Sally McKay

LOL (Lots of Love), Protein‘s fabulous new work was at The Place last week. As the title suggests the dance is concerned with how the internet and social networking is transforming relationships, replacing human contact with a series of letters, dots and dashes. The changes in the way we connect, find love and develop relationships.

As well as dancing the performers speak text in rapid, anxious one liners. The dance is fast and funny, but as it progresses the confusion of the online language combined with unrequited human longing results in melancholic solitude.

Andy Pink has created a fascinating soundscore with video animation by Rachel Davies

   LOL (Lots of Love)

Chris Thompson, Director of Learning & Access at The Place described LOL (Lots of Love) as “A brilliant show, so many layers and textures and knotted wires”. During the devising of the dance the cast visited community groups around the country to speak with ‘real people’, the material they drew upon was verbal, interviews and online.

Artistic Director, Luca Silvestrini says “it’s not about technology it’s about relationships within the technology; about humanity, a celebration of flesh and blood through live performance”.

Protein are Company in Residence at Greenwich Dance. Last year during the devising of LOL they performed an extract of LOL at the Greenwich Dance Cabaret. I drew the duet, To The Bone danced by Protein dancers recently at The Wapping Project. see: https://blog.sallymckay.co.uk/2011/01/

I Don’t Believe in Outer Space William Forsythe‘s latest work premiered at Sadler’s Wells, London last week. The dance is an intensely personal work looking at the very nature of fragile existence through Forsythe’s eyes. The dance is both comic and tragic, the stage is strewn with balls of black tape suggestive of meteorites, but it is not about astronomy. Forsythe says ‘the space it is talking about is the one where you look back on your life and you think, where the hell was it? You finally begin to focus on the fragility of the whole experience’.

The show opens with a fabulous dark and physical monologue from Dana Caspersen, she plays two neighbours meeting for the first time. One scary and predatory, the other polite, sweet and desperately looking for a way to get rid of him, her body completely changing in shape character and movement as she alternates between the two. (above left)

Spoken text as well as music by composer Thom Willems, using lines from Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and others both as a melody and lines slipped in as spoken word.

‘As if by chance things are falling, as if by chance moving’ 

‘I can feel it’                                  ‘I put a spell on you. I love you                                                          and I don’t care’ 

‘you’d think I’d crumble, you’d think I’d die’ 

‘No more… no more stopping, no more going. No more sun. No more taking a walk in the dark’ 

Ballet Black is celebrating it’s 10 year anniversary, they opened at The Linbury Studio Theatre at The Royal Opera House on 9th February performing for 4 nights. Ballet Black is a ballet company for international dancers of black and asian descent, their aim is “to see a fundamental change in the number of black and Asian dancers in mainstream ballet companies”. Founded by Cassa Pancho the company performs a beautiful fusion of classical ballet, jazz and modern dance.

Pendulum. Choreographer: Martin Lawrence

My personal favourite was Pendulum, a fabulous strong duet performed to Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music. The relationship swings between tender, intimate, gentle affection and wild, passionate combat, extraordinary angular shapes are created.

Da Gamba. Choreographer: Henri Oguike. Shift. Choreographer: Antonia Franceschi.  

DaGamba and Shift were both accompanied on stage by cellist Zoe Martlew. Shift was performed to Martlew’s own score of gorgeous, fast sassy jazz.

Orpheus. Choreographer: Will Tuckett

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