As we head into the most hectic and exciting period in the festival’s calendar, we’re looking for an agency or individual to support our in-house media and PR activity.

Building on the success of previous festivals, we want to generate greater profile and media coverage than ever before. If you have a strong track record in securing media coverage and a creative, “can do” approach to PR, you could be just what we’re looking for.

For a full brief and details of how to submit your proposal, please visit the Jobs section of the DanceXchange website, or call 0121 689 3170.

The submission deadline is 10am on Monday 19th September 2011.

Each year we need more and more people to work on what has become one of the largest dance festivals in the world. We’re currently recruiting for a Marketing Officer, Press Manager and Project Manager to work on next year’s festival. Following the success of IDFB 2010, these roles are a fantastic opportunity to work on a festival that is shaping up to be rather special.

If you are interested in one of these roles please visit our jobs page and download the application packs. For more information on any of the roles or the recruitment process please call 0121 689 3170

Kicking off the season is Edits (Thursday 30 Sept), a highly anticipated new work by choreographer Lea Anderson and her six-strong male dance company, The Featherstonehaughs (pronounced Fan-shaws). The showstylishly draws on the peculiar elasticity of filmic time, the dramatic rhythm of film editing, and the ability to heighten effect through extreme close up.

Then on Friday 1 October, The Featherstonehaughs will be performing a classic piece (originally created in 1998) The Featherstonehaughs draw on the sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, bringing to life the artistic vision of Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele. Both The Featherstonehaughs’ shows are an opportunity to see the all-male company perform without The Cholmondeleys for the first time in 12 years. If you book for both shows in advance you get one half price- a great excuse to treat yourself to two nights of outstanding contemporary dance!

In October, things get a little silly, when Britain’s funniest dance duo New Art Club perform This is Now (Thursday 14 October).Watch them deconstruct the first ever Now That’s What I Call Music album and get all nostalgic as Tom and Pete wrestle with classic hits from Duran Duran and Bonnie Tyler (to name a few!)…

Moving on to Saturday 6 November, Tavaziva Dance’s critically acclaimed Wild Dog features high-octane performers capturing the beauty and elegance of one of Africa’s most endangered species. There is also a brilliant soundtrack to enjoy, cut and arranged by award-winning Zimbabwean-born choreographer/composer Bawren Tavaziva.

The season closes with Eddie Ladd’s Ras Goffa Bobby Sands/The Bobby Sands Memorial Race (Thursday 11 November). This solo dance piece will be performed on a 12ft x 6ft running machine and follows the life of Bobby Sands, who died on hunger strike in the H Blocks in Belfast in 1981. Moving and compelling, this is a piece of dance unlike any other.

DanceXchange Programme Manager Paul Burns said: “This Autumn season we’re continuing to present fantastic dance with a varied programme showcasing some of the best work currently being made in the UK. From the iconic Featherstonehaughs to the hilarious New Art Club we think there is something for every dance lover to enjoy.”

I’m certainly very much looking forward to all of these shows, which are going to be at The Patrick Centre, Birmingham Hippodrome.

All shows start at 8pm – please check the website for age suitability and running times.

Tickets:

In advance: £10/£7 concession
On the day: £12/£9 concession

For ticket sales call 0844 338 5000 or to book online and for more information visit www.dancexchange.org.uk.

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.

Rosie Kay is what you might call an intellectual choreographer – she doesn’t see the point of taking on a subject unless you have done your research and had some experience of it. For her latest piece, which explores war and its affect on the body, she joined a battalion and trekked across Dartmoor with a 70lb rucksack. Her approach couldn’t be more considered for what is a current and sensitive issue – and the piece will premiere at next year’s International Dance Festival Birmingham. We spoke to Rosie Kay about the work, her success at the last festival, and her plans for Rosie Kay Dance Company.

