With An Evening-length Performance, choreographer James Batchelor reimagines the baroque ballroom as a place for queer encounters and expression. A new kind of social dance emerges that invites curiosity about the event space and its inherent theatricality. Sensitive, delicate and poised, the performers embody a shared vocabulary with echoes of their own personal movement histories. As doors open and layers are removed, the formality of the space shifts to allow moments of subtlety and intimacy.
What is particularly beautiful about “An Evening-length Performance” is that the evening does not divide, but finds harmony. He makes both baroque dance and movements of the current zeitgeist strong. And suddenly the courtly dance seems very close. And not only that, but actually quite contemporary and progressive.
Review Tanznetz.de
The light design took as its starting point the form and symmetry of formal ballrooms and gardens. Beginning the piece with the daylight, slowly closing the windows as the performers entered the space one by one. Each section of the piece the light began with a small focused gaze and gradually opened up the space and expanded the gaze of the audience. This movement was repeated through the different sections of the work, introducing colour that expanded from the floor to the fill the levels of the space to the ceiling, and streamed in through the open doors at the end of the work.
Choreographer - James Batchelor
Dancers - Jacqueline Trapp, James Batchelor, George Hampton Wale, Giorgia Ohanesian Nardin
Dramaturge, Collaborator - Bek Berger
Music - Morgan Hickinbotham
Costume - George Hampton Wale
Lighting - Vinny Jones
Developed with - Natalie Abbott, Arad Inbar
Guest Provocatuers - Zander Porter, Dr. Dorita Hannah
Premier 12.08.21 Tanz im August, Sophiensaele • Berlin, Germany.
