Playgrounds Festival

Playgrounds festival is a series of performance works that took place at the University of Northampton. These works contributed to the BA Dance honours students’ dissertation; I will review this week as it was a compulsory element for my degree to attend these performances. All performances had a well thought out theme with all individuals having a unique performance to show.  Each piece varied in theme and style of dance, this ranged from contemporary to excerpts of dance theatre and the exploration of symbolic representation, poems and the perception of colour to bricolage (the construction of a work from a diverse range of elements ‘to hand’ ).  As these are varied pieces it is hard to collectively review them as a whole, therefore I will review individual performances by complimenting and contrasting the choreography. Quite early on in the week, we was presented with a visualisation piece of choreography on geometric shapes ‘A shape in Space’. A Shape in Space was a pleasure to watch; while many of the works had deep, meaningful underlying themes that required a high level of engagement and interpretation from the audience, this work took on a static theme where the dancers quite literally portrayed the theme by making shapes in space through their movement. In this sense the piece maintained the audiences engagement on a purely visual level – aesthetically it was impressive and yet it was easy to watch and understand. Another  piece that also stood out to me in the week was ‘Alloy’ choreographed by Herbert, this piece undertook a dance theatre work, post-modern and aspects of ballet and contemporary which also had an element of humour which was a risky move to take, however for me was a success as no one else had done this before and made it a memorable work by the end of the week.