Contemporary dance and doing the numbers
Contemporary dance was described by AC Grayling as “the cutting-edge art form of our time”. Hamish MacPherson, the person behind Humanist Heritage, has been performing his own work since 2010 and is set to perform with fellow choreographer Martine Painter at Europe’s largest platform for work by new choreographers.
Hamish and Martine will be performing the premier of their duet, ‘Meeting Place’ on January 10 2012 at The Place, London, as part of Resolution!, a season of dance works by emerging choreographers.
They pair came together through a shared love of numbers and non-stylised movement and the piece plays with visually unfolding an algorithmic formula. As this takes place, an intimate and sometimes comic relationship emerges between the two dancers.
Hamish and Martine’s engagement with maths, science and philosophy reflects their diverse backgrounds: Martine read French studies, was a successful singer and is currently a librarian, and Hamish studied art and philosophy and is a civil servant.
Over the summer they both worked as dance artists with choreographer Eva Recacha for the Choreodrome season at The Place, where they performed in the Touch Wood season. Inspired by this experience they have gone on to make their own work which was accepted for the biggest European platform for new choreographers: Resolution! at the world-famous contemporary dance venue The Place.
Tickets are available from The Place box office
Trailer can be watched online
A theatrical century of Free, Modern and Contemporary Dance has had a splendidily irreligious flavour.
Historically, dance has almost always been seen as a threat to faith, Christian and Islamic. But from liberating Duncan through the Expressionists to current artists has been a celebration of values to supplant the gods. In our schools too, dance contributed much to personal education (until swept away by Thatcherism).
The Dance Centre and the Guild named after Laban continue the tradition (I rarely leap about now but v. ‘Existentialism, Aesthetics, Dance’). A chain of teaching extends from Laban to Jooss (famously denouncing politicians and profiteers) and on to Bausch and Forsythe (a Guild patron) – all dancers of great endeavour and humane committment.
According to American Grace (by Putnam & Campbell, that I’m currently trying to erode), the religious give far more to good causes, but the excess over the irreligious is least for culture and the arts. Perhaps this is slight evidence that aesthetics, like science, can now substitute for faith.