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.
Photo: Danny Willems
“There is an entire universe that exists outside the walls of the theatre that has been denied access to dance and theatre,” says Seppe Baeyens. With Birds he ventures outside the theatre walls to organise the public space as a dramatic space. How do participants, onlookers and passers-by relate in this generous, social choreography?
Following the success of Tornar (2015) and INVITED (2018), dancer and choreographer Seppe Baeyens builds upon his exploration of shaping a temporary community in Birds. For this new creation, he steps outside the theatre walls and ventures into the public space with a group of performers and musicians. There the normal course of events is interrupted – sometimes invisibly and sometimes plainly. Time and time again, unexpected compositions arise from playful interactions between onlookers, participants and coincidental passers-by, in which everyone appears to influence the outcome. Birds is a generous, social choreography that seeks out connection and imagination.
In Birds Seppe Baeyens also wanted to broaden and diversify the creation process itself. He invited Martha Balthazar and Yassin Mrabtifi to create and accompany the performance with him.
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.
Dance is made by and for everyone. Holland Dance Festival has conveyed that opinion for years. We organize lessons and activities for older people and produce performances that touch, move, surprise, and entertain their audiences. One of those performances is the biannual Good [old] Times production, in which we invite a different professional choreographer (or choreographers) to work with a group of seniors – selected through an audition – to offer the audience a unique experience.
Wistfulness
This time, the Good [old] Times production is created by choreographers Thom Stuart and Rinus Sprong from De Dutch Don’t Dance Division (The Hague). The duo has a rich, very successful track record and is very experienced in working with highly diverse groups of dancers. In their new production, titled Tableau de la Troupe, we follow a number of older dancers in a backstage setting. In the dressing room, where the group is getting ready for a new show, their lived experience as well as their dreams for the future come up. Some can look back at illustrious careers, others wistfully think of missed opportunities and unfulfilled dreams. But things can change! Stuart and Sprong: “Think of Lotti Huber, who started her illustrious acting career when she was already 80 years old and 87 when she published her writing debut, Diese Zitrone hat noch viel Saft!“
The ‘Song of life’ as a guiding principle
The expressive and energetic movement idiom of Stuart and Sprong is used to its full advantage in this vibrant new production. Music is the guiding principle in Tableau de la Troupe, and the ‘Song of life’ in particular. Through classic compositions and songs by, among others, Nina Hagen, Bette Midler, and Hildegard Knef, the dancers relive their past and their dreams come into being.
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?
Photo and video: Jubal Battisti
How can time be measured? What accumulates over its duration? Can it be wrapped up and stacked, or scattered and distributed? What gets lost and forgotten? And how do we humans change with time; or against it?
“Fäden” emerges in a fragile, interrupted and postponed present, with the memory of before and an inkling of after. From this suspended moment, the choreographer and author Ivana Müller, together with the actors and dancers Javier Arozena, André Benndorff, Walter Hess, Jelena Kuljić, Anna Gesa-Raija Lappe, Emma Lewis, Jone San Martin and Omagbitse Omagbemi, develops a web of movements, thoughts and images that reflect the inevitable process of time passing.
In this piece premiered in New York in 2018, Cesc Gelabert uses his body and enigmatic movements to explore the minimalist music of Morton Feldman, which is performed by Pedja Muzijevic on piano and which plays with the magic of the lighting designed by Burke Brown.
Choreography Cesc Gelabert / Music Morton Feldman Triadic Memories
Lighting and set design Burke Brown / Costume design Lydia Azzopardi
Performer Cesc Gelabert / Pianist Pedja Muzijevic
