Bonnie Bird Theatre, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Old Royal Naval College, London
Dance performance of re-imagined “lost” Laban work, Drumstick
Over the last two years, Alison Curtis-Jones, Artistic Director of Summit Dance Theatre and Lecturer in Dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. has been researching two ‘lost’ works, Ishtar’s Journey into Hades and Dancing Drumstick, both choreographed by Rudolf Laban in Monte Verità, Switzerland, in 1913.
As she herself states, ‘My work aligns with Primavesi’s category of re-creation, re-invention, re-imagining or re-envisioning where an artist has more freedom to explore and develop their own viewpoint on the work and how the work might be… My re-imagined Drumstick is an attempt to show Laban’s shift to arbitrary rhythm – a materialisation of extreme and subtle dynamic changes, where dancers establish their own felt rhythms and work together in unity without sound and make stillness resonate. Musicians accompany the dancers, playing in response to what they see, not the other way around; it’s not radical today, but it was in 1913!’
Book online here.