Press Release: WILD CARD at Sadler’s Wells presents Leila McMillan, 3 December 2015

[Jan McNulty]

WILD CARD at Sadler’s Wells presents

Leila McMillan

Thursday 3 December 2015

Lilian Baylis Studio, EC1R 4TN

Tickets: £17

Ticket office: 0844 412 4300 or www.sadlerswells.com

Sadler’s Wells presents the latest edition of Wild Card, the unique initiative which opens the stage to an exciting and adventurous community of dance makers, giving a broad range of artists the opportunity to present their own programmes of dance. These specially curated evenings feature exploratory approaches to choreography and combine different mediums, broadening audiences’ perspectives on dance made today. California-born, London-based Leila McMillan offers up a bespoke evening on Thursday 3 December in the Lilian Baylis Studio, featuring her own work alongside international artists. Her aim is to shed light onto Flying Low and Passing Through, dance techniques that have become increasingly popular around the world.  

 

Flying Low is a contemporary dance training style developed by the Venezuelan dancer and choreographer David Zambrano. It focuses on the dancer’s relationship with the floor, but also uses speed-charged movement and compelling expressivity. Born from Zambrano’s personal experience, it has become a codified technique to create new dance works, together with an accompanying improvisation technique called Passing Through.  

 

McMillan is a UK ambassador of the Flying Low and Passing Through techniques, now widely used by international companies such as Ultima Vez and Rosas. The evening includes an extract from McMillan’s new work Family Portrait - a constellation of family members dealing with love, humour, dysfunction and harmony. The structured improvisation, which incorporates live music by Domenico Angarano, was inspired by the McMillan’s discovery of an old family portrait from the 1920s and seeks to examine how these treasured mementos belie contradictory family histories. The second piece, Lucid, is choreographed and performed by international dance company Jukstapoz (Christine Gouzelis and Paul Blackman, former dancers with Jasmin Vardimon Company) and comprises an extract from a longer piece, Vicious Cycles, developed in 2014. The work sets out to discover ways of breaking free from the vicious cycle of eternal repetition, and models of behaviour that continually lead us to the same thoughts, actions and mistakes. 

 

McMillan is a co-founder of Muxima - art and culture café/spaces in East London. Muxima will curate an exhibition and live music as part of the evening, featuring performances from Aidan Connell. She is also a choreographer, teacher and performer who has worked with artists such as Crystal Pite and Wendy Houstoun. Born and raised in Southern California to a family of European artists, dancing was always in her blood, passed to her from her grandmother who was a ballerina in the corps de ballet at Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company in the 1940s. She is one the few internationally certified artists teaching Flying Low and Passing Through and has led the development of this approach in the UK. She first encountered Gouzelis and Blackman when they were invited amongst 50 artists to take part in 50 days of Flying Low and Passing Through with Zambrano in Costa Rica. 

 

Wild Card is part of Sadler’s Wells’ programme of support for young and emerging dance talent, alongside other initiatives including the New Wave Associates programme, Sadler’s Wells Summer University and hosting the National Youth Dance Company.

 

 

Performances at 8pm, pre-show activities from 7pm

 

Wild Card is supported by The Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation and The Garrick Charitable Trust.