(3 / 5)
Smart hand-drawn backdrop. Black and white lines of a kitchen-living-room. Strange distorted dystopian home of the bored and disaffected. With a loo off the side. A few spots of red from some flowers in a painted jar. She is black and white too.
This is a very odd start. A woman neatly dressed piddling noisily, then stroking her hair back from her head with her wetted hands. What a thing to remember so clearly. How shocking it is. How very very personal. And so it continues.
Intense, in your face, curiously flamboyant. Radio triggers a reminder of passions unspent. English at first. German later. This is an extraordinary physical breakdown of a woman tried by her own life, afraid of engaging with the outside world, trapped in her silence. It is her world and she seems ok with that.
Till she changes half way. When her hair comes down.
One very able dancer expresses the need for company and contact through a very emotional, tight series of movements which I long to become fluid and sloppy, warm from cold. Which they do, just for a short while, not long before the end, not long before she eats the red roses, dropping their bloody petals onto her green dress. Her mouth crammed with sadness, her tears quite real.
It seems completely inappropriate to applaud. Wrong. Hurtful.
The audience slopes out. A few check out the set, taking pictures, reverently whispering. Me too. I do not ask anyone what they think this time.
Helen Joy for Get the Chance, 3rd Act Critics.
The Request Show – Cooperativa Maura Morales
The Request Show (Cuba/Germany)
Performed by Maura Morales
Music composed by Michio Woirgardt
Seen: 6th May, 2017
Where: Dance House, Cardiff
For tour dates and more information:
http://www.ndcwales.co.uk/en/what-s-on/calendar/spring-dancehouse-the-request-show-the-cooperativa-maura-morales/
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To support the National Dance Company Wales, please consider their new Lift Lifft scheme at http://www.ndcwales.co.uk/en/about/support-us/individual-giving/
Tag Archives: NDCWales
Review: The Green House / Profundis by Helen Joy
I have seen Profundis before and I loved it. I described it as a Kandinsky come to life. Colourful, clever, witty and thoughtful: it is a kaleidoscopic trip into the nature of things. This time, it is slicker, clearer, funnier, more confident in its story-telling, more engaged with its audience. It is less distracted and even more enjoyable. I feel that the dancers are actively seeking our attention and allowing us to show our shock, confusion and joy. It is a delight. I love it still.
Now, The Green House is a difficult thing. Definitely verdant. As a dancer sitting beside me said, dance makes you feel emotions you didn’t know you had. This is an uncomfortable piece. I cannot take my eyes off the green dancer rolling then scrubbing his green apples against his green skirt, picking them up, putting them down, in the bowl, in the sideboard, in the bowl. He is on the furniture, scrubbing his eyes, picked up, put down, on the floor. Hard stuff this.
You see, I got this wrong. I thought it was The Green Room. This made sense of the ON AIR sign and the APPLAUSE. The waiting around to be called. The back of another room on show. The green. I was wrong.
The Green House. Hot, confining, controlling, use the windows, the door, keep it in, shut it out. It is a dance of all of these things. It is disturbing, beautiful, green. There is just enough lightness, there are just enough laughs.
The group pieces are, as always, exquisitely choreographed. Painfully perfect. I would watch this again and again as they go round and round in their green world. I can’t bear it and I can’t leave it alone.
The solos are dervishly wild and tight and someone says to me, how do they learn this, how can they repeat something that looks so improvised, so in the moment, so free? I have no idea.
I reel from this. 43 minutes of green gilded anguish and heartache. I am going to see this again. And again.
Profundis
Creative director: Roy Assaf
The Green House
Creative director: Caroline Finn
Dancers:
Josef Perou
Camille Giraudeau
Matteo Marfoglia
Àngela Boix Duran
Elena Thomas
Ed Myhill
Franklyn Lee
Alexandra Pholien
Oliver Champman
Seen: 29th April, 2017
Where: Sherman Theatre, Cardiff
For tour dates and more information:
http://www.ndcwales.co.uk/en/what-s-on/spring-tour-2017/
Free to attend but please book a space – email megan@ndcwales.co.uk for more info.
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To support the National Dance Company Wales, please consider their new Lift Lifft scheme at http://www.ndcwales.co.uk/en/about/support-us/individual-giving/
Review: Youth Dance Night at NDCWales by Helen Joy
NDCW Youth
Right, this is a hard one; I have thought long and hard about this review.
My conclusion is this: I am not here to comment on any of the pieces critically, I am here to congratulate and celebrate everyone involved in creating beautiful dance through giving all these extraordinary young people the chance to dance.
Every dance has a message for us and in essence I think it is this:
“Listen to us, we may be young and we may seem to have so little experience next to you, the big grown-up, but we have a voice and we feel and we want you to hear us and respond. Our need to express ourselves and to be understood is as great as yours and we will be heard, we will use clothes and colour and tears and anger; we will use movement and action; we will use dance.”
Each piece is so different, working so carefully with the ages of the dancers, their abilities and their stories. Some dancers have that special something – you can already see it, something in the way they look straight at you, something in the way they love the connection between their bodies and their minds, something just special. Every dancer in front of us performs as a professional – confident, charming, athletic and poised. Confident enough to use humour and we in the audience are impressed and laugh with them.
They dance of war and remembrance, of love and loss, of action and inaction, of communication and self.
I have no warm personal association with this – I was once in the wrong queue at junior school and accidentally arrived in the ballet class, surrounded by pink leotards and birds in cages. I was about 6. I can still feel the horror of it.
Yet, here I am wishing and wishing I had had the gumption these young people have and to have stayed in that class; wishing I had that gumption now too. What amazing young people they are, what remarkable people they will remain and in part because of this opportunity they have the gumption to take, to value and to work at – for none of this comes easy, I am sure.
I am sitting next to Luke, a dance teacher, and we discuss what makes the difference between the Associates’ piece and everyone else’s. There is something about the last piece which is more polished than the others, slicker somehow. Time is partly the answer – these dancers have been selected and given the time to train in a way the others do not have.
This suggests to me that it is time that we all must have to perfect what we do – all these young dancers deserve our support to give them the opportunities and the time they need to grow into the adults who will make our world more than just a little better.
To support ETC, Fantasy Feet, Rubicon and the NDCW, please see the links below.
Every young person should have the chance to dance, please help them to get that chance.
Helen Joy for Get the Chance, 3rd Act Critics.
Curator: Caroline Finn, NDCW Artistic Director
Showcasing:
ETC Youth Dance
Fantasy Feet (2 x pieces within their 12 minute slot)
Rubicon (Urban Flagship Group)
Joon Youth Dance Company
National Dance Company Wales Associates
Seen: 26 February, 2017
Where: Dance House, WMC, Cardiff
Tickets: £10 | Concessions £7
Find Youth Dance at:
Fantasy Feet, Merthyr Tydfil
http://www.fantasyfeetdance.co.uk/
Rubicon Dance, Adamsdown, Cardiff
http://www.rubicondance.co.uk/
Joon Dance, Solva, Pembrokeshire
https://www.facebook.com/JoonDance/
ETC Youth Dance
https://twitter.com/etcdance
NDCWales, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff
http://www.ndcwales.co.uk/en/get-involved/dance/associates-age-14-19/
To support National Dance Company Wales, please consider their new Lift Lifft scheme at http://www.ndcwales.co.uk/en/about/support-us/individual-giving/