Figure Ground finds the company focusing its artistic vision and educational activities on dance work that is rooted in the visual arts. We will be exploring how human figures in artistic contexts relate to, are distanced from, interact with, are seen in contrast to, or otherwise inter-relate with the visual ground around them.

Yolande Yorke-Edgell will be creating a new work, Calculated Movements, which takes its title from the 1985 computer animated film by Larry Cuba. In this film, Cuba alternates individual, movement “events”, involving ribbon-like figures following intricate trajectories, with more complex episodes consisting of up to forty of these individual events. Yorke-Edgell will use this film as her starting point. She will be working in the studio with the full company alongside the film, to create a dance that will explore the many relationships between figure and ground; between the performers and the performing space; between live dance and the dance of the animation being projected behind, in front of, and on the dancers themselves.

Yolande will also be re-creating Strandgarde 30, originally presented in 2009 as part of YDP’s first UK production Grace. It is a work inspired by the paintings and life of Danish artist Willhelm Hammershøi.

Figure Ground also includes and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me, choreographed by YDP associate director, Stephen Pelton. This dance was also inspired, in part, by the paintings of Willhelm Hammershøi, whose cool interiors and motionless figures in pale colours, resonated deeply with the world that Pelton had set out to create. The dance takes its title and subject from the poem, “Prayer before Birth” by Louis MacNeice. This meditation on how one might reconcile the tyranny of man with the progress of time and the body, is a portrait of a character, not unlike one of Hammershøi’s central figures, who seems sealed up within the hermetic world surrounding them. and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me premiered in San Francisco in 2009, where it was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award for best choreography.

The fourth work in the Figure Ground programme will be a premiere by Charlotte Edmonds who is the company’s Young Artist In Residence
under the mentorship of Yolande Yorke-Edgell and Stephen Pelton. During a three-week residency with the company, Charlotte will work alongside artist, Sally McKay, a painter and sculptor who makes her own work based on movement observed while watching dance. (Ms McKay collaborated with Yorke-Edgell on Noted, which was part of YDP’s 2012 production Words Worth.) Charlotte will also be collaborating on a new score with composer Thomas Preston, a winner of YDP’s Young Composers Competition in 2012.

Rehearsals and performances of Figure Ground will be coupled with many of YDP’s outreach activities including workshops, residencies, Professional Pathways and Youth Leaders programs. See Participate for more details…