© Dance Umbrella DU 2007 programme www.danceumbrella.co.uk Graham Watts reviews

Dance Umbrella, London’s international contemporary dance festival, gets underway on 3rd October and this year it has al fresco dance as a prominent theme. Two free outdoor events dominate the programme with Paul-André Fortier’s ‘Solo 30x30’ taking place over the whole month with thirty performances outside Liverpool Street Station; and ‘Transports Exceptionnels’ features a tender love duet between dancer and mechanical digger! Speaking of this emphasis on taking dance outdoors, Betsy Gregory, DU’s artistic director, said “I love the idea of presenting something inspiring and surprising to people who wouldn’t normally consider contemporary dance and would never step foot inside a theatre to see it.”.

Fortier’s solo will comprise 900 minutes of dance, taking place in half-hour daily chunks performed in the same place at the same time (1.30 pm), whatever the weather. Fortier won’t mark out his territory beforehand and so each day will present a new challenge of dancing around the variety of urban activity in this major rail terminus. This diverse inter-action with both the environment and the public will make every performance different.

‘Transports Exceptionnels’ is a 20-minute work to be performed four times over the weekend of 6/7th October in the new green space of the Southbank Centre’s Jubilee Gardens. French choreographer, Dominique Boivin, has created this duet of surprising intimacy for man and machine for his Compagnie Beau Geste. He originally saw it as a piece for two machines, to emphasise his view of the world becoming a “vast construction site” and a means of articulating his desire to “give body and life to something that is purely mechanical”, but it was the voice of Maria Callas that inspired Boivin to create the added drama of a human element. Accompanied by recordings of Callas singing arias by Saint-Säens and Massenet, together with additional music by Bellini, this meeting between steel and flesh is a witty interpretation of the traditional pas de deux.

This year’s festival will take place at venues across London, opening at Sadler’s Wells with the world premiere of Isaac Julien & Russell Maliphant’s ‘Cast No Shadow’ on 3rd October, but it will have a particular focus on the redeveloped Southbank Centre.

Performances at the Queen Elizabeth Hall include Siobhan Davies Dance (4-6 October) and Israel’s Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Company, who will bring the European Premiere of ‘Shaker’ (inspired by the micro-world created within a shaken snowglobe) on 8th October. American choreographer Amanda Miller returns to the QEH with her ‘Giselle-on love and other difficulties’ (11/12th Oct), a reinvention of the quintessential romantic ballet, set to the original Adolphe Adam score.

‘Instrumotional’ is a free event that takes place inside the Royal Festival Hall Ballroom from 3rd to 28th October. It consists of a random arrangement of wooden benches and cubes created by Nik Haffner and Thomas McManus, former dancers with William Forsythe, and a short film of dance animation performed by dolls and choreographed by Haffner can be viewed from inside each of the cubes. The film shows wooden benches echoing the installation itself. The action of watching the film results in the viewer becoming an integral part of the installation.

To commemorate Channel 4's 25th birthday, Betsy Gregory and Julia Carruthers, Head of Dance and Performance at Southbank Centre, have curated an evening of the Channel’s seminal, but rarely-seen, dance films, to be screened at the BFI on 6th November.

The Festival closes at the Barbican Centre with performances of ‘Roadkill’ in The Pit by the Australian company, Splintergroup, and all three parts of Michael Clark’s ‘Stravinsky Project’ on the main stage in the week ending 10th November.