Choreographer: Dollie Henry
Musical Director: Paul Jenkins
An anthology of greatest hits from Body of People Jazz Theatre Company (BOP), Jazz Conversations is an interesting mix of music and dance styles, placing jazz in direct relationships with ballet, Latin and even hip hop as well as contemporary dance while musical composition mixes some pieces composed especially for BOP performances and, in a dedicated second half, to the music of Miles Davis. An eclectic evening of dances created between 2011 and this year, as well as music covering a century of jazz, Dollie Henry and Paul Jenkins’ company celebrates this vast and highly responsive form.
The first half of this 90-minute show is entitled ‘Footprints of Jazz’, opening with a young but significant company of performers from Impact Dance with a hip-hop piece full of great synchronicity and a strong dynamic that focuses on the flow of movement and transfer of energy. The five numbers that follow, performed by the BOP dancers, are diverse in inspiration, the stronger pieces, like the also titled Footprints in Jazz choreographed by Henry in 2011, draw on the African roots of the form for an atmospheric group number centered in power, freedom and worshipful gestures.
There is also a particularly strong solo segment in the first act, Tapestry of Life, performed by Nafisah Baba, who features prominently in several of the dances. Its Middle Eastern tones and narrative about the “dance of life” are filled with emotive storytelling as Baba uses her back stretched to present to the audience. Baba also features in an important second-act solo, this time delivering a haunting flamenco from David and Gil Evans’ album Sketches of Spain that thrums with yearning.
If the first half of Jazz Conversation is let down by a couple of overly sentimental pieces, then the second is an outstanding corrective, focusing entirely on the range and genius of Davis’ music. Narrating aspects of his career between numbers along with interviews, there is a fantastic balance between choreographed performance and space for Jenkins’ superb live jazz band to just play Davis’ wonderfully wide-ranging compositions from different eras. Four and Seven Steps to Heaven are superb opportunities for The Bop Jazz Ensemble – Rob Barron, Jihad Darwish, Noah Ojumu, Tyrone Stuart, Joel Rocca and Elias Atkinson – to rightly steal focus from the dancers.
Henry’s choreography is impressive here, too, sensitively responding to the tones in Davis’ music, particularly in the romantic Flamenco Sketches danced by Baba and Oraine Frater as an artist and his lover-muse which is full of vulnerability, and later the equally charming The Man I Love, performed by Ilaria Breschi and Bafana Solomon Matea, uses a base of rhumba to depict a romantic date night between a couple who only have eyes for each other. But we also see the lighter, bouncier side of Davis’ work in the opener, All Blues, which creates an effortless flow of dancers leaving and rejoining the action with Hollywood flair while the finger-clicking So What! and Milestones deliver on late 1950s cool.
An exciting evening of music and dance fusion, Jazz Conversations will transport you around the world as it draws on performance styles and steps from lots of genres; it will take you into the past and show you the future with the young company, and leave you in the heady jazz clubs of the 1940s and 50s with the sounds of Miles Davis to see you home.
Runs until 21 September 2024
