This evening to celebrate twenty years of the Yorke Dance Project in the vastly over-heated Clore Studio featured four pieces:
First was Kenneth McMillan's Playground - an apparently easy to follow tale of adolescent awakening in its first restaging since 1979. However, as the piece unfolds, we find we are not so much in a child's playground as a mental hospital ward. Hardly a laugh as minute, it ends with one dancer straight-jacketed and the rest in white coats.
After the interval, came the very brief Between and Within by Sophia Stoller and the much lengthier Communion, a commission by Robert Cohan, mentor to Wayne McGregor. Interesting at first, if I'm honest, I found communion too long. Just as I thought it was over, it carried on. It sarted with the dancers moving forwards and backwards in line with individuals stopping and then resuming. This was an interesting idea that I think could have been developed in much more impactful ways - e.g., all but one freezing. Anyway, there was then a second part where the dancers sat on two rows of chairs facing each other while some performed between them
Finally, after a further interval, we had Imprint by Yolande Yorke-Edgell. This struck me as by far the best piece, being infused with energy and positivity. It paid homage to Yorke-Edgell's influencers - Cohan, richard Allston and Bella Lewitsky and closed with some real exhuberance.
Irritatingly, the ROH had run out of programmes, so many in the audience did not know exactly what they were or had been watching.
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