Mysterious and haunting is this ballet called, Animal Park. It is choreographed by Tim Rushton and danced by the Danish Contemporary Dance Company. The music is by Biosphere and Craig Amstrong.
Tim Rushton is a British born Choreographer who was a graduate from the Royal Ballet School in London. He started his dance career with the Deutsche Oper am Rheim in Düsseldorf then continued for a few years with The Royal Danish Ballet, Denmark. It was there he found his calling as a choreographer and has since created works for all the major contemporary ballet companies in Europe. However, preferring to work on smaller scale, when the opportunity arouse, he became the artistic Director of the Danish Contemporary Dance Theatre. Although the company is a small one it has a roster of international dancers who are very strong highly skilled with rich artistic experience.
Rushtons’ Animal Park is a psychological commentary on human behavior in regards to the private desires that lie beneath the masks people wear. Rushton has mirrored the unmasked lives of human beings at their most vulnerable and private when they feel unobserved by the outside world. Feeling concealed by the dark haze they feel free to act out their narcisstic self-centeredness, at a cost, however. Animal Park shows the effects this unbridled behavior has on our selves and in relationships by the growing tensions, conflicts and drama that ensue through out the ballet.
In this excerpt, we see Animal Park takes place in a circular space filled with a shadowed mottled haze of smoke that gives the piece a dark, murky and mysterious ambience. The movement language is a fusion of classical and contemporary styles that is wrought with a raw athletic energy and kinetic force. The driving pulse in the music gives a claustrophobic underworld feeling in which the dancers mold, twist, drop, and lurch and propel themselves with risk and abandoned impulsive recklessness, in varying configurations.
This is a powerful piece with strong dancing that is exciting and rich with and expressive force.
Enjoy this voyeuristic foray into the mysterious underworld of the unmasked human psyche! And SHARE!
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