Skip to main content

17c review – rollicking 21st-century take on Samuel Pepys

Old Vic, London
Pepys’s celebrated diaries come under feminist scrutiny in Big Dance Theater’s postmodern mashup

What’s the British slang for penis? The woman in the wig wants to know. She’s addressing the audience. Come on now, don’t be shy. After all, we’re here to talk about Samuel Pepys and he certainly wasn’t – masturbation, constipation and defecation are all recorded in his diaries. Those chronicles of Pepys’s daily life form the basis for director Annie-B Parson’s 17c, opening the Dance Umbrella festival.

Dance Umbrella is 40 this year and on great form: still curious, still adventurous, still bringing over artists new to the UK, such as Parson’s New York troupe, Big Dance Theater. There’s less dance, more theatre in this show, as the multi-talented cast of five deliver slices of Pepys’s journal – alternately earnest, arch and sarcastic – then seamlessly mix in modern speech, video, song, and baroque-tinged dance. Especially good is the funny-boned Cynthia Hopkins (who does, in the end, learn a few new anatomical nouns), making Pepys’s thoughts sound like punchlines in a lame sitcom.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2xXAqmd
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more