Output details

Goldberg Variations (Dancework)

Commissioned by the Royal Ballet and premiered at the Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House 2. Goldberg won the Olivier Award for the ’Most Outstanding Achievement In Dance‘, and was nominated for the Critics' Circle Award.

In research terms, the choreographic enquiry was concerned with an exploration of J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations with a cast of professional dancers from a variety of disciplines: three classical dancers from the Royal Ballet (amongst them Tamara Rojo), three contemporary dancers and one hip hop dancer. The basic choreographic premise took inspiration from the rehearsal room as a space where, regardless of their specific training, dancers might share aspects of expert dance-making. The strong range in Goldberg's musical score, which is made up of thirty-two variations of the same theme, was explored in an equal range of permutations of a corresponding tight choreographic structure, made up of a variety of compositional forms, from septets to solos. While the classical and contemporary cast were initially rehearsed separately due to distinct modes of working inherent in their style-specific conventions, the dancers were worked into an intimate ensemble. The project explored how dialogue and synergy between movement and music can emerge through an expressive quality of the dancers' work itself: the latter is not dance genre-specific but instead occurs across the variety of dance vocabularies. The set design aimed to echo the choreographic premise of revealing the processual in the final product: beyond the replication of a rehearsal room it included video projection across the space, which at certain stages displayed numbers corresponding to the counts of the musical score. The production thus sought to reveal not only aspects of the rehearsal process in its stage set-up, but moreover aspects of what is at stake in 'dancing' as such in performance - such as the internal and normally dancer-internalised counting of phrases in relation to the musical score.