fri 19/04/2024

I Don't Believe in Outer Space, The Forsythe Company, Sadler's Wells | reviews, news & interviews

I Don't Believe in Outer Space, The Forsythe Company, Sadler's Wells

I Don't Believe in Outer Space, The Forsythe Company, Sadler's Wells

An amusing one-woman comedy show in a crowd of freefall lunacy

I Don't Believe in Outer Space: brilliant comedic moments in long periods as mystifying as a zooSWT

An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, which is only on for two nights at Sadler's Wells, indicating that his old London muckers worry about this unpredictable man. Last night’s ovation indicates they shouldn't worry.

An audience favourite has a USP that fills the house as long as they maintain the suspense - with William Forsythe, it’s the quality Diaghilev prized: unpredictability. When he set out in Germany in the 1980s he evolved an extreme classical ballet. Just as people got used to his distortions, he went into conceptual theatre. Expected to be gnomic and abstract, he then did emotional dance-theatre about his young wife’s death. Now to comedy territory in I Don’t Believe in Outer Space, which is only on for two nights at Sadler's Wells, indicating that his old London muckers worry about this unpredictable man. Last night’s ovation indicates they shouldn't worry.

Forsythe’s second wife, Dana Caspersen, is a quite extraordinary performer, something between Jim Carrey in The Mask and Robin Williams's genie in Aladdin

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It becomes very clear re-watching the excerpt from "In the Middle.." that what was aminly extraordinary was not Forsythe's choreography but Guillem's amazing body and technique.

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