Candoco Dance Company: Review

A dance company that works with disabled and non disabled dancers. Now, if you are not aware of a lot of the contemporary dance companies out there today then your gut instinct will be subconsciously telling you that this would be either, impossible or awkward or just simply cringe worthy? But if your out of the rut and in with the new more post odern ideas of dv8 then you will understand that having disabled dancers is neither of this: awkward nor impossible.

The piece I witnessed tonight at the Riley Theatre ( home theatre to The Northern School Of Contemporary Dance ) called Rendition, was a production of three separate work by three differen choreographers;
+The Hangman - choreographed by Sarah Michelson
+In Translation - choreographed by Emanuel Gat
+Imperfect Storm - choreographed by Wendy Houstoun

Now, I didnt purchase a programme, as I wish to try and delve into what I think the pieces are about, making sure I will not be entirely influenced by what the piece actually is. Plus, I didn't really have the money but Im glad.
Starting with the piece `The Hangman`, now initial observations of this piece was `wow,that woman has some insane leg muscles` because she did. Her feet must of been screaming to let them come off of a rise. The lighting...was spectacular, sitting in the balcony seating area was indeed the best move I did because you saw everything from being on level with the lights and speakers to being able to see the mass of people below. I did not fully understand this piece, but I developed this sense of maybe us all understanding the differences with in the dance company. For example, one of the disabled dancers was in a lot of movement phrases with a girl who was clearly not physically disabled and the vast difference just did not matter, because the male dancer picked up on so much detail that the female dancer did. Also within this piece, all dancers kept this impeccable sense of timing, it was just beautiful to watch. There was this one thing, that interested me highly was the change of costume that one of the dancers undertook. It interested me because I didn't fully understand why she was doing it and it was weird and bizarre what my mind was trying to do. It was trying to link the story together and trying to find a connection as to why she was changing her hairstyle and attire everytime she exited the stage and entered back on again, when in actual fact there may of not been any reason at all as to why this was happening.


After the first interval, In Translation begun and...wow, its weird that I cannot go into as much detail as I could the first piece...maybe it had something to do with the fact that it was so tedious. So repetitive. The movement quality and the choreography itself was just spectacular, but they could of done so much more with it. They could of give just that little bit more focus and passion, but hey...maybe that is the idea the choreographer intended. I mean, i certainly found in the first piece that the choreographer wanted the audience that the dancers were struggling with the movement, you could tell with some of the hench elongated balances a few of the dancers had to endure. This piece, did't interest me towards the end and I started to drift off into wondering how good the toffee cheesecake waiting for Ross and I back at home was going to taste, but that may of just been the heat of the balcony and the silence of no music. Oh yeah, that was the beautiful thing about this piece...silence. It adds so much to movement, i love that part about it

And finally, the Imperfect Storm piece was my favourite by far. They started grouped together as a huddle downstage right with a microphone. I enjoy it when contemporary performances are mixed with dialogue or sound, I find the pieces... more inspiring as such. As I was saying, they started saying that they wanted to discuss Shakespeare...William Shakespeare, but they realised time wouldn't allow them. So they worked with the stage directions of it instead. Intriguing? It was indeed. The ending was just spectacular ending on a list of all the different typical end of show lighting cues` dimming the lights or flashing them really bright then into blackness would maybe be the end of the show` and I was, suprisingly, expecting it to go on for hours... yet it didnt, and the ending was so abrupt and rather comical.

For an overal performance, I appreciated it all and loved some parts but hey, thats my opinion. If you think you can handle seeing disabled dancers without feeling the need to follow aesthetic views then I advise you to go see it when you have time.

-C.MUCKLE