Dance: Giselle — on love and other difficulties; Shaker
As the blurb at the back of the programme says, it is well known that ‘Dance Umbrella celebrates and champions contemporary dance’. Yet the notion of ‘contemporary’ dance, once an artistically neat classification, has long lost its transparency. The vibrant and provocative combination of diverse performing idioms, techniques and genres that characterises today’s dance has indeed contributed greatly to blurring the boundaries of an historically defined artistic genre. It is not surprising, therefore, that ballet, namely the arch-opposite of contemporary dance, took centre stage last week in one of the world’s most significant platforms of new dance-making. And the person responsible was Amanda Miller, a former acolyte of the post-modern ballet guru William Forsythe, with her Giselle — on love and other difficulties, the latest modern revisitation of the 1841 Romantic masterwork Giselle.
Miller is not the first to tackle the classical repertoire.
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