and Planet: St Mary & St Nicholas Church Littlemore, 22nd May 2022

Dances for Peace and Planet is a collaboration between Oxford dancers, singers and musicians with St Mary & St Nicholas Church Littlemore, programmed by the church’s Musician in Residence Malcolm Atkins. This diverse programme, reflecting concerns of the current times and responding to the church’s beautiful space, will include performances by Nuzhat Abbas, Susie Crow, Helen Edwards, Jenny Parrott, Andy Solway, Lizzy Spight, Ségolène Tarte and Tingting Burnham Yang, as well as MUE, (dancer Macarena Ortuzar and musician Bruno Guastalla).

Performance: Sunday 22nd May 6.00pm

Venue: St Mary & St Nicholas Church, Cowley Road, ​Littlemore, Oxford OX4 4PP

Tickets: Donations on the door

Find out more about the arts at St Mary & St Nicholas Church here

The development of some work in this programme has been supported through the Oxford Dance Forum programme Creative Labs. Find out about Oxford Dance Forum here

 

ODF presents Dance Scratch Night, Arts at the Old Fire Station, 9th February 2022 – Maggie Watson reports

Wednesday 9th February saw the first Dance Scratch Night at the Old Fire Station since the start of the pandemic.   Three local makers, Pragna Das, Susie Crow and Helen Edwards shared new work with an audience, and invited feedback and suggestions during discussions moderated by Jenny Parrott on behalf of Oxford Dance Forum (ODF).  Although they work in different dance and movement genres, all three artists draw on a vast corpus of knowledge and understanding: for Pragna Das and Susie Crow, the heritage of Kathak and ballet; for Helen Edwards, Asian movement traditions including Butoh, and the ancient materiality of the natural world.

 

Oxford Dance Forum presents Dance Scratch Night, Arts at the Old Fire Station, 9th February 2022

Oxford Dance Forum are delighted finally to be back at Arts at the Old Fire Station to share an evening of new dance works in progress by ODF members, and invite feedback, comments and discussion with the audience.

Pragna Das – Bhoboghure

Moving ahead- sometimes it happens that we get stuck in a situation or a thing. This piece describes that feeling and the urge to move ahead, and how that process happens. The dilemma of being comfortable with people around, and when you are forced to move ahead without them as they were gone in the delinquent.

Susie Crow – Technical studies project

Over the course of the pandemic and under the limitations of lockdown I have been creating miniature dances arising from balletic technical challenges, that could be practised and performed at home. Western classical musicians have long written and published technical studies, making them available to all who wish to try playing them. I hope to make my dance studies similarly publicly available online, and am investigating appropriate formats and platforms for doing this.

Dancers: Ségolène Tarte, Evie Tucker and Thomas Page

Helen Edwards – Finding Stone

We are of the earth
Exploring a dialogue with stones found by the sea
Carrying these stones with me
My body feeling their weight, density, atmosphere and stories,
I am slowed by them,
Anchored in presence
The dance emerges from the body in the liminal spaces between the memories of stone and water
A residue of this ancient knowledge
The strata of life and layers of time

Date: Wednesday 9th February 7.30pm

Venue: Arts at the Old Fire Station, 40 George Street, Oxford OX1 2AQ

Tickets: £5 on the door or book online here

Oxford Dance Forum would like to thank Arts at the Old Fire Station and all their team for supporting this event.

Find out more about Oxford Dance Forum via the website here and on Facebook here

 

Serata Dantesca: a Sequence of Poetry, Music and Dance. Holywell Music Room, Oxford, 13th November 2021 – Maggie Watson reports

This was a beautifully planned evening of song, readings and dance, culminating in a performance of Franz Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi sonata. Presented by the Oxford Dante Society to mark the 700th anniversary of the death of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, it formed part of a season of Dante themed activities programmed and supported by TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, as part of their Humanities Cultural Programme.  There were some last minute changes: tenor Seb Hill had stepped in overnight learning three solos at short notice, and speaker Anthony Hunt was unable to attend; his essay was read by pianist Jonathan Katz, who devised the event and also acted as an informal master of ceremonies.

The programme included two original dances, created with the support of DANSOX, Dance Scholarship Oxford.  The first was ‘That even I’, a solo created with movement direction by Estela Merlos and danced by Thomasin Gülgeç to music by Joseph Kay made by sampling extracts of spoken word.  Merlos, Gülgeç and Kay have worked together before, notably at the DANSOX 2021 summer school, and this piece seemed a logical development of work they showed then, in respect of its intensity, the dancer’s close attentiveness to the score, and the sense that the work had grown as an organic whole.

