Archive for the ‘Guest Blogger’ Category

A big thank you

International Dance Festival Birmingham 2010 Programme Manager Paul Burns is this week’s IDFB Guest Blogger.

Paul Burns

So, we’ve reached the end of the second International Dance Festival Birmingham, and I’m really pleased to say it’s been a massive success. It seems like an awfully long time ago since we waved the Dancing the Waterways barge off to start the festival and the intervening four weeks have passed in a bit of a blur of trips to airports, rushing between different venues and, most importantly, a whole range of fantastic dance performances. Other than the Liquid Loft show in the first week, which fell victim to the ash cloud, all of the theatre shows went ahead as planned and there really were too many highlights to pick out. Some memorable moments for me personally though would include crying with laughter at the Pere Faura/Club Fisk double bill, play-fighting with the monks from Sutra backstage at The Rep, witnessing eight remarkable UK premieres in four days during the Outspoken weekend and hearing several capacity audiences of under 10s giggling during the Family Weekend. I find it impossible to pick out a favourite show, but I think the stunning beauty of Akram Khan’s Gnosis and the compelling, bizarre and extraordinary Self Unfinished by Xavier Le Roy, for me represent two very different approaches to making movement-based performance which sum up the diversity and quality of the work on show during the festival.

Dancing the Waterways

Outside the theatre settings, the work produced by the festival for outdoor spaces exceeded everyone’s expectations. Utopia, the folkloric spectacular in Victoria Square set the city alight, and brought colour, sound and some truly incredible movement to the city centre. (in)visible dancin’ surprised, amused and amazed passers-by and Dancing the Waterways brought dance to Wolverhampton and beyond via festival’s very own narrow boat, Oddball. Finally, Put Your Foot Down saw us out in style with the irrepressible Salah leading a mass-dance outside Bullring in front of thousands of shoppers on our sunny final festival Saturday.

(in)visible dancin' Salah at Put Your Foot Down!

We’ve had a busy four weeks, and achieved a lot, and all of this is down to the fantastic team of individuals and organisations we’ve worked with on the festival.  So, time to thank some people.

First up, none of this would have been possible without the support and trust of our funders; Advantage West Midlands, Arts Council West Midlands and Birmingham City Council. Then our principal sponsor Brewin Dolphin, who really embraced all aspects of the festival, even learning the Put Your Foot Down routine! Our media partners BBC WM have been incredibly supportive throughout, not only covering the festival events but also supplying impromptu weather forecasts and ash cloud updates! Our accommodation partner, Crowne Plaza Birmingham City Centre, have provided first rate accommodation and very tasty breakfasts.

Next, I must thank our festival venues. The staff at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Town Hall and Ikon Eastside have worked on the festival shows as if they were their own events and pulled out all the stops to make them a great success, as have our own venue teams at Birmingham Hippodrome and The Patrick Centre. Thanks too to Birmingham City Centre Partnership, who have once again demonstrated their commitment to ambitious and unusual outdoor events in the city’s public spaces.

Last, but certainly by no means least, I must thank our remarkable group of staff who have worked on this festival. All have shown a dedication and commitment to the festival’s success which has been incredible, and I have been really proud to have worked with them all. In particular, our two interns, Natalie and Helen, have been key members of the team and deserve particular recognition.

Unfortunately, there has also been a sad end to the festival. Neil Cooper, our technical director for both the inaugural festival in 2008 and this year’s edition was taken seriously ill in the week before the opening event, and sadly died on Friday 14 May. Neil was instrumental in making the festival a success, and his ability to work with a range of artists and organisations to creatively realise the technical complexities of some of our more ambitious projects was invaluable. His cheeky and irreverent sense of humour, his knowledge and his friendship will be hugely missed by the team, as it will be by so many other organisations, festivals and venues.

And so we look forward to the next festival, and the planning starts straight away. Whilst a number of members of the team will be moving on to new jobs and fresh challenges, I’m already starting to look for possible work for the next festival, and the core team are already starting to imagine new ways of filling the city with dance again in 2012. Until then, there’s plenty of dance to see and get involved in at both DanceXchange and Birmingham Hippodrome so don’t be a dance stranger!

IDFB Guest Blogger: Bullring’s Rachel Grocott

The countdown is on as 300 dancers from right across Birmingham and the West Midlands prepare to arrive at St Martin’s Square here at Bullring to participate in the Put Your Foot Down event on Saturday 15 May. I can’t wait to see our shoppers put their shopping bags to one side and prepare to strut their stuff in the choreographed routine.

