Choreographers Sarah Warsop (Siobhan Davies Dance Company member) and Joanne Fong (Arc Dance Company member) have got together to produce Snag Project. They go live tonite at 9pm (London Time GMT+1)on their chat page to discuss how the project is going so far. This week they are in Ipswich, leading daily class for the local professional dancers and taking three workshops based on the 2 choreographies they are currently working on, and a solo made previously by Sarah for Elizabeth Old and performed by her during Rambert Dance Company's tour of China.
The webaddress is www.danceservice.co.uk/snag
There is lots of background info about the project on the website. Hope you can join us
Cath James

<small>[ 10 February 2003, 04:07 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Thanks for this information Cath. I've copied the performance diary here:<P><B>Women's Voices; Manic Lives</B> <BR> <BR>Clore Studio... Royal Opera House...3rd November 8pm<P> <BR> <BR>Taking Risks Festival...Swindon Town Hall.... 9th November 8pm<P> <BR> <P>Bonnie Bird Theatre.. Laban Centre London .........February 2002<P>If you get the chance do go and see these performances. They feature some of the best dancers in any style performing currently in the UK.<P> <BR> <p>[This message has been edited by Stuart Sweeney (edited August 08, 2001).]

Well, press releases often go in for hyperbole, but in this case it's an understatement. They say, 'Four of the UK’s best contemporary dancers.....,' but in fact they are four of the UK's best dancers in any style. Do go and see them if you possibly can.

Press Release

Four of the UK’s best contemporary dancers present the final London performance of Women’s Voices, Manic Lives

Snag Project are at Greenwich Dance Agency on Friday 7 June

Four of the UK's best-known dancers bring their quirky talents and outstanding abilities to Greenwich Dance Agency on Friday 7 June at 7.30pm. Snag Project presents Women's Voices: Manic Lives, a dance and music event that explores life, love.....and snags.

Snag Project are Joanne Fong, Catherine James, Sonja Peedo and Sarah Warsop whose combined credits include Rambert Dance Company, Siobhan Davies Dance Company, Arc and Jeremy James and Company.

Women’s Voices, Manic Lives is made up of five works - three solos, two duets - by company choreographers, Sarah Warsop and Joanne Fong. In Warsop’s Flap, she is joined on stage by award-winning guitarist Abigail James playing a commissioned score by Peter Wyer. Warsop’s Small Hours is a solo from the Rambert Dance Company repertoire. Originally created during a workshop season for Elizabeth Old, it has been restaged for Snag with Elizabeth Old recreating her original interpretations. Joanne Fong’s Allow Me has a commissioned soundscore by Luke Anthony.

Khalil Gibran's The Prophet was the starting point for the duets, Orange Gina and Sleep Talking. Warsop’s Orange Gina is danced to music by Nitin Sawhney and John Oswald while Fong’s Sleep Talking has a commissioned score, again by Luke Anthony.

As part of Women’s Voices, Manic Lives, the Snag Website features weekly video and text diaries of the choreographic and rehearsal process. Get the Snag background and talk to the artists at the Snag Obsessions Centre at www.snagproject.com

7.30 pm
gDA
Greenwich Borough Hall
Royal Hill
Greenwich SE10




[This message has been edited by Stuart Sweeney (edited June 02, 2002).]

<small>[ 14 February 2003, 06:39 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Snag
By Judith Mackrell for The Guardian


Joanne Fong and Sarah Warsop are two of the smartest dancers in Britain. Their bodies are superbly alert to the subtlest choreographic nuance, while being powered by thrilling bolts of energy. And, at the same time, they inspire genuine curiosity about what's going through their minds.

As choreographers, though, they aren't sufficiently experienced to give themselves forceful reasons for being on stage. Snag, a mixed programme of their own work, sounds terrific on paper. Fong and Warsop have signed up three impressive dancers (Pari Naderi, Diana Loosemore and Catherine James) and the way the group interact is a lesson in collaborative stage chemistry. The women are minutely sensitive to each other's moves, and details in their joint performances are breath-taking. It's just the works themselves that don't add up.

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Snag
by Donald Hutera for The Times


SNAG is a young company formed by the dancers Joanne Fong and Sarah Warsop as a platform for their own contrasting choreography. Clearly Fong, whose work comprised the first half of this Queen Elizabeth Hall evening, feels compelled to investigate the muddy terrain between movement, speech, emotion and character. Sleep Talking found Warsop and Pari Naderi rolling and stretching in a state of stylised restlessness. Fong also had them uttering fragmentary phrases, as if talking in their sleep. Good dancers, inconclusive exercise.

For the scatty quintet Lonely Hearts, Suspicious Minds, Luke Anthony’s piano renditions of Elvis Presley standards competed with recordings by the King himself. Here Fong presumably meant ironically to illuminate insecurities within the female psyche. Unfortunately, scant choreography and twitchy, self-indulgent performances by Warsop, Naderi, Catherine James, Diana Loosmore and Fong herself continually clouded her intentions.

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Nice dance, but why the DJ?
By Nadine Meisner for The Independent

A line-up of five of this country's best dancers performing each other's work, Snag not only communicate a pleasing sense of community, but also produces the slight frisson, rather like a heavy metal all-women rock band, that comes from a display of female independence. As a title, though, Snag may have originated as a brilliantly resonant idea in somebody's mind, but its meaning is obscure to the rest of us. It invites instead the kind of predictable puns that will have readers of this piece groaning. (You have been warned.)

If only the physical allure and excellence of the dancers had been matched by the choreographers Joanne Fong and Sarah Warsop. As creators of the five items that made up this mixed programme, each presented a premiere and it was with these two, ambitiously sized, lengthy company pieces, that things went most seriously adrift.

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