Free, all welcome - no booking required.
A joint APGRD, St Hilda's and DANSOX event.
Choreographer Cathy Marston will be undertaking a week long residency at the APGRD, 1-5 June 2015, with the support of St Hilda's and DANSOX. Working with 2 professional dancers and a group of Oxford scholars, Cathy will spend the week choreographing to the ancient Greek text of Odyssey Book XI. The aim of this project is to explore how the mythical content of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld (the katabasis,) as well as its dactylic hexameter metrical form, can be translated into the medium of dance.
As the culmination of this week's residency there will be a lecture demonstration on June 5th at 5pm in the Lecture Theatre, Classics Centre, in which Marston will discuss her approaches to adapting works of literature into dance performances with APGRD Visiting Scholar Tom Sapsford. Cathy will then also show and discuss the material which she has developed throughout the course of the week with performances from professional dancers Sonya Cullingford and Aaron Vickers.
CATHY MARSTON has made works for several major European ballet companies, was director of Bern Ballet Switzerland (2007-13), and most recently was a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow (20013-14). Cathy has a long history of adapting literary texts into unusual and thoughtful dance adaptations and has previously made works based on Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream), Ibsen (Ghosts, A Doll's House), and Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) amongst others.