Press
SURGE
“Jemima Brown excels in a cleverly assembled, four-way collaboration between choreographer, dancer, music and design…Dale’s contemporary choreography absorbs elements from hip-hop, popping and the looseness and bounce of house dance, as if torsos are tossed in the air…Dale and his dancers have a style that’s distinct…”
(Lyndsey Winship)
★★★★
GUARDIAN
SURGE
“…immersive, genre-busting, dazzling, ingenious, thought-provoking – a big thumbs-up to the digital revolution.
Tom Dale is something of a rarity in setting his entire focus on digital interaction, seeking out specialists in digital projection and digitally generated music to collaborate with on equal terms…I can say with conviction that I’ve never seen anything like Surge. At first, it’s all about pattern, as six white hexagons trip the light fantastic around the floor like waltzing debutantes. Then Jemima Brown appears, a buzz-cut androgyne in dazzling white athletic gear, a stripe of warpaint bisecting her face from brow to chin. At one point the floor appears to tilt as well as spin, to the extent that we lose our sense of where the floor is, and the lone human figure’s relation to it.
Sub:Version is a sequence of dance sketches with a more clubby, hypnotic feel…the apparently tireless Brown is joined by three other dancers moving, often in impressive sync, to ambient music from a recent album by WEN.
How good it is that, for once, small regional theatres will have the chance of seeing such leading-edge excellence. All power (and help with the electric bills) to Tom Dale and his crew.” (Jenny Gilbert)
★★★★★
THE ART DESK
SURGE
“Any performance starring Jemima Brown is off to a great start in my book! This young dancer has such an extraordinary and diverse movement quality: silky smooth and dreamy on the one hand, angular and staccato on the other.
Her solo performance in Surge was all the more excellent due to Barret Hodgson’s astonishing light show…it was the Blackpool Illuminations and Olympic Closing Ceremony shrunk into the capsule size of The Place’s intimate theatre. Optical illusions had Brown surfing on a raft; she teetered on a pile of tiles; and slipped serenely through breaking rectangles of ground as if dancing through a cemetery full of open graves.
Great credit is due to Tom Dale for continuing his fascinating exploration of the potential for placing dance in the centre of new digital and electronic, visual and aural experiences. He’s not the only creative artist intent on integrating these multi-media elements but no-one is doing it with such consistent invention.”
(Graham Watts)
BACHTRACK
I Infinite
“As walls made of light slice through the space, the audience can’t resist putting their hands into these nonexistent boundaries as though there might be something to grab hold of.
This relationship between the performer and the projected environment is immaculate and by allowing the audience to wander, each individual is free to choose their own viewpoint and take what they want from this enchanting piece.” ★★★★
What’s On Stage
“A supremely powerful dance piece with a single performer, a dark space, a lot of hazy water vapour and some incredible projection mapping. It’s ominous, it’s beautiful and it’s a sublime union of the power of corporeal movement and technology.”
It’s Nice That
“The freshest work presented on the festival’s first day.”
New Scientist coverage of Frequency Festival, Lincoln
“Much more than just contemporary dance, you’ll be encased within a digital cube, and asked to roam around as the solo performer reacts to his changing digital landscape.
There’s a real harmony between the performer’s choreography and the graphics, a highlight being when he rocks, spins and tips a projected grid on the floor, as if he’s balancing on a piece of debris in space. While the instructions for the audience are to roam around the room to get the most out of the performance, it was quite easy to stand transfixed.”
Design Week
“Dance music, art and design clash in a mesmerisng performance piece choreographed by Tom Dale. A beautiful and sublime experience.”
Fused Magazine
SUB:VERSION
“Tom Dale’s double bill at the Place was dominated by his star, Jemima Brown…in ‘Surge’ Brown is at first a CGI lay figure, jerking robotically to life, swooping into lead boot backbends, changing direction with mercurial ease…Barret Hodgson’s dazzling projections dance with the performer…her every movement draws the eye. You would watch her fold laundry, mix a cocktail, creosote a fence. Brava and – soon please – encore.”(Louise Levene)
★★★★
THE FINANCIAL TIMES
SUB:VERSION
“Tom Dale Company’s latest double bill at the Place marries dance and technology to dazzling effect…
“Tom Dale’s passion for technology is well known and has increasingly informed his dance creations. In that, he stands with a number of contemporary choreographers. Where Tom Dale stands out, though, is in ensuring that dance is never subservient to the technological devices employed. Surge relies on artist and digital projection specialist Barret Hodgson to create a digital counterpart to its human dancer, the utterly compelling Jemima Brown…Sub:Version is a celebration of dance itself deceptively simple but meticulously assembled and performed by a group of dancers perfectly attuned to Tom Dale’s vision.” (Teresa Guerriro)
★★★★
CULTURE WHISPER
SUB:VERSION
“Surge, directed by Tom Dale, features Brown as an extraordinary robotic presence amidst Barret Hodgson’s dazzling digital landscape with sensational new music by ITAL TEK. The immersive aspect of the work celebrates digital sophistication and Brown’s extensive capabilities as a dancer.
Dale’s choreography is demandingly complex and requires stamina and edge together with loose-limbed softness. Whether spinning on the vertical, or horizontal on the ground they work with depth and volume into the space, appearing weightless yet grounded. It’s exciting to see these young dancers literally floating through the heady ambient setting of Sub:Version.”
