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A touch of tango with Tangueras Resonance Elmhurst Ballet Company Elmhurst Ballet School ***** Seven pieces, seven styles and the seventh company of dancers standing at the crossroads in Elmhurst’s innovative stepping stone between the comfortable, sheltered safety of school life and the harsh, brutal real world of professional dance. Like the rest of the performing arts there are far more performers than jobs and the Elmhurst Ballet Company runs as a professional outfit with the aim of shortening the odds for its students on their gaining employment in dance companies. It might be year 14 but books, A-levels, exams are left behind, and the company are no longer students they are full time dancers with all that that demands, the idea being that a year in the school's own professional company will arm Elmhurst graduates with the extra skills and experience needed to at least be able to compete in the job market where talent alone is no guarantee. The opening dance, Laurencia, choreographed by Vakhtang Chabukiani, the famed late Georgian dancer and choreographer, is based on Fuenteovejuna, a 1619 play by Lope de Vega about a revolt against tyranny by the villagers of Fuente Ovejuna in 1476.
A touch of 15th century Castille with Laurencia The music by Jewish Russian composer Alexander Krein incorporates folk tunes slowly developing a stronger Spamish feel as the dance goes on. The costumes, black and white have a Spanish air and the dance incorporates a pas de huit with some complex interweaving of dancers in this excerpt from the original and much longer 1939 ballet. Next came A Line That We Crossed choreographed by Spike Frobisher and Tom Wood, Elmhurst’s graduate choreographers, in a piece that creates some remarkable intertwining of 13 dancers into one body. The theme is trying to repair broken relationships set to Belgian singer Tsar B’s atmospheric mix of pop and electronic Gonna Hold You in My arms. A fascinating piece was Tangueras from Spanish choreographer Avatâra Ayuso, which gave us eight girls – Tangueras, incidentally, being the female dancers in the Argentine Tango and at times there was a hint of an orquesta típica in the music. The dancers were in sparkly dresses reminiscent of the age of the flapper and gave us dances interspersed with a tableau of pauses with the dancers arranged on a table like animated, syncopated manikins. Intriguing to watch and cleverly performed. At times we could have been in Roaring 20s Chicago, at times a bar in the docklands of Buenos Aires, at times the fag end days of pre-war Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin. A stand out piece.
A tangle of limbs and bodies in A Line That We Crossed What’s The Time Where You Are from Scotland’s Daniel Davidson is an exploration of time. We all know, or think we do, that time is a constant. It is only there in the moment and the moment is already gone. In Davidson’s piece a lone dancer, slowly, deliberately, almost in stop motion, traverses stage right to stage left, taking what seems for ever, as the rest of the company appear in waves stage left to right by-passing, dancing around the lone dancer as if she doesn’t exist all to a collection of tracks by Norwegian electronic music duo Smerz. The lone dancer, Olivia Cryne, continues on her solitary path, oblivious to the high energy chaos about her, until, just as she is about to reach her stage left goal, on a now empty stage, she is finally seen and her existence recognised as she dances a duet with Spike Frobisher. The second half opens with Chris Penfold’s take om Moulin Rouge with Amour Bohème set to Backstage Romance from Moulin Rouge! The Musical. With films, musicals and choreography under his belt Penfold is now teaching Jazz at Elmhurst and the jazz influence shows in this showgirl spectacular capturing the slightly risque, burlesque nature of Pigalle’s famed Red Windmill.
The Unfading elegance of 15 dancers en pointe Paper Plane has been choreographed by Studio Wayne McGregor Artist, Jessica Wright – Sir Wayne McGregor being Elmhurst’s President. It is an intriguing piece as it has been created using the studio’s AI tool which allows dancers to input their ideas and from that the programme can create the movement and choreography required to turn idea to dance. It leads to some different and quite surprising moves of the don’t not try this at home unless you like hospital food kind. The cast are dressed as if for a gym class and what we get is a sort of heath and efficiency on steroids set to Paper Plane from Sweden’s Mikeal Karlsson, a piece which brought the entire company on stage. The finale came with Unfading from Birmingham Royal Ballet Principal dancer Lachlan Monaghan, set to Chopin’s Ballade No 3, Chopin being a telling choice as this is almost a dance equivalent to one of Chopin’s Études, both challenging the young dancers and giving them a chance to showcase the skills and techniques that have learned in perhaps the piece most aligned to classical ballet. And they met the challenge with flying colours in the most romantic and symphonic piece of the evening. The piece, incidentally, was dedicated to Anait Wheeler, pianist at Elmshurst, who died last summer. Resonance is performed again on 29-03-25 and then at the Shaw Theatre, London on Saturday 5 April 2024. Roger Clarke 28-03-25 The members of the Elmhurst Ballet Company 2025, hailing from from four continents, are: Cameron Allan, Risa Ando, Lois Barnes, Maddi Calvert, Eva Cartwright, Amber Cook, Andreas Cross, Olivia Cryne, Susannah Forsyth, Spike Frobisher, Alfie-Lee Hall, Sofia Hensley, Thomas Kujawa, Cali Manders, Franics Morgan, Honey Newton, Noah Nixon, Erin Parris, Lucinda Paykel, Chelsea Potter, Harriet Quinn, Charlotte Roberts, Nora Yun Schaefer, Ella Schindler, Gemma Skinner, and Tom Wood. |
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