Nottdance

Posted on March 3, 2015

Nottdance, the international festival of dance and performance, returns to Nottingham from March 5 to 15, with more than 40 performances in 30 of the city’s venues and public spaces.

Presented by Dance4, the programme ranges from stage performances to exhibitions and interactive events. The programme includes Ultima Vez’s What the Body Does Not Remember, praised in the March 2015 issue of Dancing Times for its “game-playing… building and fracturing with fizzy assurance”. Rosemary Butcher’s exhibition Memory in the Present Tense runs throughout the festival, celebrating her work from 1976 to the present day. Butcher will also perform the UK premiere of Secrets of the Open Sea/Test Pieces and holding discussions.

Other highlights include Wendy Houstoun’s Stupid Women (originally performed as a tribute to the late Nigel Charnock’s Stupid Men) and Hetain Patel’s American Boy. Lucy Suggate’s Pilgrim moves through scores by electronic musician James Holden, while Nicole Beutler explores the suffering of fictional heroines in Songs.

Robert Clark’s Happiness Treatments (pictured) are one-to-one interactive performances. Attendees are treated as they would be in a spa, offered a drink and given a personal experience, chosen for them after a playful question at the time of booking.

For tickets and more information, visit www.dance4.co.uk.

Picture: The Happiness Treatments by Robert Clark. Photograph: Ludovic des Cognets

Zoe Anderson

Zoë was born in Edinburgh, and saw her first dance performances at the Festival there. She is the dance critic of The Independent, and has also written for The Independent on Sunday, The Scotsman and Dancing Times. In 2002, she received her doctorate from the University of York for a thesis on “Nationhood and epic romance: Ariosto, Sidney, Spenser”. She is the author of The Royal Ballet: 75 Years and The Ballet Lover’s Companion.