Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage presents Elixir on Digital Stage: Longevity in Dance, an eclectic mix of bold, playful and poignant films that challenge perceptions of dance and age.
In our new 2024 programme, alongside global premieres, you can enjoy dance film commissions by artists Louise Lecavalier, Aditi Mangaldas and Paco Peña, and documentary The Exchange. This film follows a collaboration between Company of Elders and ZYC (ZooNation Youth Company), creating a dance show together choreographed by Chaldon Williams.
Elixir on Digital Stage: Longevity in Dance is a celebration of life through dance, and the inherent desire to keep on dancing.
Berlin’s Dance On Ensemble recreates and responds to an iconic work by Merce Cunningham
Originally choreographed in 1963, Merce Cunningham’s Story was never the same show twice.
The dancers were able to make choices about their movements, while a new set was constructed for each performance using material found in or near the theatre.
Now Dance On Ensemble draws from limited archival materials to re-imagine the piece for a new generation. What shape will the work take as it finds itself in the Lilian Baylis Studio?
Never ending (Story)
As a further exploration of Cunningham’s Story, the poem improvised by David Antin in 1989, was also a starting point of Mathilde Monnier’s never ending (Story). This is a piece that explores how movement and thought come together.
This piece is rooted in stories. Stories about structure, rhythm, feelings and repetitions. Stories about the dance you will witness on stage.
Watch as Dance On bring together speech, thought and dance in a way that shows they’re closer entwined than you might assume.
Photo: Maarten Vanden Abeele. Common Grounds: Malou Airaudo, Germaine Acogny
How do we express our changing bodies and minds as we grow and age?
Elixir Festival challenged perceptions around dance and age with works by iconic artists from around the world alongside inspiring performances from dancers drawn from our local communities in north and east London.
View the programme of workshops, films and talks here.
Inside the Outside is a collaborative work between the artists of Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia and the acclaimed American dancer and choreographer Deborah Hay.
Operating within the framework of defined tasks and determinants (the specific score of Inside the Outside), the artists build configurations of kinetic relations, exploring how their individual dance practices can engage in reciprocal interactions. Their principles are tested in more intense kinetic rhetorical territories, encompassing theatrical and choreographed passages. Throughout the performance, compositions of temporality confront one another, pointing to kinetic landscapes beyond the present moment, including those of the past, potentiality, and future actuality.
Choreographer Charlotta Öfverholm and her dance collective Jus de la Vie are thrilled to share their next stage of their journey when they approach their 30th anniversary. Join us as we say goodbye to dance performance, and a great big Swedish Hej! to the world of motivational seminars. Would you like to earn more money? Have a better sex life? Have thicker, glossier hair?
Come join Dick So-So, Scandinavia’s leading women’s empowerment specialist and be re-born as the YOU you were always meant to be. Learn how to finally take control of your life! The ONLY female empowerment conference led by a man is finally here!
Humor and sarcasm in a dance theater piece about gender identity, power structures, prejudices and about finding back to oneself.
By choreographer Charlotta Öfverholm and British director Sam Brown.
Holland Dance Festival not only shone with breathtaking dance performances, but also opened its doors for partner meetings, symposiums, introductions, after-talks and films. Under the titles Dance On, Pass On, Dream On and Europe Beyond Access, more than 20 leading European partners came together to discuss key issues and to share valuable knowledge.
The internationally organised DanceAble Symposium on inclusion in the performing arts featured 400 participants from 16 different countries live and online. The festival programme also contained a inspiring Focus Day for dance teachers on the topic of Dance and the Elderly.
The starting point for the project was the question: ‘How can archiving dance become an artistic practice?’ Koruga’s explorations led to a transgenerational exchange with six former dancers and performers, who now primarily work as choreographers and directors in the local independent dance scene: Nela Antonović, Anđelija Todorović, Jelena Jović, Tanja Pajović, Boris Čakširan and Sanja Krsmanović Tasić. Together, these six artists create an “archive in motion”, embodying movements, experiences, memories and oral histories from the many artistic works they created during their long careers, which remain insufficiently documented and are in danger of being forgotten – especially at a time when there is no official institutional framework for archiving the local dance scene.
By questioning the physical, social, emotional, economic, ideological, and other (mostly invisible) vulnerabilities behind their cultural and artistic work, they also re-examine the tactics, principles, (re)positioning, and contradictions of their survival and resilience as a form of resistance, criticism, and solidarity amidst the turbulent socio-political circumstances of the past forty years.
What do their bodies reveal and conceal? How does the impermanence of the archive reflect the impermanence of the dance itself? How does independent dance endure as a relevant social, cultural, and political tool for reshaping the social body? The attempt to create a definitive history will undoubtedly fail. The only question is, for whom?
A professional study day initiated by KUMQUAT | performing arts in conjunction with the CN D and the biennale de la danse de Lyon, this one-day session is aimed at collectively exploring ways of working and inhabiting the stage beyond the age of 40.
10:00am to 1:00pm
Dancers’ professional careers: what if ageing was an asset?
This first half, dedicated to dancers and choreographers, takes the form of experience feedback on the issue of performers’ on- and off-stage career over the years.
2:30pm to 5:00pm
The dancing body: a matter of gaze and identification?
Open to programmers and all dance-sector professionals, this round table will explore the visibility of age in dancing, accompanying the audience’s gaze and expectations, and how our relationship with age informs the creative process.
Since 2017, a group of dance artists and producers gathered around Nomad Dance Academy Slovenia have been in conversation with Deborah Hay, an icon of postmodern dance, about the possibilities of collaboration and about presenting her rich body of work to Slovenian and regional audiences.
At the invitation of NDA Slovenia, she came to Ljubljana in June 2022, opening up a process of exchange and experiential learning in conjunction with the tools from her long-standing practice. In this way, she introduced the participants to her perspective on dance and choreography, while enriching, challenging and further guiding our individual artistic processes.
For us as dancers, the work with Deborah Hay is a gift, a learning experience, an affirmation of dance as a daily practice and a research of forms, formats and the fluidity of perception. In this process, dance is paralleled with learning, individual and collective. Choreography comes as a structure, which supports and challenges the dancers. The possible readings of it are infinite – firm and fluid at the same time.
Daniel Linehan invites nine dancers of different generations to reflect on the role of dance in their lives. Why do you choose to dance? What motivates you to continue? When does dance start, and when does it end?
In 2019 Linehan created the solo performance Body of Work in which he reflects on his own history of dancing. Revisiting some of the same intimate questions that he asked himself, he gives the dancers of Kiss The One We Are with their own diverse histories the space to reflect on what it is to experience life and the surrounding world through the lens of dance. In what ways can dance connect us with one another and with the other dances that take place all around us: the play of animals, the movement of plants, the rhythm of an ocean, the dance of atomic particles continually vibrating and interacting. …? In asking these questions, together they reflect on the meaning of dance itself.
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