Dance Revolutionaries

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Wed 26 Jun 2024

Birmingham’s Cineworld Broad Street is one of a series of cinemas across the UK hosting screenings of a new film Dance Revolutionaries.

The 74-minute film, directed by David Stewart, features performances of work by two leading choreographers – Robert Cohan and Kenneth MacMillan.

The two works, Cohan’s Portraits and MacMillan’s Sea of Troubles are hugely different and yet both reveal a mastery of physicality, emotion and technique.

Cohan began creating Portraits, a series of intimate solo works, in 2019 but four months later Covid 19 brought lockdowns and prevented the studio from working. Undaunted, Cohan, then in his nineties, completed the seven solos on Zoom.

Five of the series are included in Dance Revolutionaries – all were filmed during lockdown with the last rehearsal being in December 2020, a month before Cohan died at the age of 95.

Cohan chose the five locations and the choreography in each speaks to that specific location with the spaces gradually closing in to take us from the natural world back onto the stage.



So the first piece is set on the seafront with dancer Edd Mitton interacting with the sand and the waves, a portrait of nature as much as a person. Freya Jeffs then brings the work inside but in a studio against which we see the Canary Wharf backdrop, reminding us how interior and exterior interplay and create their own landscape.

The middle Portrait sees Dane Hurst arriving on a motorbike and then performing in a grungy background of a graffiti-strewn underpass – a setting which reflects the increased tempo of the work. Intensely intimate, Jonathan Goddard performs the fourth Portrait near naked and sand-strewn in what appears to be a deserted concert hall. Taut with emotion, we see Goddard’s body judder, as if being reborn into a new world.

And finally, we step back into the Royal Opera House for Romany Pajdak to bring the Portraits back into a theatre space. The choreography for this final piece also appears more grounded in traditional ballet – as if the pieces have returned to earth from ethereal to solid ground.

The second half of Dance Revolutionaries steps into more narrative territory with MacMillan’s 1988 work Sea of Troubles, his re-telling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet story. Dane Hurst plays the troubled Dane unsure whether to trust a vision of his murdered father who calls for revenge and torn between love and loyalty for his mother and his beloved Ophelia.



Setting the performance in Hatfield House and Park in Hertfordshire gives the story another level as the characters stalk through the historic halls and corridors. Stewart makes great use of the home, frequently zooming in on details in the paintings hung around the walls so the story appears to have an additional audience of static figures waiting silently for the tragic outcome.

A collaboration between Yorke Dance Project and Royal Ballet, Dance Revolutionaries gives an insight into the work of these two extraordinary choreographers. And by taking the works to the different locations the film enables audiences to see the dance in situations they could never experience in a theatre.

Dance Revolutionaries plays Cineworld Broad Street on 26 June, see [LINK www.cineworld.co.uk] for tickets and see here for more information on the film.

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