MILONGA - THEATRE REVIEW

MILONGA AT THE BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME (International Dance Festival Birmingham)

Theatre Run: Friday 23 - Saturday 24 May 2014
Performance Reviewed: Friday 23 May 2014 (Press Night)

Reviewed by Kyle Pedley

The International Dance Festival Birmingham 2014 draws it’s main stage performances to a close this year with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Milonga, a suitably showy finale that crackles with the fire, complexity and frisson of Argentine Tango and dance. It leans not on narrative  but rather it’s extraordinarily diverse and inquisitive choreographer’s penchant for really exploring and re-imagining different forms of dance, here creating a real tapestry and canvas of tango that is many things at once, but all beautifully choreographed and masterfully performed.

LORD OF THE FLIES - THEATRE REVIEW

LORD OF THE FLIES AT THE BIRMINGHAM HIPPODROME (International Dance Festival Birmingham)

Theatre Run: Wednesday 14 - Saturday 17 May 2014
Performance Reviewed: Thursday 15 May 2014 (Press Night)

Reviewed by Kyle Pedley

William Golding’s magnum opus, Lord of the Flies, remains one of the continuing tentpoles of English Literature, and naturally has thus been adapted to stage and screen in almost every possible iteration imaginable. The simplicity of it’s tale - a group of schoolboys find themselves deserted on a remote island and gradually resort to feral, primitive behaviour as they fight to survive - remains as potent as ever, and it’s exploration of the human condition, societal structure and innate feral regression makes it rich for dramatisation and adaptation across a wealth of different mediums and forms. It is exciting, then, to see it given such a biting, inventive and quite boldly visceral re-imagining, courtesy of acclaimed choreographer and dance director Matthew Bourne, as part of this years International Dance Festival Birmingham.