Last modified on Fri 8 Jan 2021 01.01 EST
Cathy Marston: Drift
Amid lockdown frustration last summer, acclaimed choreographer Cathy Marston had no dance companies to make movement for, so she created some for herself instead and performed for the first time in 15 years. Drift was filmed by the River Aare, near Marston’s home in Switzerland. Balancing on fallen trees or calf-deep in the water, moving meditatively to a specially composed score by regular collaborator Philip Feeney, she offers a welcome retreat from the current world.
Pointe Black
A powerful telling of the prejudices faced by black ballet dancer Marie-Astrid Mence during her training in her home city of Paris, directed by dancer turned film-maker Rebecca Murray and featured on Nowness. Mence’s gentle voiceover belies the ugliness of her experiences: bullied about her body, told to switch to street dance, made to dance the men’s roles. A dancer with Ballet Black since 2014, Mence proved her detractors wrong, bu
THE PRODUCTIONS I caught in Wales before lockdown were exceptional, with
The Beauty Parade a stunning and deeply moving theatrical account of the women sent to occupied France to help the Resistance and, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, “set Europe ablaze.”
Kaite O’Reilly wrote and co-directed this inspirational piece of theatre which has a cast of just three women bringing to life the secret operation codenamed The Beauty Parade through song, music, acting and a unique blend of mime and sign language.
It is a compelling collaboration between deaf and hearing artists which tells the story of a little-known part of the British war effort against fascism saving the 1958 movie Carve Her Name with Pride.
Celestial vision: Birmingham Royal Ballet dance Will Tuckett’s Lazuli Sky
Credit: Johan Persson
A couple of months ago, the choreographer Will Tuckett was lamenting the fate that befell British dance for so much of 2020. Then, he added: “Artists will make art, however, that finds its way through. It’s like having a leak – artists are like having bad plumbing, in that they will always find the smallest crack.”
Was he right? For at least half of 2020, no amount of optimism or ingenuity could mask the fact that live dance – one of the jewels in this country’s cultural crown – had ceased to exist. Forced to distance themselves, dancers nationwide fought desperately in their kitchens and bedrooms to keep muscles toned, tendons long and technique strong, using anything from a dining table to the family moggy as a barre.