Coming Up
The work is an adaptation of the original book ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ written by Carlo Collodi in 1883, Italy. It was written at a time when Italian society was philosophically and morally engaged in a very important question about the nature of education; could peasants be educated? Could their children go to school and become ‘real boys’, or were they destined to be merely work force -‘donkeys’.
Unlike the Disney version of Pinocchio which portrays a journey to become a real boy, achieved by telling the truth, a message driven home by the film, I find in the original nineteenth century Italian tale a much more complex journey of challenges and discoveries. This journey leads him to realise what it means to be human, understanding and recognising human feelings and emotions in himself and in others. This classic tale, in a way of questioning, allows us to explore our assumptions of what it means to be human.
Throughout creating this interpretation of the story, I was mainly interested in the imaginative way it can be retold, constructing the characters with the performers and rediscovering the tale through them. One of the exciting things we explored with the set designer and the production team was the creation of a stage that also functioned as a marionette theatre, making the interactive set part of the choreography. It was an exciting journey of challenges and adventures for us all, and I’m happy to share it with you.
Jasmin Vardimon
The first major tour in 2022, Gidon Kremer and the Kremerata Baltica make their long awaited return to Korea with two performances in Seoul and Cheonan.
Flagships of their respective genres in Finland and leading forces of the European dance and baroque music, Tero Saarinen Company (TSC) and Helsinki Baroque Orchestra (HeBO) join forces to find new dimensions to opera pioneer Claudio Monteverdi’s (1567- 1643) radical madrigals. Third Practice features thirteen live performers on stage. Six TSC dancers and six HeBO instrumentalists are complemented by two internationally recognized opera soloists specialized in early music: Tenor Topi Lehtipuu live on stage and the virtual avatar of Catalonian Soprano Núria Rial. The creative team of Third Practice is Choreographer Tero Saarinen, Music Director, Arranger Aapo Häkkinen, Lighting Designer Eero Auvinen, Projection Designer Thomas Freundlich, Costume Designer Erika Turunen, Sound Designer Marco Melchior and Choreographer’s Assistant Henrikki Heikkilä.
Saarinen is known for insightful fusions of the classical and the contemporary – such as his praised The Rite interpretation HUNT (2002). Many of Saarinen’s best-known creations also feature inventive use of live music: Borrowed Light (2004) with early music ensemble The Boston Camerata and recent collaborations with Esa-Pekka Salonen (Morphed, 2014), The Finnish National Opera and Ballet (Kullervo by Jean Sibelius, 2015) as well as Susanna Mälkki and The LA Phil (Zimmermann Trio, 2018). In Third Practice Saarinen once again creates a gripping choreography combining dance with live music, strong and exceptional performers, innovative sound, lighting, video and costume design – intertwined with multi-layered and emotionally gripping themes.
***Due to COVID-19 this project has been postponed until further notice. Please stay tuned for new updates.***
Lucas Debargue returns to Taiwan for 3 performances in Taichung, Pingtung and Taipei, and making his Singapore debut at the Victoria Concert Hall.
Stay tuned for more information for Verona Quartet’s debut multi-city Asia Tour in May 2023!
Making his debut performance with Seoul’s KBS Symphony Orchestra in over two evenings on 24 & 25 June 2023, Gidon Kremer will be playing Schumann’s violin concerto with the orchestra. More information to follow soon.
Coming in June 2023 Gidon Kremer will be joined by cellist Giedre Dirvanauskaite and pianist Georgijs Osokins in a heroic piano trio tour.
More information to come! Program to include Mozart Violin Sonata, Tchaikovsky Piano Trio and others.
ALiCE tells the story of a woman, or perhaps a child, unsure of her identity and where she is going.
Escaping or exploring, discovering the powers within her changing body. The world around her is different, curious, and compelling – at times absolutely bonkers.
Following the internationally acclaimed success of her adaptation of Pinocchio (‘This is a show of dazzling imagination’ – Evening Standard), award-winning choreographer Jasmin Vardimon’s newest creation is a re-imagining of the groundbreaking classic, Alice in Wonderland and promises a sensory feast of arresting images, powerful performers and striking kinetic scenery.
First coming to life through a VR experience touring the UK early in 2022, Jasmin Vardimon Company brings ALiCE to the stage this autumn.
Co-commissioned by Sadler’s Wells and Dance East, ICCI and Kent County Council.
Tune in soon for more details!
Throughout his career Wayne McGregor has made choreography that interrogates life through the experience of the body. In 2017, McGregor turned his attention to the body as archive with Autobiography, a dance portrait inspired by the sequencing of his own genetic code.
Autobiography is an abstract meditation on aspects of self, life and writing, a non-linear approach to a life story refracting both remembered pasts and speculative futures.
McGregor worked with dancers from his company in 2017 to create choreography from old writings, personal memories, pieces of art and music that have been important in his life. From these elements, 23 sections of movement material were created, reflecting the 23 pairs of chromosomes of the human genome. The choreographic events from the 23 sections were then fed into an algorithm based on McGregor’s genetic code. For every performance the algorithm, developed in collaboration with Nick Rothwell, randomly selects a different section of code from McGregor’s genome to determine which material the audience will see and in which order the dancers will perform it, book-ended by a fixed beginning and end.
Palimpsesting McGregor’s choreographic imprint over personal memoir and genetic code in a continuous re-imagining, Autobiography unfolds uniquely for each and every performance. Life, writing itself anew.
