Pulse

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National Dance Company of Wales Pulse 18 May 2023  19:30 Lawrence Batley Theatre 

The National Dance Company of Wales is Wales's national contemporary dance company.  It is one of three very important institutions at national, level the others being Ballet Cymru which is Wales's classical dance company and Dawnsio, the  Welsh Folk Dance Society.  It is based at the Cardiff Dance House but partners with a number of "priority venues" one of which is the Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield. The company has visited Huddersfield regularly for many years and I have seen several of its performances there.  When it comes to our theatre it sometimes allows the public to watch its company class and it always holds a Q&A after the show.  By reaching out to its audience in this way it has made a lot of friends here.

The company visited Huddersfield on 18 May 2023 to dance Pulse (or Pwls in Cymraeg).  This was a double bill consisting of Waltz by Marcos Morau and  Say Something by Sarah Goldring and Yukiko Masui.  The cast for both shows were Vito Bintchende, Jill Goh, Niamh Keeling, Mario Manara, Bianca Mikahil, Ed Myhill, Euan Stephen, Faye Tan and Tim Volleman.  These were two very different works.

Waltz started with the dancers enveloped in a black hood with diamante sequins that sparkled in the dim light.   A recording of Sibelius's Valse Triste was played.   Gradually the dancers unfurled and formed some extraordinary shapes of which the most memorable was something that reminded me of the DNA double helix.  Eventually, they separated though their movements were synchronized.  There is a very good video on the work at Waltz by Marcos Moreau and more information on the Waltz page. 

According to the programme notes:

"A haunting waltz plays in the distance. From the ashes a tangle of shining creatures emerge to inhabit a new world. In the chaos and turbulence their only hope is to remain united."

I have to say that was not my interpretation,  Perhaps because I focused on the double helix I thought it was about the origin of life in the primordial soup and the beginning of evolution.   I should have added that the music changed as the piece progressed.   Sibelius was followed by Suspirium by Thom Yorke, Crawler by Holly Herndon and Pneuma by Caterina Barbieri.  I had heard the Sibelius before but not the other works.   The ingeniously designed customers were by Elizabeth Catherine Chiu (Costume Supervisor and Maker) and Danial Thatcher (Maker).  Lighting was designed by Bernat Jansà and programmed by Will Lewis.   

Say Something was a vibrant, exuberant, percussive work with plenty of beatbox sounds.   There were pulses of light and colour.  The video Say Something by Sarah Golding and Yukiko Masui (SAY) describes it far more accurately than I ever could.   The programme notes state: "Say Something explores what it means to 'represent', and the ever-growing expectation to have a voice."  I don't think the piece needed an interpretation.   For me, it was enough to enjoy the kaleidoscope of sound, light, movement and colour.  The music was by MC Zani and Dean Yhnell. Lighting was designed by Joshie Harriette.  The very striking costumes were by George Hampton Wale.

Euan Stephen was part of the panel for the Q&A after the show.  He was asked how long he had been a dancer.  As he was about to answer the gentleman next to me whispered "That's my boy".Euan had danced well in the show so congratulations were in order.  I was able to express my appreciation to him personally as he was standing with his parents as I was leaving the theatre.   It was quite a good Q&A with questions ranging from the rehearsal times for the two productions to the company's work for Dance for Parkinson's about which I had written before.  I was very heartened to learn that the company always tried to include some of its own choreography in its Parkinson's classes.

The day after tghe show I tweeted the following:

Sioe wych yn @theLBT ddoe. Mwynheais i "Waltz" a "Say Something". Hefyd, y Holi ac Ateb. Falch o gwrdd ag Ewan a'i fam a'i dad wedyn. Dwi'n ysgrifennu adolygiad rwan. Gobeithiaf eich gweld yng Nghaerdydd rhyw ddydd.

— Jane Lambert (@nipclaw) May 19, 2023

That means:

"Great show at @theLBT yesterday.  I enjoyed both "Walrz" and "Say Something," Also the Q&A. Pleased to meet Euan's mum and dad.    I'm writing the review now.  Hoping to see you in Cardiff one of these days."

Cambriophilia

"We have Anglophile and Francophile, but what do we call someone who is a lover of the Americas - particularly North America?" asked The Guardian on its Semantic Enigma page. "Mad" was one ungracious reply which not unnaturally ruffled more than a few Transatlantic feathers. A more serious reply was Americophile which I googled and, yes, the word does seem to exist.

