The Gulbenkian Arts Centre of the University of Kent hosts the UK Premiere of Dewey Dell’s latest creation, their unique take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, in a programme that also features a celebrated earlier work, Deriva Traversa.
The two choreographies are staged one after the other on the evenings of 28 and 29 September (7:30pm), and the audience will have the opportunity to meet the company in a Q&A after the show on the 28th.
In the previous days (September 26), the company conducts a workshop for the students of the Theatre department of the University of Kent, of which the Gulbenkian Arts Center is part.


Deriva Traversa
The solitude of the shepherds is a constituent aspect of their work. Solitude allows a profound immersion into the self, a delicate movement away from the visible. Sounds become absorbed into the silence, thoughts swell freely inside the mind. The animals being guarded are the only possibility to abstract yourself, to address your attention to.
When shepherds sing, they use the wind, the bleating of the sheep or the bellow of the cow to tune themselves. The Sardinian Cantu a Tenores – believed to be created by shepherds during the Nuragic age – has been imitating these very elements. Through singing poetry, the shepherds pass down history orally, generation after generation.
The resurgence of time though, does not forget the actual reality, it just moves away from the visible world again.
The story that the shepherds sing could be interpreted as an attempt to decipher the invisible, possible only through a descent into the self, a geography of the supernatural.
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Le Sacre du Printemps
In every metamorphosis and profound change of a human life, death is always by the side of life, appearing as a rite of passage or as an inward revolution.
In the animal and plant kingdom the coexistence of life and death becomes even more literal: death is often part of the fecundation process and life swarms on decomposed carcasses. Especially among insects, seeds, and molds, death is a welcoming presence; death is an invitation to life. The cyclic regeneration of the seasons and of the fertility of the soil are not a linear journey, but a chaotic disruption of all the elements together. Spring is a time of great agitation and the terror of existing is forever blended with the sidereal joy of being.
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