The second dance, ‘In a dark wood’, a duo choreographed by Susie Crow to music by Jeremy Thurlow, conjured up Dante’s wanderings through the forest at the beginning of Canto 1 of the Inferno, initially alone and then under the tutelage of  Virgil.  Cameron Everitt, as Dante, seemed to move aside invisible curtains of foliage, weaving his way beneath branches until he encountered Virgil, a severe but charismatic figure danced by Nicholas Minns.  At the end, the two made a stately geometric progress, exchanging places in a square pattern, as if Virgil were formally opening the way for Dante to go through a door, and leading him further on. 

The tiny floor area in a fully lit hall with the audience looking down from above was a very exposed stage for all three dancers.  Gülgeç, Everitt and Minns were within touching distance of the spectators, but with their individual and distinctive dance styles, they succeeded in drawing us into their imaginary worlds.

The evening concluded with the Liszt sonata, played by Jonathan Katz, and preceded by Hunt’s introduction, which reminded us that Frederick Ashton used the music for his wartime ballet Dante Sonata; Dante’s poetry has long been an inspiration for dance, and this programme continued that tradition.

This event, and also the Oxford screening and discussion of choreographer Luc Petton’s ballet Ainsi la Nuit for human dancers, birds and animals, have been recorded and will become available on the TORCH YouTube channel.

Maggie Watson

28th November 2021

Find out more about and give your feedback on TORCH’s Dante 2021 Season here

Check out the Ashmolean exhibition Dante: the Invention of Celebrity here

Read Barbara Berrington’s account of a previous Dante programme Dante in the Chapel including choreography by Susie Crow here

 

‘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).

 

Lewys Holt double bill Phrases/Footnotes: streamed by Old Fire Station 1st May 2021 – Susie Crow reviews

Lewys Holt is billed as an “interdisciplinary dance artist”.  His double bill of two extended performance pieces cannot really be described as primarily dance solos – involving, as they do, not only Holt’s particular movement, collapsing and reconstituting itself in wayward unexpected ways, but also articulate verbal narrative and interjections of projected images, sound and music.  A studio setting provides a small performing space demarcated by a black curtain with simple white chair and table; but shifting camera work allow viewers to glimpse behind and around it the clutter of a working space and its prosaic furnishings, with radiators, coarse chipboard, and miscellaneous equipment pushed aside – in contrast to the unrealistic abstracted framing of theatre’s conventional black box.  A masked collaborative technical team visible filming from different angles or following Holt within the performing space are occasionally drawn into his rambling monologue to answer questions and offer comments or suggestions.  

 

French Schooling: Paris Opera Ballet Gala, Palais Garnier, 27th January 2021 – Susie Crow reviews

One of the few benefits of lockdown has been the proliferation of dance teaching material online.  The ability to watch and sample ballet classes from all over the world has enabled comparison and reflection on the characteristics and relative merits of different methods of schooling, which one would normally have little opportunity either to observe or experience.  Recent trawling for fresh ideas for my Zoom teaching lead me to look closely at films documenting the classes and pedagogic approaches of two established and respected teachers from the Paris Opera Ballet and its school, Alexandre Kalioujny and Raymond Franchetti.  Of Russian origin but born and brought up in Prague, Kalioujny had a long association with the company, initially as a dancer, but later after a distinguished performing career as a teacher of its leading dancers, forging a close relationship with Rudolf Nureyev who greatly respected his work.  His alumni include luminaries Elisabeth Platel and Charles Jude, who for the film La Classe d’ Alexandre Kalioujny teach a class demonstrating and explaining some of the principles and concerns which informed his teaching, shaping future generations of French ballet dancers. 

Discussion about this prompted a colleague to point me to a documentary about the teaching of Raymond Franchetti, himself a pupil of the renowned French teacher Gustave Ricaux, and dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet, before becoming a hugely respected teacher in his own right and subsequently Director of Dance at the Paris Opera in the 1970s.  A short but very informative documentary follows a class taught by Franchetti, interspersed with his own forthright observations on ballet technique and pedagogy, interview material, and reminiscences of historic dance studios. On 27^th January the Paris Opera Ballet staged its grand opening Gala in the Palais Garnier; having studied these classes I was very keen to watch this programme, to see how the ethos and technique of the dancing visible in the studio translated into performance.