Posts with tag Dance

Contradictions. It’s the word mostly used to describe India to us. Contradictions, complexity and fast transition. To work in such a context you need to be flexible, an article in the daily newspaper The Hindu (Oct, 29) states. To be successful in your career you need among a number things; to step out of your comfort zone, build an open-minded and proactive attitude, always look to experiment with new work and be willing to take risks. For the curios reader, Nätverkstan did a study on the topic of leadship within cultural life in Sweden, where these competencies were found as important for future leaders (in Swedish: ledarskap.pdf). The study was done in 2007, in cooperation with the Cultural Leadership Award, set up by the British organisation Nesta. The experience from the Award states that a new type of leadership training is needed to meet changes and new demand – such as flexibility, risktaking, international outlook, resourcefulness and reflection.

“The beauty of collaboration is that it’s not about rationalising. You don’t have to speak so much, just do it”. Artistic Director of Attakkalari, Jayachandran Palazhy, meet us at his office, after giving us a glimpse of their new production, a work-in-progress. The dance company mixes research, dance, theatre, music, digitalisation, philosophy, to find new expressions in performing arts. As he says: “New thinking is the key in this new paradigm shift”.

New Opera Co just had the opening of “Vi i villa”, a newopera where the group use the classical form of an opera and turn it into a modern drama. Is it possible to use an everyday, very basic and realistic, dialogue in an opera? How do you create a libretto, together in the ensemble, how do you act and how do you produce? The questions was a drive for New Opera Co to explore and start, as they describe it, a phase of research and collective process in terms of ideas, performance, text and music. The result is a beautiful and creative performance that shows a new form of expression and gives an idea of what a modern opera could be. The stage is simple, a rehearsing room with just black chairs and four glasses. Scenery is projected on the wall and the dialogue, sung by the actors and actresses, is about ordinary things in the relationship between two people.

The performance was built in quite an interesting process, where the group combined working together with the whole ensemble, included actors, director, technicians, musicians, dancers, with times of concentration where the composer have built the text and the music on his own. In between, the parts that was ready, was performed and showed in front of an audience. This gave the composer an idea of how the text needed to be built and the song had to be sung to work. It’s quite a similar process, and way of thinking, as the one described at Pixar Animation Studios, where the storyboard continuously was showed to an audience and reactions taken into account in the building of a film (look here to read about our visit to Pixar Animation Studios).

“Vi i villa” is performed at the performance stage Atalante in Göteborg. Also look at trailers at http://www.atalante.org/viivilla/.