Alistair Spalding in the NY Times

The New York Times profiles Alistair Spalding, artistic director and chief exec of London theatre Sadler's Wells, a 1 500 seat-theatre that only programmes dance.

It talks about the theatre's successful programming and marketing strategy, that resulted in the organisation only relying on public funds for 13% of its budget.

The journalist goes even as far as saying that Sadler's "may well be the most important dance house in the world", which is quite exciting to hear as it's in the town I live in!

Article here.

Dance notation

I have been loving dance for a long time, but I am still quite new to some technical language, like dance notation. What does it mean? Looking into it, I found this interesting article on Slate about how choreography is recorded.

How is choreography recorded?
By Sean Rocha
Updated Friday, March 5, 2004, at 10:55 AM ET

(…) Before the advent of visual technologies like video and film, dance was almost impossible to record. Music has scores and plays have scripts, but dance has always defied attempts to create a written system of symbolic representation. Obviously, it is difficult to use two-dimensional figures to indicate movements through time and space (although two 20th-century notation systems, Labanotation and Benesh, have achieved modest success). But for the most part, the adoption of a written system has been constrained by the dance community's reliance on its oral tradition.

The history of Western classical dance begins with the founding of the first dancing academy by Louis XIV in 1661. From there, the fundamentals of ballet technique were built up over centuries and passed down through schools rather than by a literature of dance. Teachers trained students who, in turn, grew up to become dance teachers. Since ballet requires strict body control and clearly defined positions, these generations of teachers were able to develop a working vocabulary—for all those port de bras and pliés that still torment young students—that could be universally understood by practitioners. This language, codified by Jean-Georges Noverre in the 18th century, created a way to talk about the mechanics of dance, but the art of it was still recorded primarily in the memories of the performers and their audience.

It is the choreographer—part creator, part teacher—who represents the human link to the works and traditions of the past and it is he who shapes, through instruction, the dancers of the future. (…) Even today, despite the advent of video, a choreographer without disciples is in constant danger of having his work fade away after his death. Video can capture the external form and movement, and notation the positions, but the philosophy and technique of the great choreographers is impossible to get down. That is why so many of the giants of modern dance choreography—Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham—founded their own companies. It also explains why fierce battles can break out among students about how best to carry on the master's legacy—the schisms resemble those that beset religious groups. The students may be disputing aspects of technique or interpretation, but what they're really arguing about is the memory of a dance performance they saw long ago.

Full article here.

More info on dance notation from the US Dance Notation Bureau website. You can also find an introduction to Labanotation here.

11/11/09 - Update: an article on how choreography is preserved in the New York Times, taking Merce Cunningham as an example. Really interesting.

Positive thinking

I received some good news career-wise today, it makes me happy. I have been working hard and it's good to see you can get to where you want to be if you're talented enough and work hard at it.

Reminded me of those two recent blog posts over at Article 19 from dancer Jack Webb.

'I've decided that I'm very bored of wanting things and thinking about it, so I'm just going to have them if I so wish. I'm talking about things in dance, for my work, my career, of course. Because I think we can have all we want and need, we just have to look for it and find a way to achieve it.'

Bring it on.

More Pontus Lidberg

Pontus Lidberg and Derek Jacoby. Pic: Erin Baiano

Once I find something I like, I tend to go a bit obsessive about it, so I have been researching stuff about Pontus Lidberg, the guy who choreographed and directed that dance film I really liked, The Rain.

Pontus hails from Sweden, where he trained at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. He has choreographed for the Norwegian National Ballet, Vietnam National Opera and Ballet Theatre, Stockholm 59° North (a company made of soloists from Royal Swedish Ballet) plus worked on dance films, like The Rain.

Last year, Pontus Lidberg also created a new work for Morphoses (Christopher Wheeldon's company - Wheeldon, the one we talked about in Strictly Bolshoi - isn't the world of dance small) which you can see bits of here, plus a video of Lidberg at work with Morphoses dancers here (very interesting) Just realise the piece was performed in London when the company came down last September - damn.

I really enjoy his movements, but also the sense that he knows what sort of music works when creating beautiful, emotive dance pieces.

Pontus Lidberg's website.

Ballets Russes -100th birthday

We're going to hear a lot about it - Diaghilev created his Ballets Russes 100 years ago.

The revered Financial Times dance critic Clement Crisp is the first to write about it a very interesting article.

"The shock of Parade, of The Rite of Spring, of Afternoon of a Faun, of Les Noces, even of Apollo, still reverberates in performance. In 1909, his very first balletic year, he had commissioned Ravel to compose Daphnis and Chloé. Stravinsky came to public attention by way of the Ballets Russes. Debussy, de Falla, Prokofiev, Poulenc, Satie, Richard Strauss, Florent Schmidt, Milhaud, Constant Lambert, Auric, were to write scores. Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Pruna, Gris, de Chirico, Tchelichev, Larionov, Derain, Goncharova, were among his designers. The mind reels: we have no comparisons today.

