Yorke Dance Project continues its relationship with Robert Cohan CBE, one of the giants of modern dance who this year celebrates his 90th birthday. The company’s spring programme, Figure Ground 2015, includes the world première of Cohan’s Lingua Franca, his first new work in a decade.
Inspired by his 1984 work for London Contemporary Dance Theatre, Agora, Cohan has created a new quartet, Lingua Franca. Preceded by a specially commissioned composition by Eleanor Alberga, Cohan’s long-standing collaborator, the piece is set to a J S Bach Chaconne played live on piano by Alberga herself.
Lingua Franca will be performed alongside Cohan’s only solo for a female dancer, Canciones Del Alma from 1978. He reconstructed the work for Yorke Dance Project’s Artistic Director Yolande Yorke-Edgell in 2014, describing it as a “meditation that Yolande has made her own”. Canciones Del Alma is danced to Geoffrey Burgon's setting of poems by the 16th century mystic St John of the Cross for two counter tenors and orchestra.
Also on the programme is Charlotte Edmonds’s 2014 work, No Strings Attached, a piece for six dancers set to music by Michael Gordon. No Strings Attached was the first professional commission for 17-year-old Edmonds, twice winner of the Royal Ballet School’s Kenneth MacMillan Senior Choreographic Award and now studying at the Rambert School.
The evening closes with Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s 2014 work Unfold to Centre, inspired by pioneering US computer-animation artist Larry Cuba’s film 3/78 (Objects and Transformations). Yolande plays with the relationship between live dance and the ‘dance’ of Cuba’s animation, which is projected in front of, behind and on the seven dancers themselves. Sound compositions by Kazu Matsui and Joseph Hyde make up the score.
Opening 31 January 2015 in Frome, Figure Ground 2015 tours to Swindon, London, Bournemouth and Winchester. Further dates will be announced later.
To celebrate Robert Cohan’s 90th birthday, on 27 March Lingua Franca can be seen as part of Robert Cohan at 90 at The Place, where the programme will also include the duet from Forest performed by dancers from the Martha Graham Company, the première of a new solo work choreographed by Cohan for Liam Riddick of Richard Alston Dance Company, Cell Revisited choreographed by James Cousins and performed by students from London Contemporary Dance School and the première of a new work by Tony Adigun inspired by Cohan’s Forest and performed by dancers from The Place’s Children and Youth Dance programme.