Kay’s last piece Double Points: K – a duet she danced with Morgan Cloud based on Italian choreographer Emio Greco’s Double Points: Two -  was shown at the International Dance Festival Birmingham 2008 before touring across the UK. It was a physically demanding piece – Kay danced for a full 30 minutes on stage at each performance and had to do cardiovascular training everyday to maintain her stamina. At the festival, it was performed alongside Greco’s original piece. She said:

“As a choreographic night it was really interesting because you could see the details that I had taken and multiplied. But it was quite intimidating.”

The music to Double Points: K was in three parts, starting with electronica, followed briskly by Bach’s Concerto in A minor and then contrasted by heavy pounding dubstep beats. The piece was well-received by critics as well as Greco’s dancers. Kay said in an interview she had ‘Rosiefied’ the piece. What exactly is ‘Rosiefication’?

“My pacing and timing is very specific – with Double Points it’s quite a blast and I’m impatient to make dramatic shifts in timing. The biggest shifts are in the music and I allow myself to really work with the music, particularly the Bach. I took Greco’s physical exhaustion theme and I tried to push it further in my own way. I hope it has a bit of sense of humour within the work as well.”

Prior to Double Points: K, Kay’s pieces for Rosie Kay Dance Company (formed in 2004) were more theatrical and decidedly funny, such as The Wild Party which enjoyed success at Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2006. Kay says she now is moving away from the “choreographic” and “pure dance” basis of Double Points, to a more studied and layered piece.

Through the Rayne Foundation fellowship, Kay was given some time for research and a year ago she spent a placement with 4th Battalion The Rifles – an infantry battalion based at Salisbury Plain – to see soldiers in training, and later Headley Court where injured soldiers go to be rehabilitated.

She has brought together composer Annie Mahtani (who worked with her on Supernova), theatre director, Walter Meierjohann, dramaturg Petra Tauscher and visual artist David Cotterrell who also spent time with soldiers in Afghanistan with the Royal Army Medical Corps.

She is yet to set the choreography, but has gathered her team of collaborators as well as her research from her time with the 4th Rifles. The piece will contain five dancers, four men and one woman, two of which have had military training and will look at three parts:

“The physical training from a civilian to a trained soldier and transforming the body to respond automatically, which is very much like rehearsing a dance. Then I’m interested in the second part; the transformation when they come back. The bit I’m not trying to do is their experience in Afghanistan.”

The dance is called 5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is The Frontline, the name stating Kay’s key message and pointing to her desire to show the humaness of war. She said:

“A soldier’s life is in some ways a purely physical life, so it translates very well into dance. There’s a lot which is identifiable for the public – the marching and drilling view of a soldier they see – and that is all very rich with movement potential. Attack and defense is all choreographic.”

Kay is aware of how prominent the subject is in the media and is incredibly conscious of not wanting to create a production which trivialises the war or present it in a crass, stereotypical way:

“The war seemed so anonymous to me and this bothered me so I started looking into this research. It was very different to how I imagined it from the outside, and I got to know real people. What I want to try and do is get across the realisation that this is humanity and bodies getting attacked. War is human, it’s not separate. Eventually we might make politicians answer why we are at war and what we’re doing.”

While Kay doesn’t want to force her political opinions of the war on the audience, she does think choreographers should be brave in putting forward a message:

“There’s a perfectly good place for dance to explore dance, but not all artists want to be like that. I want to communicate about what it is to be human and what’s alike in one another -and I hope to try and change the world very slightly in my own way – if you don’t feel like that then why are you doing it.”

Brought up in Scotland in a family which she calls “quite political,” Kay says it is partly personal interest which takes her down different avenues in her research. She wants to know her subject and layer many references in the work. She also spent years touring with companies all over Europe, and feels audiences there are more open to experimental and intellectually demanding dance works on stage:

“Dance can sit in a place outside of society. It can make dance about dances but, like theatre, it can talk about subjects too and I shadowed three MPs (Claire Short, Ed Vaizey and John Barrett) to see if dance could say big things about political subjects. But David Cotterrell and I have such a sensitivity that we wouldn’t want to make a huge piece of propaganda about the war. Hopefully the piece is more considered because we know people involved in it.”

