Reigning Yorkshire Champions, the Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band, will join Rambert on stage at the Theatre Royal Nottingham for Dark Arteries, a piece inspired by the miners’ strike in 1984-85. The programme will also include Frames by Alexander Whitley and Didy Veldman’s Picasso-inspired The 3 Dancers.
Dark Arteries, which premiered at Sadler’s Wells in May 2015, is inspired by the miners’ strike which took place 31 years ago. A collaboration between Rambert Artistic Director Mark Baldwin and composer Gavin Higgins, Dark Arteries explores ideas of industry, conflict and unity. The work will see the award-winning Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band take to the stage with Rambert’s world-class dancers in an emotion-filled work about community and change.
Gavin Higgins comes from a long lineage of brass band musicians dating back to 1895 and received his initial musical training in the family brass band. He has worked closely with some of the country’s leading orchestras and his recent commission, Velocity, opened the 2014 BBC Last Night of the Proms. Mark Baldwin and Gavin Higgins previously collaborated on 2012’s What Wild Ecstasy.
Inspired by the tragic love triangle behind Picasso’s masterpiece The Three Dancers, Rambert’s new work from Didy Veldman explores the eternal themes of the painter’s work: love, desire and death. An internationally-renowned choreographer, Veldman uses three dancers in white to depict the tragic lovers and a further three dressed in black as their shadows or darker selves in order to delve into the social, psychological and human elements of Picasso’s work.
Veldman is well known for her theatrical style and earthy choreography. In The 3 Dancers she explores how one of Picasso’s most distinctive styles, Cubism, can be applied to movement to create the fragmented atmosphere and world which is so characteristic of his work. The 3 Dancers features an original score by leading Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin. Known for her diverse output of work, which includes operas, orchestral, chamber and solo pieces as well as music for theatre, film and dance, Kats-Chernin’s compositions are highly rhythmic with bittersweet melodies.
Frames is a new work from former Rambert dancer Alexander Whitley which lays bare the process of making a dance performance. Twelve performers assemble and disassemble the set, move lighting and change angles, constantly creating new spaces and playing with what’s revealed and what’s hidden in their sequences of virtuosic, highly technical dancing.
This thought-provoking work is a continuation of Whitley’s collaboration with award-winning visual artists Tuur Van Balen and Revital Cohen. The work is accompanied by a new score from Icelandic composer Daníel Bjarnason.
Tues 23 – Thurs 25 Feb 7.30pm: Theatre Royal, Nottingham
http://www.trch.co.uk/ | 0115 989 5555
