World Press Photo 2008 winners

I always really enjoy looking at the winning pictures of the World Press Photo Contest - nature, sport, current affairs, portraits, stories, they cover such a huge range of topics, and are always outstanding images.

The winner of the 2nd prize in the Arts and Entertainment category - singles, is photographer Jerome Bonnet for his portrait of a student at Paris Opera Ballet School. You can view the image here.

The winners' gallery can be seen here. Enjoy.

Rafael Bonachela - 62C

As mentioned earlier on this blog, choreographer Rafael Bonachela picked 6 choreographers he liked and invited them to perform at Southbank Centre. It was free so I went to check it out.

Due to the snow and stuff, I only made it on the Saturday (3 other choreographers were performing on the Sunday) but still it was pretty good. A few pics below.

Quite a lot of people turned up, which is cool! Go dance!

Rafael Bonachela wasn't there himself but did record something on video.

Adam Linder. Yes, he wanked off a gun - the 10-year-old girl next to me looked a bit horrified. His solo, set to Ravel's bolero, was interesting, but maybe with an undertone that was too violent or sexual for an afternoon audience (even a contemporary dance one). The hilarious thing was this middle-aged man who went at the front of the stage and started putting his legs up in the air and do weird things - we all thought he was part of the piece, but realised he wasn't when security came to take him out.
Credits to Adam Linder for carrying on with his performance though.

I can't really remember anything Blanca Arrieta did (sorry!), but I am quite happy with this picture.

If you went on the Sunday, feel free to let us know what it was like!

Olivier Awards

Barely mentioned in all the articles on the recent Olivier Awards nominations announcement, the dance nominees are:

Best new dance production -

Pina Bausch Tanztheater Wuppertal's Cafe Muller / The Rite of Spring at Sadler's Wells

The Royal Ballet of Flanders' Impressing the Czar at Sadler's Wells

The Royal Ballet's Infra at the Royal Opera House

DV8's To Be Straight With You at the Lyttelton

Outstanding achievement in dance

The company of the Royal Ballet of Flanders for their performances in Impressing the Czar at Sadler's Wells

The company of the Royal Ballet for their performances in Infra

Savion Glover, Marshall Davis Jr and Maurice Chestnut for their performances in Savion Glover's Bare Soundz at Sadler's Wells

I am going for the Royal Ballet of Flanders' Impressing the Czar in both categories. It totally blew my mind, it was so good!

Full list of nominees. Results on 8 March.

Tanja Liedtke - Twelfth Floor - UK Tour

The production Twelfth Floor, created by Tanja Liedtke, is touring the UK this Spring starting on the 10th of Feb in Warwick, and ending on the 27th of March in Oxford.

Tanja Liedtke was a German dancer and choreographer based in Australia. Her dynamic and highly physical choreography won her awards and in 2007 she was selected to be the Artistic Director of Sydney Dance Company. However she died tragically before taking the post.

You can find more info on the tour website.

The tour is brought by Dance Touring Partnership, a network of theatres working together to bring exciting dance to new audiences around the UK. It must be tough, but credits to them!


There is something that reminds me of Jasmin Vardimon in there.


Update 16/2: A review of Twelfth Floor in The Observer ' If this is what she was capable of at 29, what might the future have held?'

Jordan Clarke

I saw this video on the really good blog Dancing Perfectly Free and thought I would put it up too.


Vanilla Strawberry from Jordan Clarke on Vimeo.

It looks like a live Gilbert & George painting sometimes.

More Jordan Clarke's video here.

Thomas Noone Dance

Decided to try out this Barcelona company next week at Southbank Centre. It was set up by a British guy who trained at Rambert and worked in the Netherlands and Spain, Thomas Noone.
It seems quite well-known in Barcelona, as it is resident in one of the city's cool theatres, the Sant Andreu Teatre.





