Jasmin Vardimon Company are enjoying a sell-out success in Spain this week, performing YESTERDAY at GREC, the prestigious arts festival of Barcelona.
Barcelona Television News interviewed Jasmin at the theatre last night and filmed segments of the show. You can watch the news piece at the link below.
The National Youth Dance Company’s world premiere at Sadler’s Wells on Saturday 8 June performing a new piece choreographed by Jasmin Vardimon called (in between), received a fantastic response from both audiences and critics alike.
NYDC will be performing the work at Sampled on 28 & 29 June prior to a short UK tour.
4 STARS in The Times:
‘A spellbinding dramatic dance. Vardimon has quickly honed these talented young people into a cohesive ensemble. The opening image – all of them upside down, legs straight in the air as arms wave like seaweed – is immediately arresting… A rampant, rushing, high-spirited energy… Vardimon’s dark take on human ecology generates an uncommon ritualistic power.’
Londondance.com said:
‘The premiere of National Youth Dance Company’s ( in between ) by their first Guest Artistic Director Jasmin Vardimon is an impressive display of team work as well as individual skill. Thirty teenagers from a variety of dance and cultural backgrounds find common ground in simple strategies like shared breathing and the rhythms breath can generate. The result is a noisy but fluid and deeply connected performance. Vardimon works with the theme of a forest, the felling and re-generation of trees – a fitting idea for environmentally switched-on young people.
Against a backdrop of a towering forest, the dancers balance on tree stumps, swaying and gesturing with their arms. Two angry men cut them down, until they are all felled – even the woman with Rapunzel-like hair who repeatedly returns to her stump in defiance. Bauschian repetition and the utilisation of sequences performed in a chorus formation, create a gratifying tension and powerful suspense. Although a state of meditative calm is brought about by the sound of the dancers breathing and wafting their arms, like the wind sighing through trees, the quality changes to one that is more thrusting and percussive as the ‘spirits’ of the trees re-group and reclaim their roots.’
Flying the flag for Britain’s top female choreographers, Sadler’s Wells Associate Artist, Jasmin Vardimon, has been awarded the 2013 International Theatre Institute (ITI) Award for Excellence in International Dance.
Presented by the Director of the British Centre, Neville Shulman CBE, Vardimon has been chosen for this prestigious award in recognition of her outstanding choreographic work over recent years.
As a nation we are well supplied with choreographers. Matthew Bourne, Akram Khan, Wayne McGregor, Liam Scarlett, Christopher Wheeldon… the list goes on. All are highly acclaimed, players on the world stage, their services booked for years ahead. So why are their female colleagues struggling for visibility? Why, when British dance was founded by women like Ninette de Valois and Marie Rambert, and has always employed more women than men, are there no high-profile women choreographers?
It’s 14 years since a woman was commissioned to create a main-stage ballet at the Royal Opera House. If this were true of women playwrights at the National Theatre, or female artists at the Tate, there would be outrage. But at the flagship institution of British dance, the omission has escaped public notice. As it did last summer when the Royal Ballet and the National Gallery launched a collaboration named Metamorphosis: Titian 2012. Of the 15 artists and choreographers involved, none was a woman. An ironic decision, given that the subject was the goddess Diana, the personification of feminine power.
Even in contemporary dance, historically a territory marked out by choreographic pioneers such as Martha Graham and Pina Bausch, men are much more prominent than women. In the UK the female choreographers are there – Fleur Darkin, Shobana Jeyasingh, Charlotte Vincent and others have been diligently carving out careers for years – but it’s almost always their male colleagues, even the less experienced ones, who get the big commissions. “It’s a nightmare for those of us who watch as men get given chances they are simply not ready for while we graft away at our craft and take smaller-scale opportunities,” says Janis Claxton, an Edinburgh-based choreographer. “Women quit because they don’t get the support that their male colleagues get, and having to push constantly against this outrageous gender inequality is infuriating.”
In classical dance, female choreographers are rare indeed, and the dynamics of vocational ballet schooling are at least partly responsible. Boys see themselves as individuals from the start, but girls quickly learn how replaceable they are, and in consequence can become over-anxious to “fit in”.
“When I was a student,” one Royal Ballet soloist remembers, “the highest praise was to be told that you were a ‘good girl’.” While this makes for loyal, biddable corps de ballet dancers, it doesn’t encourage young women to take a proactive approach to their own creative careers. In professional ballet companies, faced with heavier workloads and greater competitive stress than their male colleagues (not to mention the exigencies of pointe work), few women have the time, energy or inclination to consider choreography.