Kay said she does sometimes take a step back and worry about approaching the subject, but thinks the depth of her research means she has to say something about it:

“Hopefully it will be very intelligent and I want to be brave. I’m looking forward to getting started. I have some great international dance collaborators with me, so I feel this work will be strong.”

5 SOLDIERS: The Body Is The Frontline premieres at International Dance Festival 2010 in April 2010, but will preview at British Dance Edition in February 2010. After IDFB2010 it will tour across the UK from May – October 2010.

The inspiration for the International Dance Festival came from the 2002 industry conference British Dance Edition. Delegates were impressed by the city’s infrastructure of dance venues teamed with a diverse number of established dance organisations in the region. The idea of bringing Birmingham’s dance resources to the world’s attention was floated and the International Dance Festival Birmingham was born.

Co-Director of the festival David Massingham taking part in the closing Salsa at Sunset event in 2008

David Massingham, artistic director of DanceXchange, is also co-director of International Dance Festival Birmingham along with Stuart Griffiths, chief executive of Birmingham Hippodrome. Massingham nurtured the first seeds of the festival and saw it grow into one of the biggest dance festivals in the world – putting Birmingham on the map as a stage for groundbreaking and exceptional dance.

Last year’s festival attracted some 25,000 people from all over the UK and used venues across Birmingham including the Town Hall and Victoria Square, with 60 performances over four weeks. Alongside the shows, professional workshops and educational sessions encouraged newcomers to experience dance activities and develop dance partnerships. The economic impact on the city was huge, bringing an estimated £4.3 million to Birmingham.

With plans for the 2010 festival well underway, Massingham is already looking to fresh commissions for 2012, hoping to help the festival grow deeper into the city while maintaining its international scale. Using the festival to put Birmingham at the centre of the global dance map ties in neatly with the Hippodrome’s plans to make the city a national centre for dance. He said:

“It felt natural that a new dance festival needed to be built for Birmingham. Although Birmingham had a lot of festivals I felt it could have a larger impacting festival.

“A big thing reason why it works in Birmingham, is that Birmingham is a multicultural city and dance is a non-narrative form in many respects – dance and a mixed society of people go together very well. Birmingham is also one of the youngest cities in Europe, and dance and youth also fit nicely together. The thinking behind this project, as well as the Hippodrome becoming a national centre for dance, is to bring together all these strands of thinking. The three companies together (Birmingham Royal Ballet, the Hippodrome and DanceXchange are all housed in the same building) make up one of the biggest dance hubs in the country – with only Sadlers Wells and Leeds. The dance festival is a shop window for the dance that does go on here.”

Birmingham is already home to a diverse range of dance styles – from ballet to bhang – and the festival hopes to capitalise on the city’s flourishing  and vibrant dance scene, while inviting companies from across the globe to come and perform and collaborate here.

“Dance festivals around the world usually focus on contemporary ballet,” Massingham said. “While there is a lot of contemporary in this festival, it will also have flamenco, ballet, folk dance, South Asian dance – all international projects or work – which gives the festival a focus and ethos that makes it unique. British artists who take part have an international angle for their work.”

The festival also aims to provide performances which cater for audiences who may have never stepped inside a theatre, as well as those who consider themselves dons of dance. Massingham wants to challenge preconceptions about what dance is or can be. He said:

“Some people think dance is a niche thing, but we wanted to blow that idea out of the water. The 2008 festival set out to be mainstream at times – with bigger events such as Havana Rakatan at the Hippodrome and Watch This Space in Victoria Sqaure – and at other times there were performances for small audiences such as Saburo Teshigawara dancing on a field of glass. This festival needs to see small niches as part of a big festival.

“Some people don’t buy tickets for theatres but do want be in a lively city and to see events. Taking dance out onto the streets, out of its institution buildings, and making it available to everybody is what we want to do.

“Dance covers many things and as long as there’s dance in it, it can be part of our festival.