We were eager to become part of this year’s IDFB to join up with such an impressive cultural event offered by Birmingham, and to offer another dimension for our visitors to get involved in. We’ve seen our shoppers bopping around during the dance lessons that have happened in the malls so I’m sure the main event will be very popular!

Put Your Foot Down

Put Your Foot Down at Bullring

Put Your Foot Down at Bullring

Over the past three weeks you’ve really been able to feel the city’s theatres, streets and waterways buzzing as the Festival has taken a grip on Birmingham and we’re really excited that we now have the chance to bring this to Bullring with the grand final and how better to end IDFB 2010 than with a mass participation event with French hip hop artist Salah.

Rachel is Marcomms Manager at Bullring.

Want to take part? Click here to find out about the Put Your Foot Down sessions we’re running where you can learn the routine. It costs just £2.50 to learn the routine and get entry to the Mass Dance on 15 May, which happens from 6pm-6.30pm after the dance demos and performances.

Dance at Ikon Eastside – breaking down some barriers this spring

Art gallery Ikon Eastside has found itself playing host to a busy dance programme this spring, both as an International Dance Festival Birmingham venue and with extra performances scheduled to sit alongside the Festival.  IDFB guest blogger Nicky Getgood caught up with Ikon Eastside Curator Helen Legg to catch up on the dance action.

Helen Legg

The first IDFB performance was to be Liquid Loft/Chris Haring’s Running Sushi, but this unfortunately fell victim to the ash cloud, leaving the company unable to make its way over from Berlin.

However, this lull in activity was soon made up for with a day of tango from renowned British performance artist Anthony Howell on Sunday 2 May.  Tango Schumann: Complexities featured two video works, Homage to the Horse of Saint Petersburg (1998) and The World Turned Upside Down (2002) followed by a dance performance by Howell and his partner Lindi Kope.

The performance was followed by tango classes for both beginners and the more experienced, which proved to be highly popular, with the beginner’s session completely sold out.  That this should happen whilst some equally popular IDFB Flamenco Workshops were taking place at Birmingham Hippodrome surprised Helen and I into wondering if Birmingham is a city of hidden passions!

Ikon Eastside is by no means a stranger to dance – in 2008 the industrial space hosted the challenging IDFB performance Glass – Fragments of Time from Saburo Teshigawara & KARAS, and in autumn 2009 British choreographer Siobhan Davies used the venue to launch her new piece The Collection, which Helen said, “operated as an installation or as a continual performance” rather than a more usual beginning-to-end performance piece staged in a traditional theatre space.

For Helen this way of drawing dance out of its comfort zone into an art gallery space with new audiences is part of Ikon Eastside’s ambition to become what is an unconventional dance venue – breaking down those invisible barriers and joining the dots between artforms:

“For us it’s really clear there’s a really strong link between dance and a lot of what performance artists do, or you could think of it in terms of sculpture, so we’re not really very interested in those kinds of barriers that would mean that you would go to one thing and not the other. And I think a lot of our audiences are open-minded in terms of thinking about dance.”

However, staging dance in a non-theatre venue poses its own challenges – such as how to keep the dancers warm and happy in what is a large and draughty building with an uneven, bare concrete floor.

“Having said that, the dancers and the companies they work for are really adaptable and excited by the idea that they’re performing and working in a different space,” says Helen. “Something that’s atypical and also dealing with different audiences, it’s not typical contemporary dance audiences.  They know they’re going to get people who maybe have never seen dance before…there’s more pros than there are cons, everybody’s really willing to work with it.”

The next person who’ll be appearing at Ikon Eastside is Xavier Le Roy, who’s performing Self Unfinished this Thursday and Friday evening at 8pm. Having seen him perform once before, Helen can hardly wait:

“I’m really, really looking forward to it….he almost demonstrates scientific principles through his body, so he’s dancing in ways that might make you think of Centrifugal force or different scientific concepts….I would expect some surprises.”

Listen to the audio interview: http://soundcloud.com/getgood/recording-3

Tickets to Xavier Le Roy’s Self Unfinished on Thursday 13 and Friday 14 May at Ikon Eastside at 8pm can be bought from Birmingham Hippodrome Box Office.