Archive for the ‘Review’ Category

The World’s Greatest Show

Saturday, June 28th, 2014

28 June 2014

Arthur Pita’s The World’s Greatest Show

The Never-Ending Dance Marathon of 1935

During the American depression in the 1930’s Dance Marathon’s were organised as entertainment, where couples danced almost non-stop for hundreds of hours competing for prize money, the longest recorded Marathon lasted 3,780 hours. The World’s Greatest Show is a dance-theatre work exploring this phenomenon, choreographed by Arthur Pita with music by Frank Moon and a live jazz band.

In June 2013 I was invited by Arthur Pita to draw the show in R & D at Greenwich Dance, with the working title Nobody’s Baby, 10 performers danced for 100 hours keeping to the original marathon rules. Sometimes I arrived to draw at 10.00 am, sometimes at 11.00 pm, it was an exceptional week of physical and mental strength combined with extraordinary good will from the performers.

These drawings are from the performance on Friday. I drew many drawings during R&D but they now feel irrelevant. I watched with daughter Gaby who said at the close of the show: “That was Brilliant” I couldn’t agree more

The Worlds greatest show 4

The Worlds Greatest Show 5

The Worlds Greatest Show 8

The Worlds greatest show 12

Drawings of Formed View

Tuesday, August 20th, 2013

August 20 2013

On Friday evening I was privileged to be part of dance artist Christopher Matthews multi-media performance installation, Formed View, at the Arbeit Gallery in Hackney Wick. Formed View was part of Hackney WickED Festival. While dancer Lyle Wheeler created dynamic flowing improvisation and James Haswell-D’Arcy gave him spoken feed back and direction, I made drawings of Lyle as he moved and of James as he responded to Lyle. The dance performance along with the verbal, written and drawn response was streamed live on the Hackney Live website as well as to an audience within the gallery, who watched via the TVs.

A few of the many sketches made during the evening:

Formed View 1
Formed View 3
Formed view 5
Formed view 7




Formed View g

Opening Night of Exhibition

Saturday, September 15th, 2012

13th September 2012

Sally McKay: Multisensory experience and artistic images of the moving human figure 

My Exhibition at no format gallery opened on Thursday evening.

no format gallery. Sally McKay show

Sally McKay. Exhibition at No Format GalleryThe gallery ready for the evening opening

The Rodin Project

Yolande York-Edgell and Jack Jones of Yorke Dance Project danced solos surrounded by my work in the gallery. The sculpture, Marilyn, will be leaving the gallery early next week to join Yolande York-Edgell on stage at Bath ICIA when she dances in the company’s World Premier of Words Worth.

Thanks to Nicholas Carn for filming the performance.

Sally McKay Exhibition in Dancing Times

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

The story of my exhibition is currently featured on the front page of of the Dancing Times website

http://www.dancing-times.co.uk/news/item/1005-sally_mckay_exhibition