La Rosa, South Africa’s premier Spanish Dance Company will present Bernarda, a fusion of Flamenco dance, Asian aesthetic and heightened theatricality in five performances in Centenary Halll.
La Rosa, South Africa’s premier Spanish Dance Company will present Bernarda, a fusion of Flamenco dance, Asian aesthetic and heightened theatricality in five performances in Centenary Halll.
The production was commissioned by the Gordon Institute for the Performing and Creative Arts and was staged as The House of Bernarda Alba at the Institute’s Directors and Directing conference in July 2011.
The debut proved a significant achievement and the subsequent run of Bernarda in November was part of the collaborators’ commitment to bring the work to a wider audience. One critic remarked that this is the kind of work that the international arts community should see: It is of the highest quality and yet could have been born nowhere else but the Western Cape (Clare Stopford, a delegate at the conference).
La Rosa Company Dancers, featuring guest artist Rosana Maya in the title role and renowned actor Andrew Laubscher, take to the boards with butoh-like precision to give a passionate dance-theatre exploration of Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba.
The poetic drama is re-visioned by collaborators Geoffrey Hyland, a well-known theatre director, and Carolyn Holden, a Spanish Dance Choreographer and the Artistic Director of La Rosa, in a production which subverts conventional artistic boundaries and deconstructs the traditional Spanish dance idiom.
In an experimental fusion of Flamenco dance, Asian aesthetic and heightened theatricality, Bernarda explores the unappeasable longing of the individual pitted against the will of an oppressive society. Grief, rage, repression and wilful joy find ardent articulation in this compact emotional and fiery epic.
Hyland and Holden first collaborated with choreographer Adele Blank in 2005 on Lorca’s Blood Wedding, performed by La Rosa in Cape Town, Johannesburg, the Absa KKNK Festival and at the Oude Libertas Amphitheatre in Stellenbosch. It has long been a dream to take that initial exploration even further and the result is this production of Bernarda.
This production has been made possible with the support of the National Lotteries Distribution Trust Fund and the Gordon Institute of Performing and Creative Arts. La Rosa is also supported by National Arts Council, the Nussbaum Foundation, Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sports, the City of Cape Town and The Foschini Group.
The company La Rosa was established by Carolyn Holden in Cape Town in 1990 and is South Africa’s premier professional Spanish performance company, teaching and training Spanish dance at community, school, tertiary and recreational levels.
The Company continues to build and grow its success in empowering skilled dancers and teachers in the performance and teaching of Spanish dance and theatre. In 1997 La Rosa established its education and skills development programmes, focusing on making flamenco accessible to the youth, developing the artistic and technical skills of potential professionals and growing audiences across the broader socio-economic spectrum.
Flamenco has recently been acknowledged by Unesco as a World Intangible Heritage and La Rosa’s work in South Africa over the past two decades has contributed to making this rich art form a staple of the South African cultural landscape. The choreographer Carolyn Holden was amongst the nominees for Best Choreographer of a Contemporary Piece at the FNB Vita's Dance Umbrella in 1995, 1997, 1998 and was the winner for Best Choreography for the 1999/2000 year for Flamenco en Curso.
She began her studies with Mavis Becker and Clive Bain, in South Africa, and has continued her studies in Spain on a number of occasions, sometimes accompanied by her students. The wide range of teachers with whom she has studied in Madrid and Seville includes Mercedes León, Jorge Sanches Arnas, Maria Magdalena, Ciro, Carmela Greco, La Tati, Pedro Azorín, Javier Cruz, Manolo Marín, Maria Angeles Gabaldon, Eva la Yerbabuena, Belén Maya, La China and La Truco.
Spaniards who have worked with the company since 1996 include Carlos Rodrigues and Angel Rojas of Nuevo Baile Español, Javier Cruz and Joaquin Ruiz. The director Geoffrey Hyland is an Associate Professor (BA UOVS, HDE, BA (Hons) Cape Town, MFA York) and second-year Theatre and Performance course co-ordinator at the University of Cape Town.
He directs theatre, opera and dance professionally and teaches across a range of courses, with particular interest in directing, acting for stage and camera, and design. His special focus lies in the staging of gender and sexual politics in theatrical productions and directing Shakespeare.
Hyland has taught in Canada and the US and is an Associate Teacher at the Professional Actors Lab, Toronto, Canada. His awards include the Fleur du Cap for Young Directors, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama, Kanna Awards for Best Dance Production and Best Technical and Fleur du Cap, Vita and Kanna Award nominations for Best Director.
La Rosa Dance Company's Fringe production, Bernarda, is in the Centenary Hall on Tuesday 3 July at 7.30pm; Wednesday 4 July at 6pm; Thursday 5 July at 10pm; Friday 6 July at 6pm and Saturday 7 July at 10am. Bookings through Computicket
