I love contemporary dance, and have long wanted to collaborate on a new dance piece. So now I’m very excited to be doing just that. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing a piece with choreographer Susie Crow, from Ballet in Small Spaces, and the excellent dancers of Cambridge Contemporary Dance. The inspiration for our piece is the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Purgatory. We’re still looking for a title – the word purgatory itself has a fusty sound and doesn’t exactly make the heart leap… – but the ideas, of persistence, movement, striving, transformation, redemption, certainly have great resonance today as much as ever.
The piece will be performed in Robinson College on Saturday April 25th as part of an exciting new collaborative venture imaginatively put together by Robin Kirkpatrick, a great Dante enthusiast and a distinguished poet and translator. The whole evening will comprise a multitude of new pieces drawing together film-makers, actors, musicians, dancers, composers, poets, choreographers, painters and sculptors. Our piece will trace a spiralling and rising progression which music and dance will literally work their way across a wide lateral space, in a process of catharsis and fulfilment.
Jeremy Thurlow - composer 