Dancin’ Oxford‘s 2025 Spring Dance Festival at the Pegasus Theatre, is one of the highlights of my Arts Photography calendar.
Moving With The Times featured dance performances by three outstanding artists; Vita Peach, Juan Sánchez Plaza and The Nomad Dance Collective, and Scarlett Perdereau.
The photographs below were taken 5 weeks before the show when I was privileged to attend a rehearsal of the performances whilst still in development. Although this was just a short insight to what the show would eventually become, I was so blown away by the experience that the first thing I did upon returning to the studio afterwards, was to book tickets for the actual show (which was last Saturday, 8th March, 2025).
Having photographed Vita’s performance of Hugo (dir. Tamsin Heatley) in 2023, I was so excited to see her back with this new show. Hugo had been so mesmerising and had left such a mark on me (I’m OK!) that I worried it was unbeatable. But I needn’t have – frankly I was sold after the teaser, but seeing the full show on Saturday night left me in no doubt that their collaboration makes for one of the most extraordinary storytelling forces in dance that I’ve photographed. Vita is mesmerising, totally enchanting and has the most uncanny ability to portray a perspective of the male psyche which is both caricature and entirely convincing, disturbing and hilarious.
With the bar set high, my nervous anticipation moved to the second piece, although again I needn’t have worried as what followed was a sumptuous and visual delight. Scarlett’s performance, set to a back projection which engulfed and embraced her throughout, was utterly entrancing. It felt like an organic exploration of the human spirit and left me in a deep sense of introspection about life and its constantly changing phases. I especially enjoyed revisiting the piece when I was post-producing the images but I guess this was inevitable considering the added visual component which I must say kept me on my toes from a technical perspective!
The show concluded with Juan and Isabel’s alluring and powerful duet – a thought provoking interpretation of the increasingly crazy world in which we find ourselves which challenges our beliefs and perspectives. It left me completely absorbed by the experience and on an absolute buzz, as was clearly the case with much of the rest of the audience who joined the dancers on stage to do the best thing that one can do when not knowing whether to laugh or cry – to just dance.