And to date, those who do have found the cards stacked against them. Consider the case of Vanessa Fenton. From 2001 the Royal Ballet held a series of choreographic evenings in the Royal Opera House’s Clore studio to show work by junior dancers of the company, among them Alastair Marriott, Liam Scarlett, Jonathan Watkins and Fenton. At one such evening, critics were invited to select a fledgling choreographer to whom they felt they could offer constructive advice, and I chose Fenton. In contrast to the men’s more ordered work, Fenton’s was quirky, strangely costumed and bursting with semi-resolved ideas. At the time, as well as choreographing and working as a corps de ballet dancer, she was studying for a degree in English literature at Middlesex University.
Fenton and I corresponded. We discussed her ideas, and the following year, having been awarded her BA, she created a ballet called Knots, which reimagined the poems of RD Laing as a series of text messages. As deft choreographically as it was intellectually, the work marked Fenton out as a potential Next Big Thing.
“I wanted to be a choreographer,” she told me. “Truthfully, I wanted to be director of the Royal Ballet. I loved the company, I would have done anything for them.”
But it didn’t happen. Her literary studies were greeted with bemusement by her superiors: “‘Why would you want to do that?’ they asked me.” And while her male colleagues’ choreography was taken seriously (Marriott, Scarlett and Watkins would all go on to main-stage commissions at the Royal Opera House), Fenton’s wry, sophisticated work was never allowed to progress beyond studio performances. “I’d get a pat on the head from the director – ‘Well done, clever girl’ – and that would be it.” Gradually Fenton realised that she was never going to get a break. “I was devastated, seeing everyone else get a shot. I didn’t get one chance. And it broke my heart.”
Fenton left the Royal Ballet, and looking back she realises that despite her manifest talent she never had a hope of a main-stage commission. She could be, she admits, “difficult… I wasn’t Snow White”. And while difficulty was pardonable in a male member of the company – “Oh, they’d say, he’s a bit of a maverick” – it was unforgivable in a female employee. “It’s as if there was something abhorrent about a free-thinking woman. Something slightly disgusting. How dare she?”
Cathy Marston was another ambitious young choreographer who found the Covent Garden main stage closed to her. A prolific dance-maker, her full-length adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts, staged in the Royal Opera House’s Linbury studio on a shoestring in 2005, was one of the finest new story ballets seen in the building since Kenneth MacMillan’s Mayerling in 1978. A few years earlier Marston had approached Anthony Dowell, then director of the Royal Ballet, to ask the company to take her on as a character dancer. This is a traditional arrangement enabling choreographers to work within ballet companies, but Dowell made it clear it was for men only. As Marston told a Ballet Independent Group forum in 2002: “He basically said, ‘Darling, I’d love to have you as a choreographer but you know you’re a girl. We don’t have character parts for girls your age’.”
Marston echoes Fenton in identifying a double standard relating to female creative assertiveness. “It’s fine to be ‘sassy’ or ‘pushy’ as a twentysomething choreographer, but whereas men over 30 can still charm their way through, it’s harder for women. They start to become ‘a flirt’, which leads to worse labels, or the opposite: ‘boring’. And affairs are not as acceptable for women choreographers as for men – not that this is directly connected to opportunity, but it’s not unconnected either. It’s certainly a way that a considerable number of male choreographers use, abuse and build power, in my experience.”
What the history of British classical dance overwhelmingly demonstrates is that while women may run ballet schools and become ballet company administrators and directors, they are rarely, if ever, invited to the choreographic high table. They are permitted responsibility, in other words, but not creative power. The consequence in recent years has been a succession of works, some forgettable, some memorably fine, but all bearing a recognisably male creative stamp.
Choreographer Susan Crow wonders if the situation is self-reinforcing. “Have decades of work from a male perspective internalised particular choreographic conventions, and conditioned tastes to a certain type of physicality?” UK ballet-goers will be in little doubt that this is so. The problem is not that the work of McGregor, Scarlett, Wheeldon and their confrères isn’t good and at times brilliant; the problem is that it’s the only game in town.
Kevin O’Hare, who succeeded Monica Mason as director of the Royal Ballet last year, is sensitive to the issue. “There’s no getting away from the fact that the women haven’t been coming through,” he says, adding that he has approached an internationally renowned female choreographer with a view to a future commission. Within the company, O’Hare says: “I will try and make a path for women to be creative.” This is heartening, as is the news that Scottish Ballet director Christopher Hampson has commissioned pieces from three women (Crystal Pite, Kristen McNally and Helen Pickett) for the 2013 season. Last year Scottish Ballet presented A Steetcar Named Desire, choreographed by Annabelle Lopez Ochoa. The production won a South Bank Sky Arts award, and the prize for best classical choreography at the National Dance awards.
