Birmingham Royal Ballet student curates lockdown video
A Birmingham Royal Ballet dancer has created a film to help students process their lockdown experience.
Brandon Lawrence, Principal Dancer with Birmingham Royal Ballet (BRB), created a choreography challenge in partnership with bbodance earlier this summer.
One hundred and fifty one students from the UK, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Kuwait, and Canada answered the question, 'what does lockdown mean to you?', by choreographing a dance to an original score commissioned from the award-winning composer, Andrew Kristy.
Their work was assessed by Brandon Lawrence, Julie Bowers, the bbodance director of artistic development, and BRB's former artistic director, Sir David Bintley, CBE.
The internationally acclaimed choreographer also chose the overall winner of the challenge, Fraya Cowan, aged 11, a student of Emily Jade Theatre Arts school in London.
Following the assessment, Brandon chose clips from all the dances entered into the challenge and edited them together to an extended version of the score entitled Pandemisis — the start, lockdown, hope.
"I’m humbled to have had the opportunity to deliver this event alongside bbodance," Brandon stated.
"I’m very grateful to Julie Bowers, Andrew Kristy, Dansez, and Sir David Bintley, as well as each and every dancer who should be proud of their contribution. Bravo."
Sir David Bintley added: "I thoroughly enjoyed watching all of the students and their responses to the challenge of making dance during lockdown.
"The ingenuity and inventiveness of young minds exploring the limits of their imaginations as well as the limits of their kitchens, living rooms, backyards, and gardens was both exciting and entertaining, but the piece that really captured the Covid zeitgeist for me was Fraya Cowen’s Lockdown.
"Beautiful, beautifully conceived, and touchingly simple."
