We're very pleased to announce the lineup for the second edition of Blue Cloud Scratch, our bi-monthly scratch night which is run in partnership with Blue Elephant Theatre, and we'll be presenting a mixture of contemporary dance, tanztheater, contemporary dance/tango fusion, ballet and dance theatre. Tickets are £3 (£2.50 for Southwark residents) and can be bought on the door, or online here: blueelephanttheatre.co.uk/blue-cloud-scratch-0 

We will be showing new works by Piedad Albarracin Seiquer, Julia Gleich, Masha Gurina, Adrian Look, Camille Jetzer and Zuzanna Pilat. We'd like you to join us to support these artists and to offer them constructive feedback on their presented works.

 Piedad Albarracin Seiquer is a Contemporary Dance Artist and through her many years of training and performance, she is now focusing on her own practice. Influenced by her time working with such artists as Jose Agudo, Estela Merlos and Saorin, Piedad has a articulate and highly energetic vocabulary. Her Spanish playful rhythms are entwined with grounded floor work and Risk taking partner work. Piedad’s non- narrative stories, from the work of poet Julio Cortazar, shows an insight into human connections, with strong imagery colouring the process.

CON-TACTO is a work in progress investigating the intimacy of touch. This is a conversation of movement between two performers, who listen, respond and propose through the perception of the others touch. This relationship starts from tentative beginnings, but finds organic flow, weight and rhythm for a true dialogue to emerge. The touch is longed for yet feared at the same time, creating moments of tension and release.

Choreographer: Piedad Albarracin Seiquer
Performers: Piedad Albarracin Seiquer and Thomas Hands
Composer: Felipe Escalada

 

Julia K. Gleich divides her artistic energies between London and New York. Living in the UK since 2003, the highlight of her creative life in London has been the production of her immersive ballet Speak Easy Secrets at The Broadway in Barking for which she received Arts Council funding. She is Co-Founder of Norte Maar based in Brooklyn, NY where she is the producer of CounterPointe, which has also been produced in London in 2013 and 2015. Her choreography has been seen internationally. Her dance films have been screened in galleries and festivals in the US and Asia. Gleich’s choreography has been reviewed in The New York Times, Village Voice, The New Criterion, ArtNews, Brooklyn Rail and DanceInsider. Her original research on movement theories using Vectors was published in the Dynamic Body in Space. Julia is Head of Choreography at London Studio Centre, on the technique faculty of Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance (Ballet and Limón), and Artistic Director/ Choreographer of Gleich Dances. She was External Examiner for Hong Kong Academy of Performing Arts and was awarded the Distinguished Alumna medal for 2014 by the Ballet Department at the University of Utah where she received her MFA. She was awarded a Choreographer Observership by One Dance UK to shadow Annabelle Lopez Ochoa and recently was an invited speaker for the Society for Dance Research Forum on the She Said programme produced by English National Ballet.

Immovable 

Moving towards weight, the dance is engaged with taking up space and posturing, with building up and taking down. Dancers are angles and directions, masculine and feminine versions of themselves. Rough hewn geometries contrast with precise intersections of pointed feet and elbows. This dance for 3 women on pointe is approximately 10 minutes with soundscape including the voice of Donald Trump. It queries some of our ideas about what it means to make ballet.

Dancers: Michelle Buckley, Eloise Hymas, Karianne Andreasson

 

Zuzanna Pilat, founder of Bee Dance Company, is a contemporary dancer and choreographer from Poland. She received the highest degree on completing her BA in choregraphy at Music Academy Łódź Poland in 2013, and has since developed a busy choreographic practice in both Poland and the UK. 

LonDOoM Is a gripping comedy about housing condition in the biggest European city. This performance describes the biggest nightmare of every Londoner - hunting for property to rent.

 

Camille Jetzer is part of Oxford-based group Dis|Connect: "We started our group Dis|Connect in 2015 in Oxford, and focused our work on re-staging and re-creating "forgotten" pieces. Our last performance was "Der Gelbe Klang" originally written by Kandinsky but never made it to the stage. This year we continue to explore forgotten pieces and the complexities of re-choreographing ballets which only exist on paper."

Forgetting deals with the concept of forgetting, how the body forgets, and how one could translate that into dance. 'Forgetting as movement'. 

We are working with a sound designer (Gemma Riggs) who has pieced together 8 voices from interviews in which each person was asked to describe how they felt at a moment in their lives when they experienced change. Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion revolves around people trying to find their words and not quite being able to put a particular word on how they felt, they had forgotten, or could not translate it. The dancers then embody this problematic, how to express forgetting through movement and space.

