Five years ago, in July 2013, Newcastle-based balletLORENT premièred The Night Ball at The MEM in Wallsend, celebrating the company’s twentieth anniversary. The piece included an eclectic mix of dance styles and focused primarily on dance as a social activity, which is, as Artistic Director Liv Lorent said at the time, “one of our basic instincts.”
For the 25th anniversary, Liv Lorent is creating a new piece inspired by that 20th birthday show and by one of the company’s most popular and most revived shows, la nuit intime, first performed in 2006 and which last went on tour in 2011.
Like the two shows from which it is born, After Dark is an intimate evening of dance and drinks, performed in cabaret style, and it will run at Northern Stage (where it is an Associate Company) from 7 to 10 November.
Lorent was an Associate Artist at The Place in London where she set up balletLORENT in 1993. She went to Newcastle in 1996 to become resident choreographer at Dance City, which is where the company is still based and from which it has toured many productions over the years, including, along with the two already mentioned, Strange Glitter, The Ball, Angelmoth, MaEternal, Designer Body, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Underneath the Floorboards and the fairy tale trilogy of Rapunzel, Snow White and Rumpelstiltskin.
“For balletLORENT, 2018 is a year to reflect on a body of work that has developed over 25 years and to share our story with a wider public,” said Lorent. “We hope to continue to inspire audiences and our peers as we celebrate the company’s fantastic dancers and collaborators that have made balletLORENT's work distinctive and memorable.
“Most of the company dancers have been working with balletLORENT for the last 20+ years. I am very much in awe that this eclectic group of highly experienced dancers continues to tour with me and offer themselves body and soul to the work we make together.”
As well as the 24 dancers who make up the company, many of LORENT’s works have featured an intergenerational cast of non-dancers and have included children, older people and pregnant women alongside the professional dancers. These large scale works of twenty to eighty dancers include PassAge to Passion, Life Stories, La Famille and MaEternal.
Thirteen young people and children aged between 2 and 17 years old joined the professional dancers on stage for the national tour of Rapunzel, eleven 5- to 8-year-olds featured in the national tour of Snow White and the production of Rumpelstiltskin features a community cast of ten children between 5 and 8 years old and four older people aged 65 and over who are local to each venue at which they perform.
Rumpelstiltskin is currently on tour until October 2018. Dates include Darlington Hippodrome on 1 and 2 September, His Majesty’s Theatre Aberdeen on 28 and 29 September, Eden Court Inverness on 1 and 2 October, Adam Smith Theatre Kirkcaldy on 6 October, Warwick Arts Centre on 26 and 27 October and CAST Doncaster on 30 and 31 October.
Tickets for the Northern Stage performances go on sale on 7 June, are £25 each and include a complimentary celebratory drink.