Back on the dance festival write-ups. Week 3 was one of contrasts – from mass-audience outdoor stuff to more intimate audiences and with performers from many different countries all sharing the same stages.
Monday 3 May
It was the Bank Holiday and we went back to watch Utopia again. What we were going to do was get a bunch of people filming from different places around Victoria Sq and then edit it together. What we didn’t realise is that the time had been brought forward, so we arrived while it was halfway through. That was disappointing. Still, it was good to see the cossack dancers again.
Strictly’s the kind of thing I avoid like the plague, so I had to be fed snippets of info about the various dancers and their back-stories by my better-informed companion for the evening (cheers, Ellie).
The dancers were, of course, excellent. Despite the fake tan, sequins and fixed grins, you can’t escape the fact that these are no fools. It was the ladies who impressed most, doing the same as the men but backwards and in heels (and usually spinning too).
Leaving aside the more snobbish criticisms (and I’ve got em), what I disliked about Strictly was the speed of it. In order to achieve maximum dazzle everything was performed as if it was sped up, providing a kind of visual chipmunk effect. Quite often the ladies were flung around the stage with such force that they seemed to be doing all they could to stay upright in those heels (which, of course, they did).
Oh, and while we were supposedly shown a range of dance styles over the course of the evening, everything (ballroom, flamenco, salsa, swing) looked like a Strictly dance.
It was entertaining, it just wasn’t my thing.
Tuesday 5 May
A slightly more rarified experience was Complot, performed by Chanta La Mui at the Town Hall. This promised to be flamenco as they’re performing it in Madrid these days. I’d attended a press call earlier in the day and chatted with the show’s promoter, Ana Garcia, who’d explained that the dance form was constantly evolving with new elements brought in regularly, but that this didn’t tend to be reflected in the styles of flamenco shown outside of London.
It was a good show – I’ve not really got into flamenco, but there was enough to hold my interest and make me wish that there had been a slightly larger audience in attendance. The bits that I remember most clearly are:
the sweat that flicked off the head of the male dancers – it’s the level of effort that goes into creating that power and grace on stage that impresses me most, and that applies equally to flamenco as it does to streetdance and ballet
the music, and the singing in particular, which really wasn’t my cup of tea
a part that involved some incredibly fast, rhythmic stamping by all three dancers that left me wondering ‘….how?!’
Friday 7 May
The predicted highlight of my week was Akram Khan Company performing Gnosis at the Town Hall. It turned out to be a show of two halves. The first left me cold – starting well enough but giving way to an improv session that didn’t do much for me (it had been a long day). Akram was chattier than expected though, and a genial host. He also recommended that those of us in the stalls find our way to the balcony for the second half which we duly did.
The second half was the main event – a duet between Akram and Yoshie Sunahata, a beautiful and incredibly talented kodo drummer who also danced and sang. The piece was inspired by the Mahabharata story of Queen Ghandari, who blindfolded herself for life to follow her blind husband.
My dance review vocabulary lets me down at this point – all I can say is that, against a stark black stage, the pair managed to create an entirely engrossing world of their own in which they told an affecting story.
As with the flamenco, I’m left with two particularly strong details:
Queen Ghandari raising her son by means of pushing, pulling and guiding with her stick which managed to convey all manner of motherly emotion; and
the dramatic ending – Akram Khan stood front and centre, spasming and convulsing with increasing violence, his body threatening to tear itself apart. A jaw-dropping end to a great show.
This was the busiest week and the one in which my jaw hit the ground more often than medical advice recommends (metaphorically speaking, obv).
Tuesday 27 April
Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Magia de la Danza is selection of the company’s greatest hits, starting with a scene from Giselle that simultaneously made me look forward to Friday and reminded me of just how scary a flock of ballerinas can be.
The show was good – nicely paced, although a few dancers didn’t seem quite on their A game; there was nearly quite a bad drop and one of the ballerinas was quite noticeably straining during her solo. For all that, it’d be unfair not to mention that another dancer received gasps and applause for the length of time she held a particularly difficult position.
Carlos Acosta paid a visit during this performance too. I gather that some people weren’t best pleased that he only put in a short cameo but he didn’t need long to prove his chops. I’ve not got the vocab or level of appreciation to spot what was better about his dancing, he just seemed better.
For all that, perhaps the most impressive performance of the night was put in by Alicia Alonso, the company’s octogenarian founder, receiving the crowd’s applause at the end before going on to conduct a series of interviews and (if reports are true) stay up and put away her fair share of rum.
Wednesday 28 April
This was the one that I’d been looking forward to most – the teenage boy in me drawn to the Shaolin monks of Sutra before anything else.
It was a great show too with ingenious use of props. If there’s a gripe then it was that I’d like to have seen more martial art tomfoolery and less furniture shifting. There was a sense that the monks were performing within themselves a certain amount – the way they lined up to cartwheel and showboat across the stage at the end showed they had some spare energy to expend. It was great to see some personality in amongst that showboating too.
This was also the night that I had the strongest sense that the festival was a major event. At a reception just before the show, David Massingham pointed out that the Hippodrome and REP were both sold out, with a good crowd at the Patrick Centre too. More than 3000 people watching dance in Birmingham on a Wednesday night. Epic.