The Diaghilev exhibitions and performances this year are a necessary celebration of one of the greatest artistic forces in the 20th century. They are also a reproach to today’s ballet with its play-safe timidities (“Oh good! It’s Swan Lake”) and its tunnel-visioned directors. Can a new Diaghilev emerge and fight the good fight as that great man once did, to galvanise the art of ballet for this century?"

South Bank show awards

The South Bank show awards will be handed out later this month (28 January) and broadcast on the UK channel ITV. The South Bank show awards celebrate UK artists in a wide range of cultural activities.

Nominees for the Dance award are:
Akram Khan's Bahok (Liverpool Playhouse)
I am Falling (The Gate at Sadler’s Wells)
Wayne McGregor’s Infra (Royal Opera House)
Wayne McGregor and Random Dance's Entity (Sadler's Wells and national tour)

Will let you know who wins!

New dance at The Place, London

The Place (pretty much London's home for contemporary dance) is presenting 37 nights of new dance in its annual new year platform, Resolution! Every night, 3 companies will present a new work. That's a total of 111 companies/works.

It's full of people you might not have heard about (I certainly haven't) but, as The Place marketing department says, you might end up seeing tomorrow's big talents. Tickets are £12 or £15 'return' (ie you can come see another performance within six months for free)

4Dance 2008

Silenced, by Isabel Rocamaro (pic: Nick Knowland)

4Dance was 76 minutes of short dance films shown recently on Channel 4 in the UK (if you have missed it, you can watch it online here)

I think it will always be kind of hard for a programme like this to get an audience, but putting it on at 3.30pm on the 27th of December, right in the middle of the Christmas break, is probably not ideal. Maybe it is actually... lots of people who have eaten too much and can't move from their sofas...

If you forget the annoying presenter (drop the attitude, man!), there was some pretty good dance films to watch. My highlghts:

I really enjoyed Pontus Lidberg's The Rain - gorgeously filmed and choreographed, very lyrical (a trailer for this film is posted below)

DIY -from Singapore, it was the film that came closest to be a music video. Lots of cool shots and well-paced editing, with a great link between the movement and the music. Directed by a director well-known in his home country, Royston Tan. You can view DIY here (not amazing quality)

Lick Your Pavement - A shirtless guy in white skinny jeans dances around a camera, slowly going around it, with skateboarders passing by him all the time. Quite trendy. Great mix. One of the directors (and the performer) is Adam Linder, winner of 2008's Place Prize (to the surprise of many) You can see more of his work with Will Davidson on their website www.collectnudes.com (Funnily enough the piece is called Fuck Forever on there...)

Silenced - I normally like my dance set to music but really enjoyed this almost silent film of 2 women set in the dramatic desert landscape. By Isabel Rocamora.

Falling - this is part of the 10th Anniversary tour of Henri Oguike Dance Company.



Full list of dance films shown:

DIY
Director: Royston Tan

The Rain (2 extracts)
Director/Choreographer: Pontus Lidberg

Lick Your Pavement
Directors: Will Davidson / Adam Linder

No Man's Land
Director: Alexandre Oktan
Choreographer: Peter Chin

Diva
Director/Choreographer:Liz Agiss

Tiny Dancer
Director: Stefan Georgiou

Night Practice
Director: Susanna Wallin

In Stone
Director: Margaret Williams
Choreographer: Maria Munoz

Soma Songs
Director/Choreographer: Daniel Belton

Animalz
Director/Choreographer: Sergio Cruz

Tea Time:
Director /Writer: Lisa May Thomas

Silenced
Director/Choreographer: Isabel Rocamora

Nascent
Director: Gina Czarnecki

Fresh
Director/Choreographer: Robert Hylton

Round 16
Director: Pete Gomes
Choregrapher: Eddie Kay /Imogen Knight

10 Exhalations
Director: Roman Kornienko/ Maria Sharafutdinova

Falling
Director: Dan Farberoff
Choreographer: Henri Oguike

Strictly Bolshoi

Misericordes, credit Dimir Yusupov

The Balletboyz documentary on choreographer Christopher Wheeldon's work for the famous ballet company the Bolshoi in Moscow, called Strictly Bolshoi, was shown on Channel 4 this week.

It is available to watch online for a month. You can watch it here.

Even non-dance fans will find it interesting: it gives good insight into the creative process of a choreographer, and is also a bit dramatic (changes of opinions, unhappy dancers etc...) and quite humourous as well. The created piece, Misericordes, is shown at the end. This documentary won the 2008 International Emmy Award for Arts Programming (no less)

Not sure Christopher Wheeldon comes out very well in this but the piece is great so who cares. You can see bits of Misericordes here.

Pontus Lidberg - The Rain

Trailer for the 28-minute film The Rain, by Pontus Lidberg.

The programme 4 Dance 2008 included 2 extracts from that film, and I really liked it. Quite a nice surprise to find out there is more to see! Website for the movie here.

Dance in 2009

Two UK newspapers are looking forward to the year ahead and list what to look out for in 2009. Amongst the many artforms presented is dance.

Sylvie Guillem and Russell Maliphant's new collaboration Eonaggata seem to be what they most look forward to. Check out the Times and the Guardian.

