Baxter festival marks a decade of dance

Published Oct 8, 2014

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THE BAXTER Dance Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary this year with a bumper edition.

Some 69 dance productions will be presented over 10 days by companies from across the Western Cape plus one from the Northern Cape. This is up from the 45 seen last year and despite no big sponsor for the event.

“I didn’t have my heart set on a number, it was about accommodating as many productions as I could and that time would allow,” explained Nicolette Moses, the festival producer. “It’s great to be able to offer a space like this.”

Having started the Baxter Dance Festival in 2004, Moses says she has seen a definite improvement in the quality of work over the years. As the festival developed she noticed a need for a bridge between the main (professional choreographers) and the fringe (studios and schools) programmes and four years ago the off-main programme started as a space for emerging choreographers and students of choreography to get a chance to perform at a festival.

This year’s commissioned work comes from Thalia Laric and Steven van Wyk, Capetonian choreographers who first started collaborating on the Baxter Dance Festival programme while still UCT fourth-year students in 2009.

They are founding members of the Underground Dance Theatre (a collective of like-minded choreographers who include Kristina Johnstone, Cilna Katzke and Joy Millar).

Last year a Special Silver Ovation Award was presented to Underground Dance Theatre for the production Plastic at the National Arts Festival and this year Van Wyk and Laric’s Skoonveld won the same award.

”Mode is a dance piece about dance,” says Laric.

“Because the brief was, ‘I wanted to see dance’,” explained Moses.

Last week we watched dancers Ciara Barron, Luke de Kock, Katzke and Henk Opperman run through the full version of the 30-minute piece, accompanied by soprano Robin Botha. Afterwards the tired dancers collapsed in the back of the studio space while choreographers Laric and Van Wyk explained that Mode finds its humour and aesthetic inspiration in the formal elements of social dances – from the processional rigidity of court dances to the frivolity of the salsa.

“We knew we wanted to do something about the form, not physical theatre, not dance theatre… an ode to dance in a way. No props,” said Laric.

“It’s the most dancerly piece we’ve ever done,” says Van Wyk. “It’s also our memories of childhood dances.”

Laric says she had recently spent a lot of time in church halls which reminded her that these are spaces which contain so many dance memories for many people: “So conceptually, narratively, that’s the space we find ourselves in and that is where the movement comes from.”

Van Wyk says they have also referenced an image he has become familiar with, watching the Ballroom Society meet on the UCT campus below the library. Watching people practice without partners on the sidelines reminds him of “the memory of dance”.

Mode will be performed most nights on the main programme (barring Wednesday, October 15 and Thursday, October 16) and not on the weekend programmes.

Moses is heartened by the strong showing of flamenco on this main programme.

“After the death of Carolyn Holden, things went a bit quiet on the flamenco front and it’s like the phoenix rising at the moment with the resurgence and I’m happy to be able to give that a platform.”

• The Baxter Dance Festival takes place from Thursday to October 18 at the Baxter with the off-main programme running on Saturday and the fringe programme running on October 18. Check out www.baxter.co.za for the full schedule. Tickets: R30 for the fringe programme to R100 for the main programme, with discounts for multiple performances or groups.

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