Tri.Art Dance Academy is delighted to have once again been invited to take part in the educational outreach programme with the Yorke Dance Project.
After last year’s triumphant performance at Sadler’s Wells, the Tri.Art performance group has been selected out of all the dance schools in the UK to work with the Yorke Dance Project on their new production, ‘Figure Ground’.
Principal Amy Morgan Bell has been working with the company and Robert Cohan, an internationally celebrated dancer and choreographer who has recently created a new work for Yorke Dance Project, his first new work in 10 years. It is based on a work he made for London Contemporary Dance Theatre in 1984 called Agora, and the new title for this work is Lingua Franca.
The idea behind Lingua Franca is that the individual dancers share a common language through dance, their own Lingua Franca. The opening is based on how each dancer prepares their body for a performance.
You see them warming up, their own language of movement becomes clear. In the dance itself each dancer has their own movement and when they are not dancing focus on each other as if having a conversation. A conversation without words, only movement. Each dancer moves in response to the other.
The Tri.Art performance group will be performing a curtain raiser for the production which will take place on Saturday 31st January, 7.45pm at the Merlin Theatre. The current piece devised by Tri.Art principal Amy Morgan-Bell has been a five year project in the making – only now with the resources and the platform given by Yorke Dance project has this idea now fully come to fruition.
Continuing the themes of Lingua Franca, the Tri.Art piece will create individual phrases of dance that define each students own style of movement, through the influences of other dancers own styles. The dancers communicate through observation and exploration, and their unique styles are defined.
The project not only enables Tri.Art Dance Academy students to work with a professional dance company but also to attend workshops with company dancer Edd Mitton (formerly from the Matthew Bourne Co), who specialises in contemporary dance and physical theatre; through this the students are able to explore a different dance style and better understand the world of the professional dancer. It’s a very exciting process and the dancers are working really well under the new challenges brought to them via this project.
Tickets for Figure Ground cost £14 (£12) and are available from the Merlin Theatre website or box office 01373 465949.