Am particularly interested in this news from the Times that Sadler's Wells (London's dance house) has commissioned works from Maliphant, Wayne McGregor, Javier De Frutos and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui that 'encapsulate the spirit of Diaghilev' who founded the Ballets Russes 100 years ago.

Dance Xmas

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Had a slightly dance-themed Xmas. Got tickets for a triple bill at the Royal Opera House (which includes Christopher Wheeldon's Danse A Grande Vitesse - love it) + the Balletboyz DVD Encore (which includes a piece I love, Propeller)

I highly recommend Encore - just what you'd expect from Ballet Boyz: great choreography (Will Tuckett, Liv Lorent, Bonachela...), insightful interviews before each dance piece, and a really interesting 'director's commentary' with the Ballet Boyz talking about the dance being performed.

I also watched "10 years of Riverdance" (it DOES count as dance!), "Mamma Mia!" (which I guess is choreographed so also counts as dance...) and Dance 4 Film on Channel 4 (also called 4dance 2008).

All the dancers in the house...

wish they were in that video.

(Choreography inspired by Bob Fosse's work, no less)

Birds can dance

This is from the New York Times Magazine Year in Ideas 2008.

Avian Dancing By REBECCA SKLOOT

If you aren’t one of the millions who have already done so, go immediately to YouTube and search for “Snowball the Dancing Cockatoo.” There you will see a large white bird balanced on the back of an office chair, bobbing his head, stomping his feet and doing something that — until now — scientists believed impossible: dancing just like a human.

This is good fun. It’s also good science: Snowball’s videos are changing the way researchers understand the neurology of music and dancing. Aniruddh Patel, senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in California, got the link from a friend. He saw not just a funny bird but also a potential solution to a scientific argument dating back to Darwin: some researchers say that human brains have been specially wired by natural selection for dancing, because dancing confers survival benefits through group bonding. If that were true, according to Patel, you would see dancing only in animals that, like humans, have a long history of music and dance, which no other species has. The fact that only humans dance has long been seen as evidence supporting the evolution argument.

So Patel sent an e-mail message to Snowball’s owner, Irena Schulz, and asked to study her bird. “The obvious question was whether he was just mimicking somebody,” Patel said. To answer that, he made CDs of Snowball’s favorite song (“Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” by the Backstreet Boys) at various speeds. Schulz videotaped Snowball dancing to each version, and then Patel graphed Snowball’s movement against the music’s beat. “Like a child, he synched to the music for stretches of time, then danced a little faster or a little slower, but always in a rhythmic way,” Patel says. “Statistically those periods when he’s locked onto the beat are not by chance — they really do indicate sensitivity to the beat and an ability to synchronize with it.”

What’s most interesting to Patel is that this ability is present in birds but not in primates, our closest animal relatives. “This is no coincidence,” he says. Patel says dancing is associated with our vocal abilities, not musical hard wiring. Humans and parrots are two of the few species with brains wired for vocal learning — hearing sounds (like words), then coordinating complex movements (lips, tongues, vocal cords) to reproduce those sounds. Other animals who have this ability: dolphins, seals and whales. “In theory,” he says, “they may be able to dance, too. We just don’t know it yet.”

50 years of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre

The special gala celebrating 50 years of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre sounded like it was a great night, if you read the NY Times review of it.

They also have a short video about Alvin Ailey. Check it out.

Below a piece from his most well-known work, Revelations.

Impressing the Czar @ Sadler's Wells - review

GO GO GO! This is surreal, crazy, funny, superbly danced, especially Act 2 In The Middle, Somewhat Elevated, where things get serious and technical and are all about the purity of the movement.

I didn't know what to expect, and I was blown away.

Video with bits from Act 2 and Act 3 (yes it's the entire company dressed as schoolgirls...crazy, I said)

Sangre Flamenca @ Peacock Theatre, London - review

It was a pretty good show, though me and my flamenco friends (I take flamenco dance classes) found it very cheesy at times.

Lead dancers and co-founders of Nuevo Ballet Espanol Angel Rojas and Carlos Rodriguez are very good dancers, but at times, their mix of flamenco and contemporary dance doesn't work very well, particularly when danced to a moody (read: boring) soundtrack.

I found the second tableau, between 2 guys and a girl, particularly dreadful. There was some imaginative stuff in there, but lord, they just tried too hard.

Also, Angel kind of milked the applause at the end of his solo. First, he danced, then came to the front of the stage and danced some more, but no one really applauded afterwards. Why? Because we were not impressed, that's why! His footwork was fast but only in short sections - little build-up, no time to think 'wow this is crazy, he is amazing!"

When they stayed close to pure flamenco (eg Carlos' solo, in particular), that's where it was beautiful.

Richard Alston Dance Company

From Richard Alston Dance COmpany's Shuffle It Right.

Will leave you with a massive smile on your face. Highly recommended! They are touring the UK this November.

Update 4/11: A short feature on Richard Alston in today's Guardian.

A glorious pic

From Australian Dance Theatre's new work, G, coming to London soon.

An article on La Lupe, the queen of Latin Soul!