Three days to go and open for business on Saturday 4 September!

It’s ‘all hands on deck’ today and everything around us is being dismantled and moved to the new dance centre and offices. But it’s also ‘business as usual’ as we prepare for our Annual Review Meeting with Arts Council next Monday, deal with invoices and payments and plan for the next season – Alvin Ailey II coming from New York in March and a French/ South Asian Festival to plan for in the Spring. It’s a beautiful sunny day here and there are still lots of visitors enjoying the beach and the sea. Let’s hope they enjoy the dance centre opening on Saturday too.
One of the most thrilling things for me is opening boxes of new flyers as they arrive from the printers: this time it’s the Up Close season and they look wonderful – really doing justice to this cutting-edge season of dance programmed by Eckhard Thiemann. Take a look at the DSW website for details of the programme with world premieres by Ben Wright and Jonah Bokaer and fascinating work from German artists Caroline Simon and SilkeZ collective. We also show Angela Praed’s production The Bed – an all-nighter where you can bring your sleeping bag and watch an all night duet, or doze and wonder if it was all a dream and whether you really are in the Ocean Room at Pavilion Dance, instead of being tucked up at home.
Eckhard’s programming for us has been extraordinary. He’s chosen to curate clusters of work that the audience can take in over a weekend so that the experience builds in layers, rather than a one-off experience. Some of the events we programme are free and this is a deliberate strategy that eases new audiences into their first experience of dance.My quote of the day:
‘Great outpourings of expressive feeling are not relevant to making art. Much more so is the simple and complex fact of how you group things together.’
Briony Fer in Eva Hesse: Studiowork.

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