The 2010 festival will include new work alongside productions that have been successful elsewhere – and it also hopes to engage better with other cities in the region, such as Stoke, Coventry, and Wolverhampton.

Performances are still in the process of being finalised and the programme is due to launch later this month – so watch this space.

Excited about next year’s programme, Massingham said:

“We hope that audiences who might go and see one thing will then go and try something else. We’re trying to go deeper into the city and make sure we’re on the world stage; putting Birmingham on the map as a dance destination. London is amazing but we can do it too.

“We’re being bold and will get bolder with commissioning as we get more established. We value the audiences and once the message gets out about the 2010 festival  we hope people will come from all over.”

Award-winning hip hop dance artist Kashmir Leese thinks streetdance classes are teaching the wrong thing, doesn’t like Diversity and wishes more people knew their krumping from their wacking.

Kashmir Leese took a starring roll in ‘Watch This Space‘ at 2008’s International Dance Festival Birmingham. As a member of 2FaCeD Dance Company, he was the body-popping dancer who drew some of the loudest cheers when he stepped up for his solos.

Since the last festival Kashmir has carried on refining his moves, picked up awards and strengthened his reputation.

The 20-year-old professional dancer knows he still has a lot to learn about hip hop culture (he keeps a growing list of influential people in hip hop at home), but he is adamant that, if streetdance is going to become more accessible and be taught in schools, it’s got to be done by the right people in the right way.

“When you say streetdance people think it’s routines. But streetdance is a collective term from streetdance styles. A lot of people don’t know what voguing and wacking is because they’ve never seen it and in the UK we don’t know where it originated from. One studio I went to had a hip hop class and a streetdance class – but they were teaching some sort of streetjazz, and people will think that is streetdance. I don’t mind, because people are dancing. But it is frustrating when people get it wrong because it went through a lot to get to where it is now.”

Born and bred in Birmingham, Leese remembers seeing his friend’s Bollywood films and being sucked in by the impressive movements in the martial arts scenes. He enjoyed drama at school and went to study performing arts, theatre and dance at Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College. A year later he self-taught himself hip hop using YouTube videos, practising the styles at Broken Silence in Newtown. He joined 2FaCeD Dance Company in 2007, touring with them around the UK and collaborating with contemporary choreographer Hofesh Schechter for International Dance Festival Birmingham ‘08.

Leese has gone on to form the hip hop collective, Smash Bro’z, who won awards at the UK Hip Hop Dance Championships and qualified to go to the World Hip Hop Dance Championships in Las Vegas in July - but they couldn’t raise enough money to go.

“We went to London and I entered the freestyle battle. I was beaten by another friend and got second place. We ranked third  in the adult group finals and qualified for Las Vegas, but we didn’t raise enough money in the end. There was a lot of support, but no people with money helping us. The only money we had was from busking on the streets everyday.”

Leese now teaches hip hop and funk styles at Birmingham’s DanceXchange, as well as running classes for the hip hop societies at Loughborough and Aston Universities. He sees the hip hop culture in the West Midlands as spread out across Bboys, graffiti artists, and MCs – but feels these groups remain fairly separate instead of joined as a collective, and more could be done to encourage the development of hip hop and its expression in dance in the region:

“There’s a few groups in Birmingham, but they are generic and don’t know their history and they’re not hungry. In London, everyone’s competing against each other and hungry to get better. Here, everyone just thinks they are the best, so they’re not going to improve.”

When Leese teaches young children he always starts by educating them about the history and fundamentals of hip hop and streetdance, as he feels they have both developed the wrong image. Hip hop, he says, is wrongly portrayed as having an association with gangs, shootings and swearing. Streetdance is often thought of as punchy dance routines, more akin to cheerleading, due to many dance schools misleadingly calling their lessons ’streetdance’ despite not teaching any of the streetdance styles, of which there are many:

“Streetdance involves six or seven styles – popping, locking, house, breaking, krumping, voguing and wacking.”

