Rambert Dance Company: Awakenings, Lyric Theatre, The Lowry

Price from: £13.50

Opening Times: 22/09/2010 - 24/09/2010

Category: Dance & Ballet .

Rambert Dance Company: Awakenings

Rambert Dance Company, Britain’s national contemporary dance company, presents an evening of imaginative, ambitious and high quality dance including a world premiere performance of exciting new work Awakenings.

This new production is an interpretation of Dr Oliver Sacks’ book of the same name, made famous by the 1990 Hollywood film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, which presented the company with a very interesting challenge; how do you create a dynamic dance work when ‘sleeping sickness’ lies at the heart of the story?

After the flu panemic of 1918, a mysterious sleeping sickness affected around 5 million people, and many of the survivors were left in a catatonic state, virtually frozen for decades. In 1969, Dr Sacks, then a young doctor in New York, encountered a few dozen of these survivors and gave them an experimental drug which enabled many of them to ‘awaken’ after 50 years of immobility.

Dr Sacks explains how important music was in the process for these patients; "Awakenings, the book, is partly about the delight of free and unfettered movement, contrasted with frozenness, the interrupted or distorted tempos that these deeply parkinsonian patients faced. They often moved, in body and mind, too fast or too slow, losing the musicality of normal movement, speech, or even thought. They often had complex, uncontrollable tics. Often music and dance were the only ways to restore to them a normal, fluid ‘kinetic melody'."

A collaboration between theatrical choreographer Aletta Collins and celebrated American composer Tobias Picker, Awakenings is a beautiful piece of dance full of high emotion, energy and drama.

Christopher Bruce’s award-winning and uplifting Hush and Merce Cunningham’s 1960s piece, with set design by Andy Warhol, RainForest, complete the bill.

With 22 of the world’s finest dancers and incredible live music from the Rambert Orchestra, the company continues to be at the very heart of British dance.

‘Where contemporary dance is concerned, Rambert sets the standard for quality and diversity.’ - The Times