In the last two decades, we have witnessed numerous restagings, reconstructions or historical stage studies of the repertoire from various phases of contemporary dance. Some were put up by the authors themselves, others by those who were moved by the works of art in one way or another. The restagings of choreographic works by the American choreographer Lucinda Childs are certainly among the more successful. In recent decades, they have aroused exceptional interest among generations of artists who were not even born at the time of their creation. Because audiences in different parts of the world never get enough of them and because they are always a great challenge for dancers, works from the oeuvre of Lucinda Childs steadily return to world stages and are born anew.
19.30 – lecture (free entry) Rok Vevar: Introduction to the choreographic principles of Lucinda Childs
Elixir Extracts 2022 opens with an evening of solo works from internationally recognised artists who challenge perceptions about dance and age. The evening will include short works by the UK’s Liz Aggiss and Charlotta Öfverholm from Sweden.
Crone Alone – Liz Aggiss
Liz Aggiss, ‘enfant terrible’ of the bus pass generation, and grand dame of anarchic dance is pondering on her past glories and catastrophes. She has decided to reinvent herself as a performance poet whilst embracing her inner crone as the ideal incarnation of herself, unruly, wise, fearsome, and just a bit gobby.
Lucky – Charlotta Öfverholm
She is longing for happiness, to die young, to live forever, or just in the moment. Dancing and laughing in a tragicomical landscape and letting the audience shine in the spotlight. “A technically drilled primal force that gives us hands-on perspective of life”.
A piece about sustainability in the sense that “the grass is not greener on the other side”, honouring the experiences and maturity to refine life on earth.
Dance, circus, text and music create a performance that questions, accepts and celebrates life and what might follow.
Charlotta Öfverholm and Anders Larsson have been producing films together since 2013. Anders has created three documentaries following the work of Charlotta’s project Age on Stage. Checking Out, a detective story, was their first dance film released in 2021.
Iconic works of modern and postmodern dance meet contemporary artists and perspectives: The Dance On Ensemble has been invited by the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn to present its evening “Making Dances”, in which Tim Etchells and Mathilde Monnier ‘reply’ to seminal pieces by Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in their own artistic languages. The result is a collection of works that shed new light on dance history in a dialogue that spans generations.
Sadler’s Wells Digital Stage presents Longevity in Dance, an eclectic mix of bold, playful and poignant films that challenge perceptions of dance and age.
The programme features commissions by internationally acclaimed artists, Charlotta Öfverholm, Nahid Siddiqui, José Losada Santiago and showcases new films by award-winning choreographer and director Eleesha Drennan, Sadler’s Wells Company of Elders and a fly on the wall documentary about iconic dancers Malou Airaudo and Germaine Acogny.
This beautiful collection looks at what makes us spark, the passing of time, our connection with nature, and the legacy we pass on. It’s a celebration of life through dance, and the inherent desire to keep on dancing.
Works in Silence offers a unique view of the early work and artistic development of one of the most important choreographers of the twentieth century: the grand old lady of American Modern dance Lucinda Childs. Ty Boomershine, who as a dancer had a long-lasting relationship with Childs’ company and has been the artistic director of the German 40+ ensemble Dance On since 2019, managed to involve her in this remarkable collaborative project.
An immense influence on generations of choreographers The six selected choreographies from the extensive repertory of Childs are fascinating both because of their rarity as well as their great importance to international dance and immense influence on generations of choreographers. The works could be seen in museums, churches, and public spaces in the 1970’s, and most have never or hardly ever been performed since. In these choreographies, Childs eliminated props, objects, spoken word, symbolic movement – all characteristics of the famous Judson Dance Theater era – and instead chose to purely focus on the movement of the body through space. Starting off from what, to her, is the basis of movement – walking – and going from walking to changing direction, to skipping, to jumping. In other words, according to her vision, the illustration of the evolution of movement through dance.
Vulnerability and humanity The pieces express vulnerability and humanity, quietly performed by the extraordinary dancers of the Dance On Ensemble who each illustrate the considerable value of experience with their own rich history, background and knowledge. Childs: “By crossing out any artificiality and theatricality, the beauty and truth of wisdom is confronted, shared, and exposed.”
“Dance On offers a new look on the still fresh avant-garde of yesteryear” – Het Parool
Charlotta Öfverholm celebrates the mature dancer in her new expressive piece on trust and how we reappraise the relationship with ourselves gradually as we change. With strong characters and live music she invites both humour and darkness.
We tend to trust the predictable – but how much trust is needed to be unpredictable? A stage performer who has been in the spotlight her whole life is forced to re-evaluate the trust to the body’s own ability and to reappraise the relationship to herself. If your self image was built in a cage of stage light, do you dare to trust that it is still intact when the lights switch off?
Choreographer Ivana Müller brings together four dancers from Dance On Ensemble and four actors from the Münchner Kammerspiele in a poetic braid of movements, stories and images that reflect the inevitable passing of time.
In Fäden (threads, strings in German) choreographer Ivana Müller brings together four dancers of the Dance On ensemble and four actors from the Münchner Kammerspiele in a creation around the idea of ageing. Fäden emerges as a choreographic, poetic and visual meditation on time and the way it formulates our lives. While unravelling ideas and sensations of past, present and future, performers knit a sentient reflection in which remembering, forgetting, losing, waiting, aging and transforming become main protagonists. Fäden unfolds as an ever-changing landscape and a lively conversation on the inevitable passage of time.
Ivana Müller is a choreographer, artist and author of texts. She was born in Zagreb, grew up in Croatia and Amsterdam, and currently lives in Paris.
Unfortunately, this performance had to be cancelled due to COVID health concerns.
The American artist, who broke new ground in dance in the 1970s and became a touchstone for later generations, will perform for the first time in Spain. She will present four pieces, two of them with Cullberg, Sweden’s most international ballet company.
Jonathan Burrows first appeared in Slovenia in 2001 together with Jan Ritsema in the duet Weak Dance Strong Questions (2001). Since then, he has presented a number of his works here, created with the composer and performer Matteo Fargion since 2001, and a translation of his work A Choreographer’s Handbook was published by Maska and JSKD (Public Fund for Cultural Activities) in 2010, in which the dancer and choreographer had organised (morphological, aesthetic, compositional, etc.) topics related to the creation of contemporary dance into a series of questions, statements, comments and quotations that address those dilemmas of the choreographer’s process that he is often afraid to say out loud. Both Sitting Duet (2002), created by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion almost two decades ago, and which by a strange coincidence has never been seen in this country before, is today a classical work of contemporary dance. The amount of coverage that has accompanied it to date is extensive because it is, simply put, a genuine choreographic invention, the likes of which is enjoyed by contemporary dance only every so often. Without being accompanied by or generating any sound, the Duet functions as a dance-kinetic piece with its subsonority and orchestral stage situation, in which the performers seem to be separated from its execution. But despite all the possible conceptual, dance-theoretical and historical aspects it has produced so far, the piece is utterly humorous, it has virtuosity, and it reminds us of the sensual and intellectual joy of watching dance. In 2003, the Both Sitting Duet won the prestigious Bessie Award in New York. The solo Rewriting (2019) is the author’s meditation on the embodied but crossed out parts of choreographies. What could it possibly mean to carry within you the recollection of something that has lost its context and meaning?
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