Goodbye Featherstonehaughs

26 November

Saturday night at The Riverside Studios. I’m here to watch Edits, choreographed by Lea Anderson for her all-male company the Featherstonehaughs, which she co-founded in 1989, 5 years after co-founding the all-female Cholmondelys. It is the last time the Featherstonehaughs will perform and no one can quite grasp or believe it.

Featherstonehaughs, Edits. copyright Sally McKay 1

Featherstonehaughs, Edits. copyright Sally McKay3

The dance is fascinating and beautiful, I have drawn them rehearsing fragments of the dance but never watched a run. And the costumes… just gorgeous, designed by Oscar winning costume designer and long term collaborator of Lea, Sandy Powell.

Featherstonehaughs, Edits. copyright Sally McKay 2

The 6 Featherstonehaughs took their bows at the end of the show, as the audience clapped and cheered (and quite a few cried) 3 women walked on stage dressed in funerial black lace and began to dance a 1985 Cholmondely dance to Nina Simone’s My Baby Just Cares For Me, there were screams of joy, the co-founders and original dancers of The Cholmondeleys: Lea Anderson, Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward were dancing together again.

The Cholmondeleys Lea Anderson, Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward

Goodbye Featherstonehaughs

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