"Futil is a beautiful yet haunting duet following a couple and the history of their increasingly polarised relation. Beginning with the end, the piece starts with their separation and rewinds to the initial moment of meeting" - sounds interesting. I like the way he falls on the floor at the end of the video.

More info here.

National Dance Awards winners

Winners were announced at what I'm sure was a most glamourous gathering, on a Monday afternoon (that's how much dance matters... erm)

De Valois award for outstanding achievement in dance
Richard Alston – artistic director, Richard Alston Dance Company
(happy about that one, I really enjoyed his last pieces Shuffle It Right and Blow Over. He always picks really good scores for his dance works)

Dancing Times award for best male dancer
Edward Watson – Royal Ballet

Richard Sherrington award for best female dancer
Agnes Oaks – English National Ballet (she is retiring this year)

Dance Europe award for outstanding company
English National Ballet

Best classical choreography
Christopher Wheeldon for Electric Counterpoint - Royal Ballet

Best modern choreography
Hofesh Shechter for In Your Rooms

Patron's award
Northern Ballet Theatre – received by NBT artistic director, David Nixon, from NDA patron, Beryl Grey

Artsworld Presentations award for best foreign dance company
New York City Ballet

Spotlight award: classical male
Martin Harvey – Royal Ballet

Spotlight award: classical female
Yuhui Choe – Royal Ballet

Spotlight award: modern male
Anh Ngoc Nguyen – Wayne McGregor / Random Dance

Spotlight award: modern female
Kate Coyne – Michael Clark Company and freelance

Working Title Billy Elliot award
Michael Guihot-Jouffray

Dance UK industry award
Janet Smith – Scottish Dance Theatre

Rafael Bonachela week end at Southbank Centre

The popular Rafael Bonachela is presenting a selection of his favourite young choreographers next week end (31 January - 1 February) at Southbank Centre in London. I don't think he will actually be there himself since he is now AD of Sydney Dance Company, but it seems like there will be some good stuff on offer.

Saturday 31 January, 4.30pm
Adam Linder - he is the 2008 Place Prize winner. I like his videos but I've never seen him live, I am looking forward to it. Apparently he will dance to Ravel's Bolero.
Blanca Arrieta - all the way from Bilbao, Spain.
Frederick Opoku-Addaie and Jorege Crecis - their piece is called Bf Starter.

Sunday 1 February, 4.30pm
Laila Diallo - ex-Random Dance, performing a piece called The Wayside. I am quite interested in seeing that one as it is set to a song I really like Pa' llegar a tu lado.
Cameron McMillan - the ex-Rambert Dance Company dancer presents a duet with Amy Hollingsworth.
Ben Wright - a performance by two dancers from his company, bgroup. Ben Wright is the guy who created the role of the Prince in Matthew Bourne's famous all-male Swan Lake, back in 1995.

Plus it's free, and you can have a drink while you watch - pretty cool prospect.

Hopefully I can take some pics and let you know what it was like.

Spring Awakening @ Lyric Hammersmith, London - review

Went to see Spring Awakening. 2nd preview, and it looked pretty sharp to me. Let's keep this review simple:

- Cast: all good from everyone. Good acting, good voices, good presence. Many are doing their professional debut in this production. Very fresh.
- Staging: very cool. Lighbulbs hang from the ceiling, neons in the theatre, back wall covered in paintings, images, a blackboard listing the songs, more neons and lights, some objects related to the story etc... There are seats for the audience on either side of the stage, where the actors also sit sometimes, and a small band at the back (piano, guitar, fiddle, drums and more). Actors help with the running of the show, moving microphones about, taking the lights down etc, giving a special feel to the proceedings.
- Songs: pretty good. I wasn't sure about the idea of pop-rock tunes for something based on a 1900s play, but it did work. Being a teenager then was worse than it is now, but the angst and the fear and the weight of adults' expectations on your shoulder remain. Mama and Spring/Summer are particular favourites of mine.
- I enjoyed the story and realised it was darker than I expected. Abuse, violence, suicide, teenage pregnancy... it's all in there.
- The one thing I didn't like was the way the gay relationship between two of the boys was treated as comic relief for act 2. I doubt that at a such a religious time, in small-town Germany, two boys realising they loved each other would be so comfortable with it. Why did the audience laugh? Embarassment, probably (as in many other moments of the piece) and because one of the boys suddenly developed cliched manoeurisms (nowhere to be seen beforehand) and we had jokes about licking the cream. Why present it that way? Their future is probably no brighter than that of the 3 main characters...
Anyway this is a small thing...

