Dance: Transports Exceptionnels, Compagnie Beau Geste, Jubilee Gardens; Cast No Shadow, Sadler’s Wells
Dance-making has come a long way since the days when a duet was the expected climatic bravura piece for principal dancers. Even before modern and post-modern challenges altered the traditional format of the classical pas de deux, 20th-century ballet-makers such as Mikhail Fokine had already revisited the old formulae in ground-breaking works such as Le Spectre de la Rose (1910). Removed from a larger context and left on its own as a complete performance, the duet soon became the favourite discrete artistic expression of many in the dance world. Soon, the once neat male/female division was also challenged, thus broadening narrative and choreographic possibilities, which were also revised in the light of post-modernism and the advent of high-tech ideas on stage. Within the past ten years, I have seen duets between real dancers and film images, holograms and a whole series of allegedly inanimate objects, such as armchairs or even sanitary fittings.
These, however, are still a far cry from the duet between a man, Philippe Priasso, and a mechanical digger proposed by Dominique Boivin, artistic director of the Compagnie Beau Geste, for this year’s Dance Umbrella.
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