I
don’t know the first thing about Contemporary Dance. I really don’t. To my tiny and untutored
world it looks a bit like random movements to often jarring music and feels a
lot like someone trying to tell me something important and urgent. But in Swahili.
At
least that was how I felt until I saw EDge, the London Contemporary Dance
School’s postgraduate performance company and why I am excited that they are
coming back to Exeter Phoenix on Tues 22nd May. It won’t be the same group as last year and
they won’t be doing the same thing, but they will be 12 of the most promising
and exceptional dancers on the scene today.
The
programme will feature new pieces by Matthias Sperling and James Wilton
alongside other works such as Alston Takes Cover which I confess I googled to
find out more because even to a novice like me the name Richard Alston is
something of a by-word for Really Good Contemporary Dance.
According to EDge, to celebrate the choreography of Richard Alston, The
Place and Dance Umbrella jointly commissioned Tony Adigun and Rachel Lopez de
la Nieta to create works inspired by the Alston classic Wildlife. The
original piece, considered groundbreaking back in the eighties, has been
revitalized with Tony Adigun playing on the foliage of the jungle, creating
constellations and floor patterns whilst still using his own specific ‘street’
style of moving.
Alston has been pleased with what the new breed of choreographers and
dancers have done to his work. He enjoyed
the sense that Rachel Lopez used it to reinvent David Attenborough – making her
piece a ‘very earnest but hilarious documentary’. That spirit, of not holding particular pieces
as sacred, is something that is central to the ethos of Contemporary Dance, which
by its very nature needs to be of the moment and yet it has a past; as a genre
it is now a pensioner. What EDge are
doing is ensuring that Contemporary Dance continues to question itself
as well as the other more standardized, structured dance forms.
I believe it is hard to keep art forms such as dance from seeming elite
and I suspect that is an indictment of our culture today, in which we live more
in the head than the body, but seeing EDge perform and taking our role as the
interpreters of their energy, spirit and skill is one way perhaps to unify mind
and motion at least while the dance plays on.
Richard Alston on Wildlife:
http://www.exeterphoenix.org.uk/news/edge-news.html
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