Last night was the première of TWOOLS, hailed as “Scapino’s ballet overdose”. I don’t know about overdose but it was certainly a style of dance to which I could easily become addicted. The programme consisted of six short pieces, often funny, always dramatically and immaculately presented.
The three dancers, Jeroen Van Acker, Lorenzo Capodieci and Francesca Peniguel worked well together as the mood changed with each short piece. The live music was performed throughout by Maarten van Veen on piano . . .
For centuries artists have been fascinated by circus performers of all kinds – Toulouse Lautrec, Picasso, Marc Chagall and Dame Laura Knight’s colourful work are all well-known. Britt van Eijk’s exhibition of drawings is a perfect illustration of how the arts can overlap and feed off each other.
Circuses used to be very closed shops, family affairs where skills and acts were handed down through generations. But things have changed, a middle ground between theatre and circus has been established and circus skills have become “legitimate”. The resulting shows have established a new theatre genre and dozens of schools have been established around the world . . .
The Rotterdam International Duet Choreography Competition is a platform to discover emerging choreographers. RIDCC aims to stimulate and offer opportunities to choreographers from all over the world. This is an open competition and so far over 120 duets from all over the world have been registered for the event.
The piece started in complete silence with a lone male dancer standing in a ring of bricks like a statue in an ancient stone circle. He is joined by five other dancers, moving together. . . After a few minutes a solitary male figure crawls on from down stage right and the group withdraws to a rectangle of light in the opposite corner and watches.
Sabine Molenaar’s That’s It was almost cinematic, dreamlike and enthralling – a set bathed in red light, an apparently very old woman who, when briefly donning a couple of long-haired wigs, seemed to recall her younger years when she was desirable and sexy, her tentative movements reminding me of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire or Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard
Always holding hands, always touching in a cat’s cradle of twisting turns. Sometimes caressing, sometimes struggling for separation, it is a relationship laid bare that eventually became almost a test of will, a test of strength. But we had seen nothing yet.
