Under the influential artistic directorship of Yolande Yorke-Edgell, Yorke Dance Project has carved a distinctive place in the UK dance landscape. Rooted in tradition while looking to the future, YDP presents immaculately reconstructed classics of contemporary dance and ballet alongside premieres of new work by both established and emerging choreographers.
The company’s latest programme Modern Milestones, coming to the Linbury Theatre at the Royal Opera House from 19 to 22 January, celebrates 100 years of Martha Graham Dance Company, the centenary of Robert Cohan’s birth, Christopher Bruce’s 80th birthday, 60 years of Lewitzky Dance Company and Liam Francis’s year as Yorke Dance Project’s inaugural associate artist.
Modern Milestones features three London premieres – Troubadour, the first new work in over a decade by Christopher Bruce, CAST |x| by 32-year-old Liam Francis and Bella Lewitzky’s 1970 work Kinaesonata. Also on the bill are Martha Graham’s 1937 solo Deep Song and Robert Cohan’s 2015 work Lacrymosa.
Christopher Bruce’s Troubadour is a powerful and moving work for eight dancers. Set to music by Leonard Cohen, it explores the man, his poetry and his natural charisma as a performer. A long-time admirer of Cohen, Bruce was inspired to create the piece when his son Mark (also a choreographer) gave him a recording of Cohen’s live 2008 performance at the O2 Arena. He has set Troubadour to six iconic tracks: “Dance Me to the End of Love”, “The Future”, “A Thousand Kisses Deep”, “Suzanne”, “Boogie Street” and “First We Take Manhattan”. Bruce says: “Leonard Cohen was a Troubadour and, having spent large parts of my own life touring as a dancer and choreographer, I can identify with both the positive and negative sides of this world.”
CAST |x| is a new contemporary dance work by Liam Francis, a dancer with Lost Dog and former member of Rambert and ZooNation. The work explores fractured memory, moral ambiguity and the stories we tell to survive blame. Set against Jethro Cooke’s cinematic minimalist score composed entirely of fragmented voice samples and droning textures, the choreography builds from sharp stillness into an intricate storm of movement. Each of the four performers embodies a gesture and a phrase—interweaving and contradicting each other in a gradually tightening knot of narrative and emotional tension.
Bella Lewitzky’s soaring 1970 work Kinaesonata is a kinetic response to Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera’s Piano Sonata No. 1, Op 22. Fast, energetic, intricate and colourful, the work is packed with lifts, symmetry and mirrored movement, its eight dancers in constant motion from beginning to end. Kinaesonata was revived by Benjamin Millepied’s LA Dance Project in 2019. Yolande Yorke-Edgell was a member of Lewitzky Dance Company from 1994 to 1998, dancing many leading roles and being appointed a master teacher. She is committed to Lewitzky’s legacy and has regularly presented her work since setting up Yorke Dance Project.
Yorke Dance Project has staged a number of short works by Martha Graham in recent years including Errand into the Maze and Lamentation. This programme features Graham’s 1937 solo Deep Song. Set to music by Henry Cowell, Deep Song is a visceral reaction to the Spanish Civil War. The work is a cry of deep anguish – its contractions, swirls, crawls and falls are powerful physical representations of human experiences in war. The dance disappeared from the Graham company repertoire in the 40s and wasn’t revived again until 1989.
Robert Cohan’s Lacrymosa was created on Yorke Dance Project in 2015, entering the company’s repertoire the following year. A duet set to music of the same name by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, Lacrymosa explores both the loss and return of a loved one, moving from initial sorrow to the transforming power of reunion. Cohan has said that his starting point was Jesus returning home to Mary Magdalen.
The Yorke Dance Project dancers are: Abigail Attard-Montalto, Elly Braund, Jasmine Daniels, Eleanor Ferguson, Carina Howard, Dominic Rocca, Maddie Smith, Pierre Tappon, Amy Thake, Francis Thomas and Harry Wilson. There will be guest appearances from Jonathan Goddard, Liam Francis and Eileih Muir.
Tickets to Yorke Dance Project’s Modern Milestones are on sale now from £7 – £24 at https://www.rbo.org.uk/tickets-and-events/modern-milestones-details
