Four 'TV episodes' featuring brand new dance works performed by professional dancers and local volunteers, interviews with choreographers - and an invitation to join in
Essential viewing begins Thursday 25 June at 6pm
https://www.facebook.com/greenwichdance/
Forced indoors by Covid-19, Greenwich Dance has re-imagined Up My Street - Showtime!, a borough-wide project designed to tackle cultural inequality and loneliness, into Up My Street - Online!
Beginning on Thursday 25 June, four TV-style episodes featuring brand-new short dance works, interviews with choreographers and excerpts from their eclectic back catalogues, plus an invitation to get moving will be screened via the organisation's YouTube channel.
Greenwich Dance has commissioned four choreographers - Zoie Golding, Mathieu Geffré, Temujin Gill and Sarah Blanc - to each create a brand-new piece of dance for the camera, made entirely within lockdown restrictions. Edited by award-winning film-maker Roswitha Chesher, each piece will be screened within in its own magazine-style episode which will be hosted by Blanc, also a comedienne and performer.
The choreographers have each with worked a mix of professional dancers and volunteers aged between 13 and 68 who came to the project via a call-out to local South East London Facebook groups. Each choreographer has a cast of between eight and ten people, most of whom are strangers to each other.
Zoie Golding has used the detective character from her interactive live piece Sleuth to create an interactive digital game. She has posted clips of him, performed by professional dancer Niko Hanakam, and asked her cast to make choices about his next steps. Does he use the toothpick or the crowbar to open the locker? Does he search this room or the next one to hunt for his missing magnifying glass? The result is fantastically original fun.
Mathieu Geffré worked with his cast on Zoom, holding one-to-one sessions to set them choreographic challenges. He has created a series of dancing portraits to an original score composed by
James Keane, where the movement becomes a poetic ritual to elevate our current state of reality.
Temujin Gill, working with long-time collaborator Sunanda Biswas, explores the question 'what's important to me now?'. Working on WhatsApp, Gill posted a range of tutorials exploring breath, body percussions and dance steps such as the SuziQ and TopRock, as well as showing his cast an excerpt of himself bursting out of his house, running up streets and hills - and encouraged them to do similar things to explore the constraints of being inside and the freedom of being outside.
Sarah Blanc worked intensively with performers from Lotus Youth Dance Company and Dancing to the Music of Time, Greenwich Dance's Over 55s company. She partnered her participants up, mixing ages and groups, and together they devised poetry and movement using the chat facility on Zoom.
Melanie Precious, Greenwich Dance's CEO, says: "Up My Street was designed to bring dance to parts of the borough at risk of being overlooked. It was about putting a social event right into the heart of people's communities. When Covid19 hit we got together with our four choreographers and filmmaker to work out how we could offer those same communities some of what the original promised. Up My Street - Online! is what we have come up with.
This is the first time we have ever made work in this way. The choreographers have risen to the challenge as have the community casts, creating work together without, in most cases, ever having met each other face-to-face. Embracing technology like this has not been easy with both logistical and artistic challenges. The result is a real testament to the creativity of the sector and our communities.
Greenwich Dance is about making work for unusual places and spaces....and why shouldn't that include WhatsApp, Zoom and the internet? Doors have been closed to us but browser windows have been opened and this project is inspiring all of us to rethink what dance by and for the community really means and what it looks like."
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