Many of these styles started off as social dances – for example krumping, one of the newest streetdance styles, started off as clowning and developed into a raw expression of emotions – a certain way of popping your chest. Each style has a specific origin and history with a pioneering dancer or creator, says Leese such as Don Campbell for locking. Voguing came from the gay community; not from Madonna, but from posing. Then the straight-guys’ pastiche of voguing developed into a new style – ‘punking’. What’s more, each style has a specific music it is danced to – for example, popping was done to funk music and electro beats. Leese believes children learning the dance styles should be educated with some of the culture and history of hip hop and streetdance, to make sure it stays true to its name.

“To be a streetdancer you need to know your streetdance styles. You can’t say you’re a maths teacher without first learning maths.

“Already people are getting it wrong but are still teaching it. So the question would be – who has the right to teach it?”

What’s more, he says that dance groups like Diversity, who came to prominence via Britain’s Got Talent, worsen the situation because they don’t include the range of styles in their dances, despite having talent.

“For me, Britain’s Got Talent is an issue. When Diversity won it, one of my friends said ‘The whole streetdance vision has just been ruined’ because Diversity are good, but they don’t do streetdance – popping, locking. To me it looks like cheerleading. To do streetdance you need to do the streetdance styles. Flawless, they did it, they did popping, locking. I don’t know why they didn’t win. Diversity have got talent and the entertainment factor but technically Flawless were better. ”

“A collaboration of styles is what hip hop culture is about. From contemporary to breaking. Some people say they do merge styles but they don’t do it the the right way. They do contemporary for four eights and locking for two eights. They need to merge it so it doesn’t lose its originality and its culture, but looks good and you can see what it is.”

So what does the future hold for Kashmir Leese?

He’s working with West Midlands Youth Dance Strategy Manager Toby Norman-Wright on a solo performance called L’Après-midi d’un Faune, to be shown next year. He’s also working on a group piece with the Smash Bro’z. He expresses a desire to focus on his own creative work and take a step back from teaching. He also hopes that Smash Bro’z – dejected after being unable to go to Las Vegas – will re-group and continue to create new dances as well as performing at San Fransisco hip hop festival.

‘Watch This Space’ was one of the biggest spectacles to take place in Birmingham in 2008 and demonstrated IDFB’s aim of taking dance to the people. Thousands of people witnessed an incredible fusion of athletic dance styles in Victoria Square, which was temporarily transformed into the most public arena in the city.

An event for the people, captured by the people

These days when you put thousands of people in front of an event like ‘Watch This Space’ you’re bound to see cameras and mobile phones held aloft. It used to be irritating, now it’s almost taken for granted.

As a result, some great photos were taken and uploaded to photo-sharing websites like Flickr by, among others, jable1974, Matthew Ager, newfolder and abrinsky.

It wasn’t just photos – with many mobile phones and point-and-shoot cameras incorporating video recording, more people can capture their own footage and upload it to YouTube. That’s what DanceGround did, that’s what flyboyflip did and it’s even what I did:

Blogs were also used by those wanting to share what had taken place – Hip Hop Dance Videos, Fiona Handscomb and myself all took advantage with one commenter being moved to describe it as:

one of the most exhilarating displays of ‘contemporary’ dance ever seen in the city

And these are just the examples I’ve been able to find over a year after the event. However, the question is:

Can dance use technology to reach a wider audience?

I think so, and in at least two ways.

Thousands of people saw ‘Watch This Space’ in the flesh; by now at least twice as many have seen the performance via amateur recordings . I wouldn’t argue that the two experiences are necessarily equal, but I would say this shows that the Internet provides the means for compelling content to reach a wider audience than ever before. That must be exciting for anyone working in any art form.

Secondly, dance is particularly well suited to collaboration with other forms of art and expression (including even architecture). The forms of expression provided and facilitated by the Internet (and especially social media) are no different in this regard – the opportunities are there to be taken.

How? Well, that’s a question for the dancers, choreographers, artistic directors and other creative people to answer.