DANSOX hosts New Movement Collective open rehearsal, Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, St Hilda’s College, Oxford. 18th July 2023 – Maggie Watson reports

On Tuesday evening, DANSOX hosted an open rehearsal of extracts from the choreographic research developed by the New Movement Collective (NMC) during a three-day residency at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. Introduced by Professor Sue Jones, producer Malgorzata (Gosia) Dzierzon explained that she and the other four dancers (Patricia Okenwa, Gemma Nixon, Juliana Javier and Eryck Brahmania) had been working collectively on a rewriting of Bronislava Nijinska’s ballet Les Noces (1923). This is a completely new dance work, but like Nijinska’s ballet, NMC’s work conveyed a strong sense that it was set in a deeply traditional society in which the wishes and desires of the individual are sublimated to the interests of the group.