But the English language doesn't seem to have a word for a lover of Welsh culture which is strange because there is so much to admire in that beautiful peninsula just a short drive away for most of us. So I'm going to coin one which I hope will one day find its way into the OED. "Cambriophile" and its noun "Cambriophilia".  That adjective certainly applies to me. As I said in Ballet Cymru in London 1 Dec 2015:

"To the best of my knowledge and belief there is not a millilitre of Welsh blood in my veins. Such Celtic heritage as I can claim is Irish and Scottish yet I love Wales as much as anyone who was lucky enough to have been born in that country."

One of the reasons I am a Cambriohile is that Wales has a great ballet company in Ballet Cymru. I am delighted to say that it also has a fine contemporary dance company in the National Dance Company Wales.

The National Dance Company Wales spent a day in Huddersfield on 10 March 2016 and we got to know them well. They invited us to their company class over cakes at lunch time before performing three of their works on their current Spring tour and then finally sticking around in the meeting room afterwards for a Q & A. I should say for the benefit of those readers who have never been to Wales or Huddersfield that we share quite a bit in common. We also live in a hilly, gritty landscape which once had mines and mills and we share a love of singing with one of the best choral societies in the world. A language close to Welsh was once spoken in Yorkshire and quite a bit of it remains in names of geographic features such as Pen-y-ghent for one of the highest points in our county.

Company class was taken by Lee Johnston, the company's rehearsal director, and it was entirely classical starting with warm ups on the floor, barre work, and the usual centre exercises albeit to slightly different music than would normally accompany a ballet class. While the dance these artists perform on stage may not be ballet they are clearly ballet trained and they are as supple and graceful as any ballet dancer. Gita and I ran into Johnston on the way from the auditorium to the cafe.
 "Thanks for coming" she said.
"On the contrary. we thank you for letting us watch your company class" was our reply.
We introduced ourselves as Team Terpsichore and expressed our delight at meeting another Welsh dance company.
"We are good friends of Ballet Cymru", we were told, "who are just down the road from us."

The NCDW is based in the Dance House in the Millennium Centre in Cardiff which is indeed not far from Rogerstone which is the suburb of Newport where Ballet Cymru is based. The facilities of the Dance House sound magnificent: "a world-class production facility and performance and rehearsal space for local artists, youth groups and touring companies across the UK and beyond." They share that space with a roll call of some of the best and the brightest in Wales Welsh National Opera, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Touch Trust, Ty Cerdd, Literature Wales, Hijinx and Urdd. Facilities include "two dance studios, a lounge area and office space. The main production studio, the Blue Room, has the highest quality technical specification for producing and presenting dance, including 100 tiered and retractable seats. The second studio, Man Gwyn, is a simple square rehearsal studio complete with ballet barres, mirrors and full circle grey drapes for rehearsal, auditions or intimate presentations." Apparently the Dance House is always buzzing with activity.

The company has 9 dancers of whom only Josie Sinnadurai seems to be Welsh. The rest come from England and the Continent.
"You call yourself the National Company of Wales" I asked in the Q & A after the show, "so what's so Welsh about you?"
"Good question" replied David Pallant, their latest recruit, "well we go to all parts of the country and interact with schools of community groups."
"Our dancers are actually learning Welsh to work with children" added Lee Johnstone.
"Would you like to say something in Welsh?" said our Canadian master or rather mistress of ceremonies to Angela Boix Duran who is a strikingly beautiful young woman from Barcelona.
"Yr wyf o Sbaen" ("I'm from Spain") came the fluent reply.

The company performed three works for us:

• Tuplet by Alexander Ekman whose work includes an alternative Swan Lake which seems to be even more off the wall than David Nixon's (see Up the Swannee 17 March 2016) or even Sir Matthew Bourne's (see Swan Lads - Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, Bradford Alhambra 4 March 2014 5 March 2014) so if a choreographer must have a go at one of my most cherished ballets he may as well do a proper job;
• A Mighty Wind by Jeroen Verbruggen who also designed the sets as well as choreographed the ballet; and
• Folk by the company's artistic director Caroline Finn.

I liked all three works enormously but the one I enjoyed the most was Verbruggen's Mighty Wind. It was exciting as the men tossed one of the women between them as though she were a sack of potatoes and also innovative in the way he used four mobile fans with powerful lighting to flare the dancers hair as though they were on fire. Verbruggen had created The Nutcracker for the Geneva Ballet which I mentioned in Geneva Nutcracker on 25 Oct 2015. I would love to see that work one day but for now A Mighty Wind will do.

