Pegasus is involved in the 40th anniversary celebrations of The Place, somewhere I had no idea about before we did a piece there a couple of years ago. There were some
dance celebs at the first night, but it is not my area of expertise…
Choir project: Attention! has been a hard piece to get to grips with, partly because movement while singing is not a core competence and the music needs to be memorised while doing it, not something we can practice at home. Finally, the hugging audience members and lying down at their feet while singing (and sweating in my case) is entertaining.
It has been great to watch the creative process as Hanne, Heidi and Sylvia have had to deal with changing demands of the location, not having the whole team together at any one time, and our attempts to learn and perform simultaneously. Two more performances to go, and I am looking forward to them.
We were kindly bought tickets for the sell-out anniversary programme (we are a prologue outside the auditorium) and I absolutely loved some of the excerpts we saw:
- Robert Cohan’s Forest was stunning (Graun has lots of information about the man and a short clip of the piece).
- There was a lovely piece for the young dancers (under 7s, I think) called The Chase which was delightful to a cracking piano piece: the Steeple Chase Rag by Jelly Roll Morton.
- Hands (the opening of What the body does not remember) by Wim Vandekeybus was simply stunning. A performer’s hands on a table control two dancers in impossibly difficult routines. Staggeringly good. I can’t find anything like it online, but the brick-throwing bit at 2:20 in this video gives a flavour: yes, they are real bricks.
- Shobana Jeyasingh‘s Configurations was a great combination of eastern and western styles.
- The short excerpt of Siobhan Davies’ Sphinx showed just how difficult solo dance can be.
- Victoria Marks’ Dancing to music was a brilliant piece of mostly stationary dance, and made for a great finale. I enjoyed the Sigur Rós-like vocals over the Wim Mertens piece (Casting no shadow) it was performed to.
These are my choices: the whole programme was excellent. I liked the current dancers Reservoir Dogs-style walk to the front of the stage, lights off and leave that they did to finish each of their group pieces.