Forward in Motion dance festival

Forward in Motion dance festival

Every winter the second year dance and theater students organize an amazing festival collaborating with different companies and independent artists. This year the students presented three different performances, that allowed the audience discover new places and let go their imagination in an unexpected journey trough art and space.

The first performance that we have seen was performed by Chameleon Dance Collective and coreographed by Kirstie Richardson who took the public into secrets places of Ellen Terry building. The students started the experience of exploring different places in the building by yhinking about scores like distance, sounds, stillness, action, that offered the public interesting views on three levels. This is where the quiet met the movement and also the stillness of human bodies, who were following their reactions of sounds around them, temperature and also people who witness.

After a few moments the audience moved to a piano room, where we found two students that seemed to be in their own world. They were hostage of their own existence and they had to move into a small space, that expresses the lack of distance and the relationship between them. The only sounds we could hear, as their reaction to that environment were the piano keyboards that expressed dancers' feelings.

In the last hidden place we observed a group of dancers having a journey in a fire exit, that is a dark and cold place. The dancers expressed the need to move, to make different sounds and to feel comfortable in their new environment.

The second performance, “Where is the Garden?” was quite similar because it expressed the responses of dancers to a specific environment and the way the performers investigate and discover new places.

The coreographer Alex Howard express her attraction for gardens by creating movement into this kind of space, that is an alive environment, full of energy and freshness.

The show starts into a dance studio and the public is invited to take a walk between the artist, just to feel the space they are coming into. The light is a natural one and the music express the sounds we can hear into a garden: birds songs, a calm wind. The performers were part of a different dimension, their eyes were focused on different objects into dance studio, as they were just about to discover them. The dancers used combinations of movement to explore many levels and corners of the room and also the improvisation with some enormous pieces of plastic.

In the second part of the performance, the dancers surprised the audience by inviting them to take a walk together, so we could all feel the sense of a group. Once arrived into a beautiful garden, the performers started to explore what means to create movement in such a space.

These two performances bring new aspects of the art and they offered us the possibility to discover different places where artists can be inspired. They also express the fact that places and human feelings and reactions are always in a strong connection.