This summer, four new dance performances and an invitation to get moving will launch online, in a bid to help tackle cultural inequality and loneliness.
Forced indoors by Covid-19, Greenwich Dance has re-imagined Up My Street – Showtime!, a borough-wide project designed to tackle cultural inequality and loneliness, into Up My Street – Online!
Beginning on Thursday 25th June, four TV-style episodes featuring brand-new short dance works will be screened on YouTube, alongside interviews with choreographers, excerpts from their eclectic back catalogues, and an invitation to get moving.
Greenwich Dance has commissioned four choreographers – Zoie Golding, Mathieu Geffré, Temujin Gill and Sarah Blanc – to each create a brand-new piece of dance for the camera, made entirely within lockdown restrictions. Edited by award-winning film-maker Roswitha Chesher, each piece will be screened within in its own magazine-style episode which will be hosted by Blanc, who is also a comedienne and performer.
The choreographers have each with worked a mix of professional dancers and volunteers, aged between 13 and 68, who came to the project via a call-out to local South East London Facebook groups. Each choreographer has a cast of between eight and ten people, most of whom are strangers to each other.
Zoie Golding has used the detective character from her interactive live piece Sleuth to create an interactive digital game. She has posted clips of him, performed by professional dancer Niko Hanakam, and asked her cast to make choices about his next steps. Does he use the toothpick or the crowbar to open the locker? Does he search this room or the next one to hunt for his missing magnifying glass? The result promises to be a fantastic, fun and original piece.
Mathieu Geffré worked with his cast on Zoom, holding one-to-one sessions to set them choreographic challenges. He has created a series of dancing portraits to an original score composed by James Keane, where the movement becomes a poetic ritual to elevate our current state of reality.
Temujin Gill, working with long-time collaborator Sunanda Biswas, explores the question ‘what’s important to me now?’. Working on WhatsApp, Gill posted a range of tutorials exploring breath, body percussions and dance steps such as the SuziQ and TopRock. Gill also showed his cast an excerpt of himself bursting out of his house, and running up streets and hills; encouraging them to do similar things to explore the constraints of being inside and the freedom of being outside.
Sarah Blanc worked intensively with performers from Lotus Youth Dance Company and Dancing to the Music of Time, Greenwich Dance’s Over 55s company. Blanc partnered her participants up, mixing ages and groups, and together they devised poetry and movement using the chat facility on Zoom.
When: Thursdays at 6pm, from 25th June 2020
Where: Online via YouTube
£: Free (Suitable for all ages)
More info: facebook.com/greenwichdance