The piece also focuses on repetition, how specific words come back in the dialogue, how specific movements come back in the dance, and how one can use repetition in order to develop the concept of forgetting.

Dancers: Camille and Fran

 

Masha Gurina is a Ukraine-born dance artist living in Brighton. She trained in Laban and her portfolio includes contemporary dance, physical theatre, dance film, art installation and Argentine tango. She has directed several full-length works, art films and short choreographies for stage. Masha loves mixing media, genres and movement languages (which, no doubt, is a product of her own diverse background).  Her last work, In Memoriam, was sponsored by the ACE and involved a mix of dance (contemporary and flamenco), live music and film. She also worked with several drama companies and won Bronek Independent Theatre Award 2013 in her native Ukraine for 'imaginative mix of drama and movement'. Her recent performance credits include Brighton Dome Scratch Night, ProArt Festival Prague, Lord Mayor's Thames Festival, Resolution!, London Tango Apasionado International Festival, various dance theatre productions on the stage of Bonnie Bird Theatre (London) and other venues in the UK and Europe.

Oom-pah oom-pah is a duet born out of experimentation with two dance genres: contemporary and Argentine tango. The two have very different, quite opposite concepts of femininity: tango with its idiosyncratic idea of sensuality, and contemporary dance with its unisex, androgynous approach to movement. Sometimes these concepts or norms get taken to extremes and become clichéd. We were curious to see what happens if you relax certain rules present in both genres and let go of our own idea of how we (the performers) should come across.

Both of us have been working with the idea of mixing different dance forms for a long time now. We started devising the piece by playing with concepts of Argentine tango and mixing them with contemporary dance. Our original intention was to show new possibilities - of playing with musicality, rhythm and partner dynamics using "contemporary" approach. During the process we discovered the flip-side of this idea, as we started challenging not only some dance conventions, but also ourselves - the way we saw ourselves as dancers (and women). This helped produce some unexpected interpretations. Perhaps in that lies the entire purpose of "letting go", and that is what we want to share with the audience.

Dancers: Masha Gurina and Savina Casarin

 

Adrian Look is a freelance dance artist and lecturer for Tanztheater. He is also the artistic director and choreographer of London based T a n z t h e a t e r Adrian Look, founded in 2014.

As a freelance choreographer/dancer in 2013, he worked on several projects in Germany and Switzerland. Highlights included choreographing a community group of 100 amateur dancers and performing as an ensemble member of the Origen Festival in Switzerland. Additionally, he choreographed and danced in a "Da Pacem", a liturgical concert concerning conflict between various religions. His first choreography as a freelance artist, "˜The elephants weep', was created for the Theatre of Bielefeld in 2013.

Since moving to the UK in March 2014, Adrian has performed his solo work "A-R-Panda" and choreographed "˜The smouldering Delusion' for East London Dance as part of the FI.ELD Festival. His piece "˜SICK AND TIRED' premiered in January 2015 as part of the Resolution 2015 line up and received an honourable mention for being one of the highlights of the festival.

Adrian is also a sought after teacher and has taught contemporary dance, ballet, and improvisation in various guises since 2003. He has lead classes for various professional companies, including Alvin Ailey II and the Origen Festival in Switzerland, and regularly teaches professional classes at The Place and Greenwich Dance. As well as running his own independent classes at Chisenhale Dance, The Cockpit and ISDT2 Dance Studios, he was recently asked to give workshops at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, The University of Bedfordshire and The Place.

Adrian is currently a regular lecturer in dance at Morley College, and a guest lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire.

Sisyphus's Wife premiered on 29.01.2016 at The Place as part of Resolution 2016.

Maria Ines Sousa and Adrian Look perform a duet telling a story of despair, purpose, choice and acceptance of fate; inspired by the 19th century Rückert poems about "Weltschmerz" and "The Myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus.

In the myth Sisyphus is punished for his self-aggrandisement by being forced to roll a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, repeating this action for eternity. Despite Sisyphus" eternal labour, Camus concluded: One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. All Sisyphus's silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man"s heart. 

Adrian Look, director and choreographer, has set the piece in 2016, developing the eternal nature of the myth with the idea that Sisyphus is still engaged in his labour somewhere today. Using Gustav Mahler's "Rückert songs" and Max Richter's 'Vivaldi recomposed', the piece explores Sisyphus's inner conflict - the seemingly futile nature of a task, which also provides him with a sense of purpose - along with his unknowing wife"s battle for his burdened soul.

Dancers: Maria Ines Sousa and Adrian Look