Thursday 29 April
I didn’t get to see much of the Outspoken programme of dance from the Arab world but I made a point of catching the first event – a screening of a work in progress documentary, Dancing Under Crossfire, which tells the story of an Iraqi dance group made up of dancers now living in Europe. It was good to get another perspective – while we were enjoying a deluge of dance in Birmingham, Baghdad’s contemporary dance scene is apparently just about non-existent.
After Tuesday’s sneak peek it was back to the Hippodrome for Ballet Nacional de Cuba’s Giselle. None of the shakiness of the other evening, everything ran smoothly. The first half was pretty but felt a little over-long (I’ve discovered very traditional ballet isn’t really my thing) but things picked up after the interval, with a darker mood and astoundingly regimented ballerinas dancing in tight formation.
I can’t leave this one without saying Giselle shouldn’t have bothered to save Albrecht and Hilarion, who was drowned in a lake by the Wilis, didn’t deserve to be treated the way he was. Where’s the justice?
Saturday 1 May
In 2008 I went to watch the big public IDFB spectacle in Victoria Square – it was probably the dance performance that made me think that dance was something I could see myself getting into. This year we had Utopia taking over the same space with an international mix of folk dances and The Destroyers.
It was a great show – the band sounded ace, with Paul Murphy in his element. The rain held off (for the first performance – the evening one was cancelled) and a sizeable crowd were there to appreciate it, with the cossack dancers getting the biggest cheers.
The performers looked like they had a fantastic time too. Such was the response, it sounds like it might now be adapted for the stage. Quite right too.
Circa was on that evening at the REP. It looked interesting and had been talked up by a few people but I didn’t buy tickets until the morning of the show. By that time there were only a handful left. I was so glad I didn’t miss out on it.
I’m not sure what to say about this one. In purely descriptive terms it was a mix of circus skills, sports acrobatics, gymnastics, contemporary dance and breakdancing.
That doesn’t quite cover it though. The things those people did on stage defied belief. The audience was the noisiest I encountered but that was no-one’s fault – we’re talking gasps, squeals, laughs of disbelief, outbreaks of applause… that kind of thing.
Over the past month I went to 18 performances as part of International Dance Festival Birmingham. I figured I should probably write about them.
Monday 19 April
Things kicked off with Dancing the Waterways at midday – there were speeches, David Massingham flung a bottle of champers against the side of a canal barge and we (the small crowd assembled around Brindley Place) were treated to an extract from the boat-specific dance piece called Canal Work Dances.
After that I hot-footed it over to see Temperamento Español performing in Stratford-upon-Avon for United Colours of Dance Out & About. I’d see the same flamenco dancers in Utopia in Birmingham in a few weeks time.
Tuesday 20 April
Not a dance performance but still part of the festival, Dancing on Thin Ice was a debate on the future of public investment in the creative industries.
Politicians representing the various parties joined Marc Reeves and Rosie Millard. I was liveblogging this from the back so, although I was concentrating on what everyone was saying and trying to convey it to the online audience, I didn’t get much of a chance to think about the various arguments very much. The general feeling was that, with an election close, no-one was willing to give too much away.
It was all quite (too?) good-natured, although Sion Simon and Marc Reeves both tried to inject a bit of feistiness.
Thursday 22 April
The ‘proper’ festival launch was just prior to Mark Morris Dance Group’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato. It started well, with the dancers running between each other at such speed that someone behind me gasped.
I remember that it was a beautiful production – delicate and deft movements in pastel shades – and occasionally amusing too. I enjoyed it a lot, although I was happy by the interval and the second-half, while just as good as the first, didn’t really add much more.
It occurs that, a month on, it hasn’t had much of a lasting effect on me and I’m struggling to think of much to say about it. Perhaps that’s because of the show I saw the next night.
Friday 23 April
I’d followed the development of Rosie Kay’s 5 Soldiers: The Body is the Frontline for a little while. I’d popped into the studio a few times, edited some early rehearsal footage into a 3min package and generally chatted with Rosie in the months leading up to the show’s premiere. Plenty of people were talking about how it was the show they were most looking forward to, so hopes were raised.
It was a good show but it took a little while to realise how good. It didn’t have the obvious and immediate prettiness of the Mark Morris piece but it was thematically rich and gave me plenty to chew on afterwards.
It didn’t seem to pass judgment on war or the soldiers that take part in it, other than to highlight the isolation of the injured soldier. In the main it was descriptive – we saw the boredom, the frustration and the excitement. Seen through Rosie’s lens, the physicality of the soldier’s life was highlighted, with practice drills, combat, grooming and nights out all having their choreography.
Actually, writing this reminds me how dense it was. We even got a sense of the soldiers’ distinct personalities and their varying relationships to the rest of the squad.
I was also impressed with the levels of extra detail that came out in the post-show talk. Even though I was privy to small parts of the show’s development, there were plenty more references – such as allusions to Michaelangelo’s The Last Judgment – that I hadn’t expected (or spotted, if I’m honest).
And that was week 1 over. Some outdoors stuff, a couple of cities visited, some prettiness and some thoughts provoked.
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