Review from the Guardian.

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<small>[ 08 February 2004, 04:37 AM: Message edited by: Stuart Sweeney ]</small>

Lost in transition
Ismene Brown for The Daily Telegraph reviews the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company currently touring


Choreographers suffer the same cycles and droughts as most creators, but, where an artist or writer can have a delusion in private and just throw the thing away when light dawns, the choreographer's stuck with showing the evidence.

I feel for Shobana Jeyasingh, whose fusion of her Indian classical training and London life has produced several dances that were stimulating, beautiful and unmistakably individual. Into cool, elegantly lit stagings that looked straight out of chic little art galleries, she set her gorgeous Indian women dancing that intricately decorative style of Bharata Natyam.

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Vicious circles
By Jann Parry for The Observer

Here's a sure sign of desperation in a choreographer: dancers running in circles. Here's another: running to electronic bleeps or, worse, to Mozart. Shobana Jeyasingh has taken her dancers down this route in Transtep, an 80-minute collage of so-called choreography now on tour.

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What's in the great big melting pot? Gloopy soup
By Jenny Gilbert for The Independent on Sunday

It may be tough making your name as an independent choreographer, but it's even tougher when you've made it. Like the proverbial second novel, and the fourth, and the twentieth, the challenge is not just to maintain the quality of previous work, but to innovate, keep your audience on its toes, pull surprises. Creating exquisite dances isn't enough.

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Transtep
By Donald Hutera for The Times


THE brainy, London-based choreographer Shobana Jeya-singh likes to flout dance conventions. When she invited a trio of less-established colleagues — Filip Van Huffel from Belgium, Lisa Torun from Sweden and the British-Asian Rashpal Singh Bansal — to make work for her company, she opted to blend their moves and hers into a single, continuous performance. The 80-minute touring experiment Transtep had its premiere in Brighton on Tuesday.

It’s an interesting idea, even if the overloaded outcome isn’t fully digestible in a single sitting. One way of approaching Transtep is to simply allow it to unspool before you.

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