Context
- Created by: xemilyijx
- Created on: 11-04-22 16:13
View mindmap
- Context
- Sixteen months later The Dream Is Over was adapted for London Festival Ballet to perform onstage.
- Rooster continued a trend that developed in Christopher Bruce’s work in the 1980s of choreographing to cycles of songs, usually compilations he had chosen himself.
- This began in 1981 with the Holst songs for Dancing Day created for students of the Rambert Academy, and was followed by the highly acclaimed Ghost Dances for Ballet Rambert to Andean folk music.
- This latter showed a group of people in limbo between life and death re-enacting their fate on earth.
- This began in 1981 with the Holst songs for Dancing Day created for students of the Rambert Academy, and was followed by the highly acclaimed Ghost Dances for Ballet Rambert to Andean folk music.
- In 1984 Bruce followed the success of Ghost Dances with Sergeant Early’s Dream which through Irish and American folk songs looked at the experience of displaced people.
- Originally commissioned for a television documentary on Lennon and performed by the Cullberg Ballet the dances provide visual comments on his life
- In the programme, shown on The South Bank Show on 30 November 1985, Bruce was also interviewed about the impact Lennon had made on him personally in the 1960s and 1970s.
- Given the inclusion of songs popularised by Joan Baez in Sergeant Early’s Dream and the use of Lennon’s music for The Dream Is Over, Rooster was the third work that Bruce has choreographed using music he grew up with.
- As he put it in an interview in Dance and Dancers (New Year 1993) ‘I did the piece because I just loved the music – eight songs by the Rolling Stones, mostly numbers that I’ve lived with for twenty years’.
- Although the use of selections of popular song has been a feature of contemporary dance in the United States of America – Twyla Tharp for example has repeatedly turned to this source using a wide selection of music from the Beach Boys for Deuce Coupe (1973) to Frank Sinatra for Nine Sinatra Songs (1982) – British choreographers have used them less frequently, at least until the 1980s.
- Within these brief dance sketches performed to songs Bruce frequently draws choreographic motifs from the lyrics.
- This has been a feature of his work since his earliest creations and not restricted to his danceworks to popular songs.
- When reviewing Living Space, a dance set to poems by Robert Cockburn, Noel Goodwin in Dance and Dancers (January 1970 p35) observed Bruce ‘occasionally taking a literal cue from the words’
- This has been a feature of his work since his earliest creations and not restricted to his danceworks to popular songs.
- Within these brief dance sketches performed to songs Bruce frequently draws choreographic motifs from the lyrics.
- Although the use of selections of popular song has been a feature of contemporary dance in the United States of America – Twyla Tharp for example has repeatedly turned to this source using a wide selection of music from the Beach Boys for Deuce Coupe (1973) to Frank Sinatra for Nine Sinatra Songs (1982) – British choreographers have used them less frequently, at least until the 1980s.
- As he put it in an interview in Dance and Dancers (New Year 1993) ‘I did the piece because I just loved the music – eight songs by the Rolling Stones, mostly numbers that I’ve lived with for twenty years’.
- Later works by Bruce in the structural style of Rooster, included Moonshine (1996) and Grinning in your Face (2001).
- Basing a ballet around a succession of numbers inevitably makes it episodic; but each song is an individual miniature sketch which allows for considerable variety of mood and style within the complete ballet.
- Themes found in Rooster that are recognisable from Bruce’s other works include, for example, references to children’s behaviour.
- This featured more strongly in his work when his own children were younger, as he said in an interview in The Times (6 March 1981),]
- ‘You will see things about children in many of my works’. Social and folk dance are regularly drawn on and the duets in Rooster echo movement material from, for example, the second movement of Bruce’s Symphony in Three Movements (1989).
- Sections
- The stylised movement of ‘Lady Jane’ can be linked to the formal dances of the opening and close of Bruce’s work for Rambert, Ceremonies (1986) in part inspired by the discoveries of the Elizabethan alchemist and Court astrologer Dr John Dee.
Comments
No comments have yet been made