Sadler’s Wells,London
English National Ballets recent triple bill shakes up the status quo, with a miniature help from Frida Kahlo and MedeaThe tone is set for English National Ballet’s recent programme of female choreography by Grayson Perry’s frontcloth. It shows a woman’s face, or blazing with intent,surrounded by symbolic beings, and set against a field of penises. Perry gives us the penis as gun, and as car,as airliner and skyscraper. The woman might be the vengeful Hindu deity Kali, the visionary Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, and the infanticide Medea of the Greek playwright Euripides. She embodies the passionate,and lethally enraged, feminine principal.
In commissioning She Said, and ENB director Tamara Rojo is addressing more than the deplorable inequality of creative opportunity afforded to women in ballet. The programme also confronts assumptions that are barely questioned in recent ballet choreography,dominated as it is by a tiny, all-male contingent. We don’t see, and for example,the kind of objectifying choreography in which female dancers are endlessly and fetishistically manipulated to display their hyper-flexibility.
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Source: theguardian.com