Red Head Reflection

Founded in 2007, Just Us Dance Theatre are an emerging dance company, fusing hip-hop and contemporary to create a rawness and relatable energy in their work. Their most recent piece ‘Born to Manifest’, choreographed by Joseph Toonga, challenges racial stigmas and champions black identity, embarking on a journey of real memory and experience of both dancers, and public. There was an extremely powerful quality throughout, and the experiences were beautifully portrayed and poignant. The choreography, which initially began as a solo, detailed the particular stereotypes placed upon the black dancers, with significant emphasis on an ape-like motif, which conveyed perhaps a view of them being primal, underdeveloped, and even less than human from an especially racist perspective. Taking part in the after show discussion however, lessened the value of these moments for me, as they revealed it held a very literal meaning, from experiences of physically being called ‘monkey’. It is understa...

A subtle experiment with physical theatre retells Alice Seabold’s much loved novel with a unique and imaginative flare. Lavery had a big task on her hands to portray this particularly sensitive story, which follows the perspective of young Sophie Salmon as she watches over her family, following her rape and murder. This performance was strangely heart-warming considering the subject matter, while also leaving not a dry eye in the house, and this was very much down to director Melly Still’s creative eye, which drew heavily from physical theatre. She still however managed to maintain an essence of that traditional theatre style audiences are comfortable with, and this was a clever approach, so as to not scare traditionalists away. That being said, as a lover of contemporary performance I feel she could have pushed those elements further and produced a real dazzling spectacle. Designer Ana Inés Jabares-Pita did a fascinating job with her vast angled mirror, which sat at the back ...

I have to be honest I had not heard of this company before the show, but boy did they make an impression on me. Established in 2013, Zoo Co are led by artistic director Florence O’Mahony, and pride themselves on their ‘explosive visual imagination’. Their latest award winning production ‘Sirens’ explores gender expectations through the eyes of 3 mythological beings, the sirens, as they attempt to rewrite history and show the world who they really are. With voices that will lead any man to his death, they are forced into silence, but find a loophole when they meet a deaf man. Where can I start with this piece? It was comical but emotionally impactful, ditsy and slapstick but also maintained an underlying seriousness with its messages that although were not always very subtly given out, were very valuable. The show was a bit of a muddle through in the beginning, but quickly gained sophistication as it moved forwards, and although at first I was not a fan of the basic costum...

Based in Birmingham, Motionhouse are a company renowned for their vibrant and inspiring dance-circus productions, which have been performed since the company’s foundation in 1988. They perform internationally with their pieces made for both theatres, and the outdoors. I recently had the pleasure of watching their performance of ‘Block’ at Liverpool’s Riverside Festival. ‘Block’ has been made in collaboration with NoFit State circus, created and directed by Kevin Finnan, and according to the company, explores ‘life in the city; its contradictions and challenges’. This outdoor production acts like a giant game of Jenga, as performers build and re-build numerous structures and patterns from 20 enormous blocks, leaping fearlessly to and from each platform that is created, no matter how high. Heart stopping doesn’t even describe half the feeling it creates. Each Performer and block undergo constant collaboration, both moving in equal parts to create the beautifully intricate f...

Imitating The Dog has worked for over 20 years fusing live performance with beautiful technical feats. In their most recent production, which they performed for the last time at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, the company re-tell Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and examine its relevance in 2019, stepping in and out of a cinematographic lens. 5 performers, 3 screens, 2 live cameras and an incredible tech team work effortlessly together to negotiate race, gender, nationalism, colonialism and themes of exploitation and violence, as the character Marlow (Keicha Greenidge) travels up the Congo river, and through a war torn Europe to retrieve Kurtz. Lighting is cleverly used to turn a white backdrop into a green screen, and characters are transported to the inside of a plane, an office, a barren landscape, and a concentration camp on the screens above them. Camera angles and clever movie trickery are cut between to continue the narrative, as we see snippets of a b...

Stans Cafe are a Birmingham based theatre company, who have worked since 1991 under the direction of co-founder, James Yarker. In 1998 the company created their performance ‘It’s Your Film’, which had a total running time of just four minutes, with only one audience member present at a time. Lucky for us, the show has been resurrected for a modern audience and I got the pleasure of seeing it. The audience member is positioned inside a pitch black booth with a narrow hole in front of them. Suddenly the show springs to life, and a mirage of images flashes before their eyes; a wedding ring, an intense telephone conversation, a city skyline and a smoker just to name a few.   For a four minute show the company don’t half pack in their content! A mixture of mirror and lighting trickery, and what the company describes as ‘Victorian illusion’ blends to seamlessly replicate the camera angles, cross fades and scenes of a real film, and having the opportunity to witness their techniqu...