But there is a long way to go before female choreographers achieve anything like parity with men in either classical or contemporary dance. An illuminating analysis of the female choreographer’s dilemma is provided by the dance historian Lynn Garafola. Looking at pioneer dance-makers like Bronislava Nijinska, Isadora Duncan and Agnes de Mille, Garafola notes that while women are invariably in the vanguard of any new dance endeavour, men soon step in if the project is successful. “In smaller companies, in newer companies, in companies that have an experimental dimension – you’ll find women choreographers there. But once ballet is institutionalised, it becomes a man’s world.”
This is certainly true of contemporary dance in the UK. Of the 12 associate artists at Sadler’s Wells who are choreographers, just two of them are female – Jasmin Vardimon and Kate Prince. There’s a theory that women are more complicated in their ambitions, and less ruthless when it comes to networking, self-promotion and playing the system. But even if this is true it’s hard to believe that it’s more than a contributory factor to female under-representation.
In the words of Fleur Darkin, choreographer and artistic director of Scottish Dance Theatre: “Institutions are biased against female achievement systematically, not because individuals are misogynist. It is the culture, not one thing.”
No one offered choreographic careers to Vardimon, Prince or Darkin; they had to fight for them. And it’s a fight from which many like Fenton withdraw, bloodied and exhausted. “The ambition was kicked out of me. In any other institution I’d have been an asset. Why wasn’t I given a chance?”
Luke Jennings profiles the top four women choreographers working in Britain today. Jasmin Vardimon is joined by Cathy Marston, Aletta Collins and Charlotte Vincent.
From a sociopolitical sensation to an explorer of the tensions of motherhood,here are four women taking steps to upstage Britain’s old boys’ network.
Jasmin Vardimon was born on a kibbutz in Israel. When she was 14 her dance class was drafted to cover a theatre stage with carnations for a performance of Pina Bausch’s Nelken. Vardimon stayed to watch and thought: “This could be for me.” After training and working as a dancer in Israel she moved to London, and in 1997, aged 26, founded her own dance company. Her work often addresses socio-political issues: Justitia is a multi-perspective examination of a crime story; Park is an abrasive urban fairytale; 7734 addresses the Holocaust. In 2010 she choreographed a new Tannhauser for the Royal Opera. “As for Vardimon’s choreography of Venusberg,” wrote one critic, “the word sensational doesn’t begin to describe the daredevil whirl of tumbling bodies, acrobatic leaps, flailing limbs and seething eroticism she conjures.”
Since 2007 Cathy Marston has been choreographer and director of Bern:Ballett, Switzerland. Born in Newcastle, she trained at the Royal Ballet School, danced in Europe for six years, and in 2000 became a freelance choreographer. Her work is marked by its imaginative range: Echo and Narcissus, made with composer Stuart MacRae, is a near-abstract dance opera based on the Greek myth; her latest piece, Hexenhatz for Bern:Ballet, tells the story of Anna Goeldi, “the last witch of Europe”.
Aletta Collins trained at the Place (the London School of Contemporary Dance) before performing and choreographing with London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Her work is often narrative in character, and her 2009 stage version of The Red Balloon, based on the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a Parisian schoolboy, was a miniature gem, with Collins transforming everyday occurrences – a rain shower in the street, a woman distracted by her crying baby, children misbehaving behind their teacher’s back – into a whirl of wit and incident. Awakenings, Collins’s 2010 piece for Rambert, based on the book of the same name by Oliver Sacks, which tells of his efforts to “unfreeze” his patients from long-term sleep states, demonstrates Collins’s exceptional ability to illuminate interior mental states through nuanced dance imagery. In Duet for One Voice (2011) she recreates Jean Cocteau’s experimental monologue as a dance suite, crackling with unsettling body language and overlaid with an original score by Scott Walker. Widely experienced as a choreographer of operas, Collins has few equals as a narrative dance maker. Nevertheless she has yet to receive a commission from a large-scale ballet company.
Charlotte Vincent formed the Sheffield-based Vincent Dance Theatre in 1994, since then she has undertaken a series of highly personal explorations of the human condition: sometimes bleak, often poignantly funny. One of Vincent’s concerns is the way that female dancers are “lost” to motherhood. Failure to encourage mature female performers back to work, she says, will create a UK dance ecology “dominated by men and younger female artists whose work is valid but perhaps lacks emotional depth”.