Dance Umbrella, London’s annual international contemporary dance festival, begins its 2024 programme tomorrow taking place across London, and online, until 31 October 2024. For full details on the live and digital festival, please visit: danceumbrella.co.uk/
Opening the festival at the Barbican this year, South African choreographer Mamela Nyamza presents HATCHED ENSEMBLE, running in the Theatre from Wednesday 9 October – Saturday 12 October. UK based performer and choreographer Hetain Patel presents Mathroo Basha playing in The Pit, across Friday 11 October – Saturday 12 October.
Dancer, choreographer, and acrobat Diana Niepce explores her recovery from a spinal cord injury, seeking new ways to integrate the disabled body into mainstream dance. In her solo piece The Other Side of Dance, which will be at the Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on 16 October.
Radioactive Practice from award-winning American choreographer Abby Zbikowski blends street dance, synchronised swimming, post-modern dance, tap, football, martial arts, and African forms. The work challenges physical and mental limits while exploring our survival instincts (18 & 19 Oct, Sadler’s Wells) and is a European Premiere.
Contemporary dance and physical theatre collective POCKETART’s latest work Fairy Tales (UK Premiere) features eight female dancers and two musicians in an exploration of the intersection of femininity, identity and self-discovery (21 & 22 Oct, The Place).
Change Tempo returns to Brixton House in 2024 to introduce London to two international artists whose transformational works blur the line between dance and visual art. Sweden-based Adam Seid Tahir and Amina Seid Tahir draw inspiration from literature on Black feminism and marine mammals for their latest production – several attempts at braiding my way home, (24 & 25 Oct, Brixton House).
October half term starts with a Dance Umbrella Family Weekend at Unicorn Theatre and Potters Field Park with performances, workshops and arts and crafts for the whole family to enjoy.
On Saturday 26 & Sunday 27 October de Stilte, renowned dance company from the Netherlands, bring their thrilling new show for young children to the Unicorn and the UK for the very first time. Eyecatchers is an enchanting adventure, perfect for families with children aged 1 and above. Enjoy the show and stay for interactive playtime on stage, where the whole family can immerse themselves in this world of wonder!
Wander over to Potters Fields Park on Saturday 26 October for The Bobby Dazzler, Hackney Showroom’s touring stage on wheels. Pop on your dancing shoes for an afternoon of DJ’s, live cabaret acts, dance floor prizes and family fun!
DIGITAL PROGRAMME
For the 2024 Festival, Dance Umbrella has produced and curated a selection of innovative dance films, a panel discussion and unique encounters with this year’s festival artists. If you can’t be there in person, this is a great way to experience the festival from wherever you are in the world.
The Digital Pass is Pay What You Can and will give viewers access to the entire digital programme within this year’s festival, available online to global and national audiences from 9 – 31 October.
Abby Z and the New Utility’s Radioactive Practice – for anyone unable to attend the live dates at Sadler’s Wells, we are offering a filmed version to Digital Pass holders. Hurtling onto the stage with explosive physicality, six performers challenge their physical and mental limits in a genre-bending new work.
This powerful piece was recontextualised from the stage for film by director Jeremy Jacob to interrogate the complexities of contemporary living.
British visual artist and filmmaker Hetain Patel created a series of animations during lockdown in 2020. Initially intended to loop infinitely as individual works, they are presented as part of the Dance Umbrella Festival as a single screen taster series for the first time. Hetain is interested in the specificity of each medium he uses – in this case, some explorations for the body that are only possibly through animation.
Photographer and filmmaker Hugo Glendinning and choreographer Rosemary Lee’s acclaimed short film, Sentence, explores the fleeting nature of dance through innovative animation techniques and slow shutter speed. Filmed in a former courtroom, dancer Lauren Potter’s movements blur in and out of the dark wooden panels. Crafted during the isolating period of lock down and accompanied by Isaac Lee-Kronick’s haunting soundtrack, Sentence is both poetic and mysterious, and evokes a profound sense of longing.
Inspired by memories of the choreographer Johana Pocková’s grandmother, Folds of Touch by POCKETART follows four female dancers, an eight-year-old girl and a 90-year-old woman, as they perform on stage. Based on the production Warehouses Full of Emotions, the film is both a documentary of the play and a fictional depiction of the women’s lives in real time.
Dive into some of the most exciting minds in contemporary choreography. Now in its fifth year, this edition of Choreographer’s Cut features Ioanna Paraskevopoulou. Using everyday objects: umbrellas, plungers, and of course, coconut shells, MOS, which had its UK premiere at the Barbican as part of Dance Umbrella 2023, evokes the sound effects made by expert foley artists for film and TV. Filmed on the set of MOS at the Barbican, in this Choreographer’s Cut Ioanna takes us behind the scenes to look at the inner workings of her innovative production, which was a sell-out success at last year’s festival.
Choreographer Lea Anderson discovered the work of Austrian expressionist painter Egon Schiele years ago when leafing through the Arnolfini bookshop. Taken by the possibility of seeing Schiele’s framing of repeated figures in the reproduction of his sketchbooks as a system for writing dance, she imagined Schiele as a choreographer whose dances had been lost in The Featherstonehaugh’s Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele. Originally created in 1998 as a live work, it was remade as a film in 2010 in collaboration with Deborah May of Kinoki and with new music by Steve Blake and Will Saunders. The film has never been publicly aired and will be a world premiere for Dance Umbrella 2024.
ARTIST ENCOUNTERS
Artist Encounters is an online professional development workshop with a guest artist, focusing on cultivating practical skills, sharing knowledge and asking questions that resonate. This year, Lea Anderson will lead the session which will be live streamed with a small amount of tickets available in person at Trinity Laban.
PANEL DISCUSSIONS
Moving with Equity: A panel discussion on body politics (9 October) is designed to interrogate and move forward discussions around the body, its politics and movement practices, and the current discourse with colonial history. Facilitated by author, journalist and Bernie Grant Arts Centre Artistic Director & CEO Azieb Pool, the panel will include author, actress, director and public speaker Kelechi Okafor, who is the host of the Say Your Mind podcast, as well as being a highly skilled pole and twerk fitness instructor. They will be joined by choreographer Mamela Nyamza whose autobiographical work, which will be shown at the Barbican Theatre for four nights, addresses social injustice. She seeks to show the significance and particularity of each dancer’s movement that have been moulded by many diverse contexts and backgrounds through their history as classically trained dancers, permeated with embodiments of personal, public and political experiences as artists in South Africa. Presented in partnership with the British Council and Barbican. This event will be BSL interpreted.
Is Theatre Stealing Dance’s Moves? panel discussion at Shakespeare’s Globe (22 October) features Polly Bennett (Saltburn, Elvis, The Crown) Yukiko Masui (SAY, Romeo and Juliet, The Effect) and Shelley Maxwell (Get Up Stand Up, Shifters, Macbeth). Globe CEO Stella Kanu will host a discussion covering the growing demand for the role of movement director in theatre, how it differs from the role of choreographer, and what the future of choreography and movement direction might look like across theatre, film, television and commercial projects. This event will be live-streamed and BSL interpreted.
