29 April is International Dance Day and in celebration Newcastle’s Dance City has lined up a varied programme for the following month, featuring three companies offering different styles of dance.
However, the region’s dance agency has already begun the celebrations with Fusion!, a popular Easter Urban Dance Camp for children.
First to arrive in Newcastle, as we announced in our news story of 30 March, is the Russell Maliphant Company with Silent Lines, a new work which premièred in Ipswich earlier this month. “It,” said Maliphant, “investigates a range of poetic possibilities, using the visually rich and resonant connections between internal and external worlds, the microcosm and the macrocosm.”
This is the company's first ever visit to Newcastle.
Silent Lines is at Dance City at 7:30 on Saturday 4 May.
The following Thursday, 9 May at 7:30, Seeta Patel reimagines Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, originally choreographed by Nijinsky for the Ballets Russes (which was greeted with a near riot at its première in Paris in 1913 because of its avant gard nature), in the South Indian classical dance style of Bharatanatyam, producing a fusion of two classical traditions, European and Indian.
The evening will showcase Indian classical dance talent from across the globe and there will be a free post-show talk with choreographer Seeta Patel to find out more about the work and its origins.
From 23 to 26 May (various times), Ockham’s Razor, an aerial theatre company which combines circus and visual theatre, returns to Dance City to present This Time, in which bodies are suspended high in the air and swung close to the ground in a new take on doubles trapeze. It’s a show about time, age and the stories we tell ourselves, a fresh look at perceptions of strength and ability: how we are strong in different ways at different times in our lives.
Tickets each show, available online or from the box office on 0191 261 0505, are £16.50, £13 concession, £8 students and under-18s.