Cape Dance Company to restage ‘Enemy’
SINCE they first performed it in 2010, Christopher Huggins’s Enemy at the Gate has become a signature piece for the Cape Dance Company (CDC). CDC will perform it again this year, restaging the fast and furious piece with a double cast of 50, like they did last year.
It forms part of their annual showcase, which this year is entitled Sacredspace.
CDC artistic director, Debbie Turner, says this reflects her belief that the stage is a sacred place, especially one that is occupied by dancers.
She describes Enemy at the Gate as very reflective of the world we live in, and an aggressive, punchy way to open the programme. “It’s very captivating from the first note. “Then, Shepherds will finish it on a reflective, spiritually reflective note,” she explained.
Shepherds being Jose Agudo’s A Thousand Shepherds, a piece heavily influenced by sacredness and intense spirituality, and a work which has pushed the company into a very different direction than the militarily precise Enemy at the Gate.
“All the dancers commented on how they weren’t the same people from when they first started rehearsing to the first performance of Shepherds, and they’ll never go backwards from there,” explained Turner.
She recently travelled to Birmingham in the UK to watch two of her CDC regulars, Nathan Bartman and Ciara Baldwin, dance with Agudo’s company, Ace Dance & Music.
“It was very interesting to see them in another space. They’re both highly energised dancers who are very committed and that comes through strongly,” said a very proud Turner.
The two will return to dance in this forthcoming season, which will also feature a dance piece by South African-born choreographer Andrea Schermoly, who danced for the Boston Ballet and Nederlandse Dance Theatre for several years.
As a choreographer, she has created works for Boston Ballet 2, the Joffrey Concert Group and Kansas City Ballet, among others, and will be creating a new piece of work on CDC.
Entitled Cliffnotes, its title references study aids that precis a subject or a book.
“Bubbles of conversations make up the ballet that specifically refer to episodes in her life.
“She has lived in so many different cities and when you go to a new place, it is the kind of thing people would say: ‘Get the cliffnotes on the city.’
“So, watching this piece would be like watching episodes of life. The choreographic language is as different as A Thousand Shepherds was from Enemy at the Gate, but in a completely different direction.
“That’s my job as an artistic director – to develop the dancers into spaces that they are uncomfortable in.
“Andrea is a very cerebral choreographer, she lives very much in her head and you get the feeling when you’re watching the work that it’s intensely personal to her and I think the dancers feel that too, that it’s her life that is in their hands.
“She is most definitely working on what the dancers show her who they are, but it is the commonality that she sees in them that she also finds in herself,” explained Turner.
Cape Dance Company presents Sacredspace from Saturday to December 10 at Artscape Theatre at 8pm, with a matinee on December 10 at 2.30pm. Tickets cosst R130 to R200 from Computicket. Advance booking is advised.