Author: Sanjoy Roy

It’s my first day at ArtsCross. I’m picking up the baton from writer Donald Hutera, who is at the Edinburgh Festival for a week, and am conscious that a week of a work has already gone by without me witnessing its development. So what was my entry point? Well, having already spoken to choreographer…

I’m picking up from where I left off in Part 1, in the studio with Vera Tussing and her dancers. How are they working together? So far, it looks like Vera has worked on improvisational tasks (mostly, it seems, to do with giving weight, and with a kind of proposal-response structure),…

I was at Zhou Liang’s rehearsal today, and saw exactly what Rebecca Loukes calls the “cat’s cradle”: a long length of elastic that the dancers weave and interweave into changing patterns that correspond exactly to the spatial relations between them. The geometric patterns in space, anchored to particular reaches and orientations of the body, reminded me…

[Continuing from Part 1 and Part 2] Let’s reset the scene. Here in the studio are choreographer Vera Tussing and her six dancers. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Here in the studio are Vera Tussing, her six dancers, a Chinese-English interpreter, me, an amenable fellow called Mike Picknett, who…

At yesterday’s academic seminar, Ted Warburton talked about “crossing disciplines”, and used sociology as an illustration. Some of it kind of passed me by (“epistemic reflexivity”, huh?), but there was one section, on research foci, that chimed a massive chord with me. Warburton divided sociological research into four areas:…

On Monday evening I went to Riccardo Buscarini’s rehearsal. It was rather magical, actually. Riccardo has five male dancers, two from the UK, two from Taiwan, one from Beijing. The interpreter, Soraya, is not a dancer but clearly has some experience of dance, and she can’t stop herself…

A visit to two groups this evening – Su Weichia’s and Guo Lei’s –  and it’s the first time I’ve come away thinking about dancers being singled out. Both these groups feature one UK dancer within a group of Chinese dancers. Of course, that’s not the only way of looking…

In an earlier post (“On being out out of place“) I made a point about a dancer placed at the front and in the centre, linking up the strength of that position choreographically with her strength as a performer. Well, having just seen this piece in the theatre, I think the likely explanation is that she is shorter than the others —…

A stand-alone piece that’s just been published on londondance.com ArtsCross London 2013 – Leaving home: being elsewhere. It’s a composite title for a composite evening that began with a much-needed bunch of backstory. For this was no standard performance programme, but rather the visible face of a more many-headed project: part choreographic lab,…