Yahoo Lifestyle Van Cleef & Arpels’ Festival ‘Dance Reflections’ Returns to London
LONDON — Van Cleef & Arpels is about to take over London next year with a citywide dance festival from March 12 to April 8.
“Dance Reflections” will take place at several locations, including the Royal Ballet and Opera in Covent Garden; the Southbank Centre; Sadler’s Wells East, which will open in February, and the Tate Modern museum.
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At a press conference on Thursday morning, Van Cleef & Arpels’ dance and culture program director Serge Laurent laid out his plans and hopes for the dance festival. He was joined by Marine Brutti, director of (La) Hordel; Cédric Andrieux, director of the Ballet de Lyon; dancer and choreographer Robyn Orlin, and the Royal Ballet and Opera’s director Kevin O’Hare with the company’s creative producer, Emma Southworth.
The festival will feature traditional and contemporary dance pieces, as well as workshops for members of the public.
“The best way to understand contemporary art in general is to have a little background about what’s happened before and the arts are a language to communicate with people,” Laurent said.
He added that “Dance Reflections” is based on three values, which are “creation, transmission and education.”
The program will include 15 shows.
(La) Hordel will be working with the Ballet National de Marseille on “Age of Content,” which will be drawing on the “internet’s aesthetic facets of distraction, accumulation and collage, and, moving from the strange familiarity of a GTA character to a TikTok dance mash-up, the group uses choreographic art as a tool to give critical distance,” according to Van Cleef & Arpels.
Ballet de Lyon will be presenting “Merce Cunningham Forever,” some of the choreographer’s most renowned work, from “Beach Birds” to “Biped.”
Meanwhile, Orlin’s dance piece will take a more political stand with “We Wear Our Wheels With Pride” about the rickshaw drivers of South Africa’s past.
The Royal Ballet and Opera will be presenting “Balanchine: Three Signature Works.” The dance compiles three of the choreographer George Balanchine’s pieces, from “Serenade,” his first ballet created in the U.S., followed by “Prodigal Son” and “Symphony in C.”
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