Rave reviews for NYDC’s premiere at Sadler’s Wells – choreographed by Jasmin Vardimon

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.’

Book for NYDC at Sadler’s SAMPLED