Never mind the wheelchairs
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Your support makes all the difference.CandoCo are back, performing Emilyn Claid's Across Your Heart at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. The show, to music by Stuart Jones, is about definitions of normality, its emphasis on raw physicality spilling over into sex, violence and darkness.
CandoCo are still most famous for mixing dancers with and without disabilities. They have worked hard against ideas of special pleading by emphasising theatricality and expression, and by commissioning works from leading choreographers. The result has won many awards, most recently the 1997 Prudential Award for the Arts. They are well established, very popular and delighted that the South Bank Centre's advertising no longer needs to mention disability: they have been accepted as simply another dance company, part of the mainstream.
Except, of course, that we're still harping on the wheelchairs (above). They may be able to leave it out of the advertising, but it creeps back into any discussion of the company. Which is hardly surprising, when you think about it: dance is about movement, and performers of impaired mobility may always cause some double-taking. Their shows always deal, on some level, with responses to disability. Company founder Adam Benjamin points out that audiences don't pay to watch dancers playing it safe, and he's right. Across Your Heart is full of emotional as well as physical risks. (QEH, SE1, 0171 921 4242, Fri & Sat.)
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