The National Dance Company of Wales's next stop on their Spring tour is The Place in London on 12 April and then on to Aberystwyth, Milford Haven and Mold.  If you live anywhere near those places they are worth a visit.

Phoenix in Huddersfield

Phoenix Dance Theatre, Mixed Bill, Lawrence Batley Teatre, Huddersfield, 27 Nov 2015

When I reviewed Phoenix's triple bill at The Linbury in The Phoenix Soars Over London on 13 Nov 2015 I promised to focus on Itzik Galili's Until.With/ Out.Enough and Caroline Finn's Bloom as soon as I had seen them in Huddersfield. I made that romise because I was so impressed with Sharon Watson's TearFall that I ran out of space and time to write about anything else. I am unable to keep that promise in its entirety because the first two works in last night's show were not Galili's piece bbut Christopher Bruce's Shift and Shadows. 

Not that I'm complaining for I am a great admirer of Bruce's work as you can see from my reviews of Rambert's Rooster (see Cock a Doodle Doo - Rambert's Rooster 27 Oct 2015 and Rooster ................ :-) 4 Oct 2014) and Scottish Ballet's Ten Poems (see Bruce Again 6 Oct 2015). Nevertheless it did occur to me to ask the reason for the substitution in a question and answer session with the cast in the Syngenta cellar at the end of the show. I didn't get a chance to ask that question because there were so many others who wanted to quiz the company but it was answered by Tracy Tinker, the tour director, who explained that the company had to dance Galili's piece in London because it had been a joint commission with the Royal Opera House.

The substitution prompted me to buy a new programme at the first interval and I remarked to a lady selling Phoenix merchandise in the foyer that this was a completely new programme. It wasn't entirely new. The other two works, TearFall and Bloom were the same as in the Linbury. 

As on the 12 Nov 2015 I enjoyed TearFall tremendously and appreciated it a little bit more for seeing it twice. It was clear from the Q & A that that piece went down well with the audience. Prentice Whitlow explained his interpretation of the work in response to a question from the floor. One point that I had missed before was that men and women think of tears in an entirely different way and the piece explored that.  Whitlow had introduced the piece with a short monologue and recordings of his voice and someone's (possibly his) weeping recurred at several points of the show.

Finn's Bloom was another work that I got to understand better the second time round though I am still not sure that I have got to the bottom of it.  Perhaps if I describe it you will see why.  It began with a group of dancers on the left hand side of the stage cooing and clucking around a table.  Suddenly one of them screams and Sam Vaherlehto wearing a clown's tragedy mask appears round a microphone. He shifts and shuffles apparently with embarrassment as his audience applauds and looks on. There is a duet - or more properly a dance dialogue - with Whitlow. One of the women in a tutu like skirt dances a solo to a rhyme that seemed to mock medicine. In another scene Vaherlehto gathers the dancers who were stretched on the ground like corpses and assembles them into a pile. The dancer in the tutu makes her way to the centre and lies down about them.  Towards the end Vaherlehto, stripped to his underpants, danced to a song with the chorus "I'm a creep. I'm a wierdo. What the hell am I doing here." Starting with the title Bloom I wondered whether the dancers might be plants or flowers and that the man in the mask was the gardener. I was dying to ask whether or not I was on the right track but sadly didn't get a chance to find out.

Even if it was about flowers Bloom did have disturbing undertones such as the thin line between reality and hallucination, Bruce's Shadows also seemed to be about aberrations of the mind as it started with furniture throwing. I was not the only one to see a connection with depression. The lady sitting next to me in the Q & A was a therapist and she alluded to it in formulating her question.

Shift, however was quite different. I had seen the same dancers dance that work at The Sapphire gala in March and I think they were better second time round. More polished somehow. Dressed in forties costumes with the women in head scarves Gracie Fields style they seemed to represent a production line. I was reminded very much of the munitions workers in Liam Scrlett's No Man's Land which I had seen in Manchester two days earlier (see Lest We Forget 25 Nov 2015). However, Bruce's workers seemed to have a lot more fun that Scareltt's canaries.

The Q & A session was my first chance to see all the dancers together and hear them speak. I had already met Whitlow a few days earlier, I have been following several of the others on twitter and I knew Marie-Astrid Mence from Ballet Black. They are an impressive bunch of artists. Watson explained her selection process which is uber competitive. They were asked how they took up dance. Two of the men explained that they took up dance because their sisters were taking lessons. The others gave various reasons. They were asked by the therapist how they relaxed and we learned from Vaherlehto that they look (or at least he looks) to another art. Photography in his case someone added.  I hope to run a feature on Mence and Whitlow in Terpsichore soon.