“Your life, at any given moment is fractured, multiplicitous, felt. It’s the sum of your impressions and experience, what you’re reading or thinking about, who you’re with. Autobiography is an experiment that I think speaks directly to the idea of life-writing. Life unfolds, without our having control, and we have to deal with those instances. I think that can be a really beautiful thing.” – Wayne McGregor
McGregor extended the concept and ideas of life-writing into the stage environment of Autobiography, collaborating with electronic musician and producer Jlin on the score, compositions of which Jlin based on McGregor’s genome reading; visual artist Ben Cullen Williams on the set design; long-time collaborator Lucy Carter on the lighting; and artist and fashion designer Aitor Throup on the costumes, the designs of which draw from Throup’s own 12 year archive.
Sasha Waltz’s newest work, premiered in 2019, will be available for touring in 2021. Please enquire with us.
The newest work, Double Murder, by Hofesh Shechter will tour to Asia from October 2023 to co-commissioners Hong Kong’s New Vision Arts Festival and National Taichung Theatre. More details of the tour will be release closer to the date.
In 2021, the dance company Sasha Waltz & Guests began an innovative artistic process that results in the continuous production of both digital and live formats. Terry Riley’s »In C« (1964) forms the musical foundation of this, an open composition that was revolutionary at the time and is generally considered the first piece of minimalist music. Based on this milestone of music history, Sasha Waltz and her dancers developed choreographic material that follows a similarly variable structure and is deliberately designed not to be a finished stage piece. In March 2021 »In C« received its world premiere on a livestream from the radialsystem in Berlin to the sound of a recording by »Bang on a Can« and has since been performed live (inter-)nationally.
»In C« is an experimental, constantly evolving process that once again reconceives and refines Sasha Waltz & Guests’ long-standing approach as well as the dialogue between dance, music and space, both digitally and in real life. At the same time, it explores the potential of flexible artistic production in times of pandemic and of artistic exchange, even across national borders. F.e. the individual movement phrases have also been recorded as video tutorials, which allows dancers to learn the choreographic material digitally and remotely.
»The score of »In C« consists of fifty-three musical phrases and reads like stage directions for musicians. The thought of translating these detailed instructions into dance through a choreographic exploration of the music appealed to me. The result is an experimental system of fifty-three choreographic figures for a structured improvisation with clear rules and laws. The length of the piece remains variable, as does the number of musicians and dancers. »In C« is also a very democratic score, because it gives freedom to the individual dancer within the ensemble: It is a piece about being part of a group as an individual rather than being an individual within a group. »In C« is a dynamic, modular system that remains adaptable in times of pandemic. It is an exciting challenge to be able to develop so many different variations and formats from it in the future, both for professional dancers and, in the long term, for children and amateurs.«
Sasha Waltz
Featuring the music of Franz Schubert, Nico Hümpel’s Silent Songs incorporates music, dance and the magic of theatre to tell a story.
Tune in later for more information!
***Due to COVID-19 this project has been postponed until further notice. Please stay tuned for new updates.***
For Beethoven’s 250th birthday anniversary, Nico and the Navigators will celebrate with a unique dance and theatre piece based on Beethoven’s late String Quartet, featuring the Küss Quartet.
***Due to COVID-19 this project has been postponed until further notice. Please stay tuned for new updates.***
The orchestra launched in 2019 with a week’s residency in The Pit at the Barbican Centre, London, leading to three sold-out performances.
The vision is of an orchestra based in multi-cultural London, reaching out to the world, an orchestra without boundaries.
Musicians from North, South, East and West are welcome and it is inclusive, with a gender balance, and it is 50% BAME and aged from 17-70.
The vision is of a big circle, or circles within circles. There were 20 musicians at the Barbican, but we always envisage, working from our core team, creating new Third Orchestras, responding to the cities and communities we work with, and their artistic and community profiles.
The orchestra is not about ‘fusion’. Rather welcoming each musician’s individual story, the lineage and experiences they bring from traditions or from their explorations of newness. Looking for a music that allows them to retain and celebrate whatever identities they choose to bring.
We learn from one another, and from the communities and musicians we meet, always expanding.
Why the Third Orchestra?
The first orchestra. Formal, set roles, set forms. The symphony orchestra, the jazz big band.
The second orchestra. A meets B, East meets West, Jazz meets Classical.. where players might be ‘representatives’.
The third orchestra – beyond the binary, a place where each individual brings their own story. They might be a Korean traditional player who also is very experienced in free improvisation. An Indian musician born in London. A jazz musician using live electronics. A composer who studied in Java. Reflecting the experience, sensibilites and lineage of each person, allowing them to stay being that musician – in a chemistry with the others.
A new Asia tour for Jerusalem String Quartet is brewing, tune in later for more details.
Andreas Ottensamer will join Basel Chamber Orchestra over the summer of 2024 in a multi-city tour of Asia. Check back again for more details.
UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey reimagines Jim Henson’s epic adventure and unsettling world in the context of our own ailing planet, exploring themes of nature, exploitation, courage and rescue, and asking how we can come together to be whole again. Featuring the extraordinary dancers of Company Wayne McGregor, this is a modern myth for all generations.
Since its premiere in 1982, Henson’s boundary-breaking film The Dark Crystal has achieved cult status. A darkly fantastical tale with ecological overtones, today its depiction of an earth riven by extremes and in need of healing is more urgent than ever.
A team of world-class creatives, led by director and choreographer Wayne McGregor, includes artists and original Henson collaborators Brian and Wendy Froud as well as composer Joel Cadbury, digital designers Kontrastmoment, lighting designer Lucy Carter, dramaturg Uzma Hameed, costume designer Philip Delamore and face-and body-artist Alex Box.
Tero Saarinen’s newest work will have the Asian premiere at the New Vision Arts Festival in Hong Kong in 2024 with Hong Kong Philharmonic.
Stay tuned for more details for the next tour of Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica in November 2024.