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Five diversely enjoyable new dance works filmed to watch at home are a testament to artistic director Tamara Rojo’s ambitious guiding principles
In her time in charge of English National Ballet, Tamara Rojo has made it her business to encourage new choreographers (particularly women) and to stretch her talented dancers. In her ambitious season of new dance films those principles are very much in evidence.
Stina Quagebeur is a company dancer who has been flirting with choreography for a while. With Rojo’s encouragement, she is putting her back into it, and Take Five Blues shows her gaining in confidence and purpose. Like Nigel Kennedy’s take on Bach, Vivace, and Paul Desmond’s jazz standard Take Five, to which it is set, Quagebeur’s work imbues the familiar with a sense of difference, twisting and turning classical vocabulary into jazzy, improvisatory shapes. At one moment the dancers are upright, in snappy pirouettes, the next slouching in low swoops and turns. Shaun James Grant’s atmospheric filming captures the collegiate, relaxed mood.