This has been a pretty good month for dance and the two shows by Phoenix were among the highlights. Although rooted in Leeds it really is a world class company with dancers from around the world.  I am very proud of them.

The Ballet comes to me

Normally I have to travel some distance to watch ballet but today the ballet came to me. To be more precise Northern Ballet performed Elves and the Shoemaker in The Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield. I have seen quite a lot of children's ballets with Vlad the Lad lately: English National Ballet's My First Ballet: Coppelia, Ballet Black's Dogs Don't Do Ballet and Ballet Theatre UK's Aladdin last week. I saw this one on my own (andI was by no means the only unaccompanied adult) and thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Unlike the other children's shows this ballet comes with live music. The score was composed by Philip Feeney who had written the music for Cinderella (see Northern Ballet's Cinderella - a Triumph! 27 Dec 2013 and Cinderella Even Better 30 Nov 2014). The choreography was by Daniel de Andrade who had created Fatal Kiss for the Sapphire gala. The sets were by Ali Allen. And the company deployed some of its best dancers including some of my very favourite.

The show is now touring the country and making three stops at the capital - the Linbury, Richmond and Bromley - so I will have three opportunities to take Vlad to see it. Earlier today I tweeted that I wonder whether I would be allowed to throw flowers on stage as audiences used to at Covent Garden before the flower and veg market moved to Nine Elms. I thought better of it but I really wish I hadn't because Bettina, Maggie, Snatch, Frances and Pearl as well as their men fork really deserved them.

Heavy Arts: Flashdance

I mentioned Heavy Arts Theatre School in my article on The Base Studios, Huddersfield on 2 March 2013. On 25 and 26 May 2013 Heavy Arts presented Flashdance at The Lawrence Batley Theatre in Huddersfield. I bought tickets for myself and a friend largely out of loyalty to the show's producers. I had expected a good amateur performance but nonetheless an amateur one. In fact the show exceeded my expectations. It was good. by any standard.  It was exuberant. It was energetic.   It was polished. It was poignant.  And in some scenes it was funny.

Based loosely on the film which grossed over US$201 million in box office receipts the musical tells the story of how Alex, a young woman working in a Pittsburgh steelworks by day and in a bar by night with very little formal education achieves her ambition of becoming a dancer against all the odds.  There are a number of sub-plots.  Her employer's nephew, Nick, uses his influence to get Alex an audition.  Her friend, Gloria, is tempted away to a pole dancing joint where she is abused by its owner, Kool and has to be rescued by Alex.  Alex's mother, Hannah, is shot in an armed robbery by  Jimmy, Alex's first date, who is desperate to raise a few hundred dollars.

This plot provided a setting for some good songs and even better dancing.  A triumph for the producer, director and choreographer Sean Sedley and the producer and general manager Matt Slater.  Sedley and Slater coaxed the best out of their cast - Caroline Hamilton who played Alex, Alex Jones who played Nick, Leah Varnam who played Hannah, Lawrence Guntart who played Jimmy, Oliver Burkill the sinister Kool and Florence Anstey, Beki White and Macy Varnham who played Alex's friends, Gloria, Keisha and Jazmin. They were all good - as indeed were the performers I have not mentioned - and it would be invidious to single out any of them out for special praise.

The scene changes were slick moving convincingly from a steel mill to Hannah's dry cleaning shop, a ballet school, Alex's flat, Kool's Bar and so on.  There were some difficult technical effects such as the end of the first act when the heroine was doused in what appeared to be a jet of water.  I struggle to see the point of that scene but it was still impressive.

There was just one detail that did not quite work for me and that was the accents.   For most of the audience it would not have mattered but having lived and worked in the USA they grated on me.  Pittsburgh is a steel town in Western Pennsylvania rather like Sheffield.  Like Sheffield it has its own distinct speech patterns that are recognizable instantly in America. "Still" for "steel", for instance, and "yous" for the second person plural. There are some good examples on YouTube. The actors managed something vaguely transatlantic but it was not Pittsburgh. The show would have been even better for me had the company stuck to their native speech.. Either than or they find themselves a good dialect coach.

According to the programme  Flashdance is the company's tenth show since 2007 and they have tried some very ambitious productions.  I look forward to their next show.