Overall, this is a very good show and production. The message I got from this was that thank god I am living in 2009, in a (relatively) tolerant society that allows you to be who you want to be and where social norms are not as suffocating as in the past. However, growing up remains tough!

Tickets here.

Review update (4 Feb)
The Guardian - 3 stars
The Telegraph - 5 stars
The Times - 5 stars
The Stage - positive review

Falling

Teaser for the film Falling


Falling in Space from Dan Farberoff on Vimeo.

Director: Dan Farberoff
Composer: Errollyn Wallen
Choreographer: Henri Oguike
Words by NASA astronaut Steve MacLean

The full length film is part of the Henri Oguike Dance Company 10th Anniversary show touring the UK now.

South Bank show awards winners

Aaron Sillis (in black) in Dorian Gray. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

Wayne McGregor’s Infra at the Royal Opera House won in the dance category.

The Times Breakthrough Award went to dancer Aaron Sillis, who played Basil Hallward in Matthew Bourne's Dorian Gray. It is great news that an award voted for by the general public went to a dancer. Bits about him in today's Times: "Born in Norwich, Sillis got his break when he was spotted in a local panto at the age of 12. He trained at Bird College of Musical Theatre, in London, and has since worked with Take That, Mariah Carey and Leona Lewis. He has choreographed Kylie, stalked the catwalk for Versace and played a schoolboy in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire."

Congratulations to them.

National Dance Awards

I guess it's not just awards season for Hollywood. As well as the South Bank Show awards, the National Dance Awards will be held next week. Categories include Best Choreography (Classical), Best Choreography (Modern), Best Foreign Company, Best Female Dancer etc etc...
Nominees include Christopher Wheeldon, Eric Underwood, English National Ballet, Edward Watson and more.

Full list on their website. Results on 26 January.

Sampled at Sadler's Wells

Sampled is back at Sadler's Wells next week, on 24 and 25 January.

This is London's version of New York City Center's Fall For Dance festival. Two nights of mixed dance styles, cheap tickets (£10, or £5 standing) - ideal for a taster. Most of the companies performing will be back at Sadler's Wells later in the season, so it's also a great marketing tool for them!

The line-up looks good to me (as per SW's website):

American Ballet Theatre - White Swan Pas de Deux performed by Veronica Part and David Hallberg.
Flying Steps - World-beating virtuoso hip hop styles from Germany.
Jasmin Vardimon (Sunday only) - Intensely physical dance-theatre in an extract from Vardimon's Yesterday.
Matthew Bourne's New Adventures -Enjoy the Swan and Prince Duet from Act Two of Swan Lake.
Rojas & Rodriguez - The stars of Nuevo Ballet Espanol bring some authentic flamenco flavour.
Russell Maliphant - Former Royal Ballet dancer Dana Fouras performs Maliphant's sublime Two.
Traces (Saturday only)- Experience circus as you've never seen it before.

You can buy tickets here.

William Forsythe: Improvisation Technologies

A bit of Forsythe has never hurt anyone, has it?



This video is from Forsythe's CD-Rom Improvisation Technologies: A Tool for the Analytical Dance Eye. The CD-Rom contains 60 video chapters in which Forsythe explains his movement language.

I love how things appear to help see what Forsythe wanted. The videos were made in 1994 - imagine what we could do now that film technology has progressed so much.

Out of print at Amazon. You can view them all here.

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!