Tuesday, April 9, 2013

A Dance Tribute to the Art of Football




From Jo Strømgren Kompani - on stage in Toronto this week. I must see this.  

3 comments:

  1. I would love to hear you talk about this excerpt alone.

    I would be curious to know about the process of developing this aesthetic. It couldn't have been easy for everyone.

    (It pushes me because it includes those parts of the football aesthetic that I don't like. The easy thing for me would have been an announcement through performance that football is like dance. This is more interesting than that.)

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  2. I saw this on Thursday night and enjoyed it immensely. I'm not super into contemporary dance but there was a great balance between dance and football that I thought was accessible to multiple audiences. Lots of great little in-jokes for football fans, and an incredible amount of artistry for the dance fans.

    The piece explores a lot of different ideas about football, dance, and football & dance, but one of the things that struck me was something that turned out to not have been an initial part of the piece. In the post-performance Q&A, they said that when the production was first conceived it was intended for an all male cast, but two years ago they switched the fourth performer to a woman. Her character's identity does not get revealed until the end of the piece, but seeing this in a small theatre means that you know she's a woman fro the start and it brings up a lot of ideas about the role of women in football, hidden identities, barriers in sport, etc. This was one of the elements that really struck a chord with me on a personal level, so it was surprising that it's a component of the work that they've only been presenting for two years.

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  3. Oh I wish I could have seen it!!! Thank you for letting us all know about what the performance was like. Hopefully this comes out west!

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