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Tiger Dancing
Bury St Edmunds Festival
19 and 20 May 2005
Britten Sinfonia
Henri Oguike Dance Company
St Edmundsbury Cathedral
is about to be finished after 500 years. A neo-gothic central tower
has finally been added wityh the help of millennium lottery money. To
celebrate its near completion, Bury St Edmunds Festival and DanceEast
commissioned Britten Sinfonia and Henri Oguike Dance Company to perform
in the nave.
They gave the world premiere
of Steve Martland's Tiger Dancing, written for the company and, in honour
of Sir Michael Tippett's centenary year, his 1939 Concerto for Double
String Orchestra, choreographed for the first time. The dance part of
the concert was completed by Oguike's signature work, front Line, to
Shostakovich's String Quartet No.9. Since it's a piece in which the
sound of the dancers' pounding feet amplifies the frenzy of the music,
the noisy, makeshift stage was peculiarly appropriate.
The thumps distracted though,
during the Tippett. Dressed in shades of green, 10 dancers were celebrants
of spring, bringing the abbey gardens into the church. Wheeling and
reforming to absorb each soloist, they made up a companionable congregation.
Isolated in the slow movement, Nuno Silva contemplated his envelope
of flesh, reached out in anguish, sighed with the strings. When the
others returned, joyous Sarita Piotrowski was the only one left behind,
Silva's serene counterpart.
A beautiful piece, it confirms
Oguike as an outstandingly musical choreographer, as lovable as Mark Morris.
The Observer
The Tippett looks pretty good.
It is a blithe, lush score, with echoes of fresh-air Copland and melancholic
Mahler. Oguike picks up the dewiness with a verdant first movement - couples
in white and lime clothes chain-dancing sweetly like an Attic frieze.
Suddenly silence, low blue light and a lone man walking out through the
orchestra - the tremendous Nuno Silva, with a ravishing solo that starts
casually like something from Oklahoma! (thanks to the gospel gentleness
of the music there) but turns wonderfully deep and soft, full of aching,
arching movements and fast plunges, as if he were seizing on memories.
The other dancers drift into
the pillars, and occasional lights pass, like car headlights (Guy Hoare's
lighting). The final movement builds impressively on Tippett's double
idea, the spirited group invisibly separated from the watching Silva,
with Oguike's poetic instinct in lively flow.
Martland's premiere, Tiger
Dancing, inspired by William Blake's Tiger poem, is vivid and well-sprung,
real dance music. It was following [Oguike's] masterly 2002 sextet Front
Line. Very few dances premiered in the last decade equal this exacting
and excitign creation to Shostakovich's manic depressive ninth string
quartet - the one where the added floor noise actually increased the thrill
of it.
The Telegraph
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