DANCE ART JOURNAL
Digitopia
“Tom Dale has for some time been working steadily to harness dance to the latest advances in audiovisual technology. The British choreographer’s newest touring production is a consistently engaging, handsomely designed attempt to explore the capabilities of digital media for young audiences.” ★★★★
Donald Hutera, The Times
“This was just SO good! Such sophisticated dance and light effects need not be exclusively for children and there were plenty of adults too enjoying this extraordinary show.” ★★★★★
Andrew Connal, The Latest
“Digitopia is a mark of the 21st Century, a beacon as to what theatre could look like in decades to come. Tom Dale‘s choreography is a thing of genius. Aesthetically astounding. Digitopia leaves me with snapshots that I’ll remember for years to come.” ★★★★
Lucy Basaba, Theatre Full Stop
“A beautiful production. Innovative, well crafted, unique and had a gorgeous soundtrack to boot.”
Left Lion
“I haven’t watched many dance performances before and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it.
To me it was like dancing in space with epic light effects and made 3D patterns.
My favourite part of the show was the special effects. My favourite one was a black wall using lasers to create a blue man and the music went so well with the effect.
I would say that any aged child would be very happy to watch the show.”
Joe, a young audience member
Refugees of the
Lost Heart
“Somehow that old Joni Mitchell line, ‘we are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’ comes to mind as the final section of Tom Dale’s Refugees of the Lost Heart blazes across the stage. Digital projections explode in bursts of white light, dancers erupt in high-energy dashes where their bodies are washed by the dynamic imagery, making them part of a universe beyond our current earth-consuming way of life.
That driven rat-race had dappled the slickly brisk dancers with feverish, flickering frames of stock-market number-crunching and before that, the opening scenes had filled the space with a glorious, primal outpouring of tribal awakenings overlaid with the emerging starscapes of a cosmos that is, like Dale’s dancers, never static.
It’s an epic concept, inspired by (and using) music by Shackleton. And though the projections lapping over the geometric shapes of the set are quite fabulous, what really shines are the dancers in a choreography of palpably fierce physicality.” ★★★★
Mary Brenan, The Herald
“Breathtaking, enveloping visuals and live projection. Six impressive dancers flit and fall between the light, sound and all-encompassing graphics as the world evolves and ruptures around them. Never getting lost in the overwhelming visuals, the performers create between them subtle moments of stillness, slick, fluid movement and fantastic flashes of character in a multifaceted piece. A wonderful watch, and highly recommended.” ★★★★★
Three Weeks, Edinburgh
“A brilliant piece of dance theatre. Tom Dale is clearly a choreographer who knows how to convey an abstract narrative through movement and dance and the use of digital media complements the dancers, creating an immersive experience that is visually stunning.” ★★★★
Broadway Baby
“Full-on, fast-paced, exciting contemporary dance, perfectly contained within a visually stunning set, and driven along by Shackleton’s ever-changing score. At turns frenetic, contemplative and joyful.” ★★★★
The Scotsman
“Hats off to Tom Dale…. I would have thought that any choreographer working on such an epic scale – it’s the encounter of man with the universe, damn it! – would be doomed to appear woefully inadequate, recklessly vainglorious; probably both. But Refugees of the Lost Heart catches its audience and keeps us, and I think it’s telling that it reminded me less of dance than of film and music. Refugees of the Lost Heart is not a dance performance, it’s a choreographic concept album. ”
Sanjoy Roy, London Dance
Rise
“Choreographer Tom Dale’s intensely beguiling work sucks the breath right out of you and glues you to your seat with its flawless technical display and continuously inventive choreography…
Taking inspiration from leftfield electronica and IDM, the soundtrack is a crackling onslaught of glitched out break beats from the likes of Aphex Twin and Susumu Yokota.” ★★★★
Neil Brabant, Three Weeks
“A contemporary dance language with the odd hip-hop move and touch of balletic grace, creating a fluidity of movement that holds you in its grasp…” ★★★★
The Scotsman
“Tom Dale’s RISE is a treat, then, thanks to its focus on beautifully choreographed, well-executed dance… some of the most dynamic and occasionally menacing choreography you’re likely to see on the Fringe.” ★★★★
Chitra Ramaswamy, Scotland on Sunday
“If I have to think of one single phrase that sums up Tom Dale’s Rise, I would say that it is the mesmerising fluidity transporting wave upon wave of evocation and assuring cohesion of the various styles of movement.
Rise is at one and the same time exhilaratingly beautiful and simmering with danger.
Rise should delight audiences of all ages, but equally it should be given funding to tour to places where contemporary dance is never seen, because it has the potential to engage new audiences and draw in young people in challenging new ways.” ★★★★
Jackie Fletcher, British Theatre Guide (website)
“Described in Pulse programme as uncompromising, edgy and exhilarating, Rise was all those things and more.
Inspired by the claustrophobic, cabin fevered nature of society where human behaviour is shaped and moulded by institutions, this inventive, mesmerising piece of contemporary dance was a joy to behold.
Five young dancers, three male and two female, all had their roles to play both singly and collectively.
Their athleticism was extraordinary, as was the preciseness of the unique and unusual movements, all designed to convey the theme of feeling ‘boxed in’.
Katy Evans, East Anglian Daily Times
