Preparing for our first performance tonight at the Lion and Unicorn. We will ‘get-in’ on the day and the other performers haven’t seen the venue. This is like small scale touring 30 years ago. All decisions about lighting, sound, spacing, entrances, exits, scale and feel of the place are all ahead of us – then […]
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The return to late working. We are preparing for performances at the Lion and Unicorn Theatre. I noticed an article in The Times on September 7th; ‘Grey Power: endurance can improve with age’ was the headline, for a story about Diana Nyad now aged 64. Thirty-six years after her first (unsuccessful) attempt to swim 110 […]
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The summer has slipped by and – it has been memorable. As well as seeing the sun – and welcoming the feel of its ‘burn’ deep into the ageing bones – I’ve presented our work at conferences. At the Dance and Somatics Conference in Coventry I reflected on the impact on my mature dance now […]
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Ashton used to say that watching The Sleeping Beauty was like having a private lesson in the art of composition in classical ballet (Kavanagh 1996, p.309). The richness of Petipa’s choreographic text (despite its mutability and variation from one production to another) and the particular poetic and historic symbolism of the work, give it layers […]
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Meeting in Oxford on a raw January day, but the sun is shining for the first time in a while. We mull over how to take Late Work forward. Difficult to untangle the relationship between the project’s aspects as both research and performance. Is it primarily an investigation of the relationship of technique and choreography […]
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This feels like a big challenge, we prepared in April and now this performance is shoe horned into the pressurised calendar of teaching, assessments, research applications, administration as well as domestic life. Roehampton is a particular context – we can expect an audience of contemporary dance students, academics, researchers with ballet expertise. I […]
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