This is what Akram had to say about his latest production:

Vertical Road also features two IDFB 2010 veterans – Ahmed Khemis and Salah El Brogy, who were involved in our Outspoken Weekend with their solo works.

We caught up with Salah and here are his thoughts on his Vertical Road journey so far:

To watch the Arabic version, click here.

Ahmed shares his Vertical Road experience:

To watch the French version, click here.

Vertical Road is Khan’s first ensemble work since the critically acclaimed bahok in 2008. The performance is inspired by the idea of vertical ascension – a common motif in several different religions, and the journey that the soul takes after death. These ideas will be explored in a ground-breaking work of contemporary dance, choreographed by Khan and performed by eight hand-picked world-class dancers from across Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Performances at the Curve Theatre in Leicester will be between 14-18 September with the world premiere on 16 September. Tickets start from £8.25.

On 5 September, there are two workshops being held at the Curve. Workshop 1 (11am-1pm) will be a masterclass for experienced dance practitioners and Workshop 2 (2-4pm) will be aimed at experienced dance students. To book tickets or workshops, call the ticket office on 0116 242 3595.

The Leicester performances kick off the Vertical Road tour – the dates are below:
29 Sep – 2 October 2010: Geblasehalle, Duisburg (Ruhrtriennale Festival), Germany
5 – 9 Oct 2010: Sadler’s Wells, London, UK
19 – 23 Oct 2010: The CUB Malthouse, Merlyn Theatre, Melbourne (Melbourne International Arts Festival), Australia
28 Oct 2010: Brighton Dome, Brighton, UK
11 – 12 Nov 2010: Halle Kalk, Cologne, Germany
15 – 16 Nov 2010: Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea, UK
19 – 20 Nov 2010: DanceEast, Snape Maltings, UK
24 Nov 2010: Nuovo Teatro Comunale, Bolzano, Italy
2-4 Dec 2010: de Singel, Antwerp, Belgium
26 Jan 2010: Stadsschouwburg, Amserdam, Netherlands
29 Jan 2011: De Warande, Turnhout, Belgium
1 Feb 2011: Schouwburg, Tilburg, Netherlands
3 Feb 2011: Stadsschouwburg, Groningen, Netherlands
5 Feb 2011: Cultuurcentrum, Hasselt, Belgium
8 Feb 2011: Stadsschouwburg, Brugge, Belgium
4-13 March 2011: Theatre de la Ville, Paris, France
17 – 20 March 2011: Teatre Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona, Spain
25 – 26 March 2011: Teatro Central, Seville, Spain
16 – 17 May 2011: Kunstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
20 – 21 May 2011: The Hellerau, Dresden, Germany
23-24 May 2011: Le Grand T, Nantes, France
27 May 2011: Teatr Wielki, Poznan, Poland
29 – 30 May 2011: Teatr Wielki, Lodz, Poland
7-11 June 2011: Kunstencentrum Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium
24-25 June 2011: Montpellier Danse festival, Montpellier, France

Vertical Road is sponsored by COLAS and co-produced with Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage, Curve Theatre, Leicester, Sadler’s Wells, London, Theatre de la Ville, Paris, National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona and supported by Arts Council England.

Rajeh is Beirut-based Maqamat Dance Theatre’s artistic director. He is working on a solo entitled Can You Hear Me?, which will be presented as a work in progress at Constane Cambiamento Festival in Florence, Italy next month.

Magamat Dance Theatre also is working with Sasha Waltz & Guests and Sareyyet Ramallah to create Takween-Beirut Contemporary Dance School 2011, which is an annual three-month intensive contemporary training programme aimed at young people who wish to take on dance and performance as their careers. Takween-BCDC is from Sunday 5 September – Sunday 5 December. Dansgroep Amsterdam and Mancopy Danskompagni are also collaborators on this project.

(With thanks to Dance-Tech for the video)

Our Facebook group is still very active and we’re really pleased to see our fanbase grow to more than 1,000 fans! So, if you’re a dancer or someone who just simply loves dance, please visit our page, like it, and tell your friends about it. If you want to see our photos, check out our Flickr page and for videos, we have a YouTube channel.

Just saw a group of dancers queue up behind a very confused man at a cash point in town and dance behind him.

I also saw people dancing in town and a little girl tried to join in!

There was a massive crowd of people around a group of people dancing outside the Pavilions in town.

I heard someone talking about the performance. They said “Oh my god, these guys are really amazing!” So true!

There was massive cheering from the crowd while they were watching a dance performance and I saw loads of people taking photos and filming it. Must be IDFB!

Many thanks to Ruth for such fabulous photos.

If you’re a young person and would like to get more involved in dance activities in and around the West Midlands, drop DanceXchange a line to see what opportunities are out there.  You could join the DanceXchange Youth Forum, gain valuable work experience through volunteering, or take part in dance classes to improve your technical skills.

Click here to get in touch with our Youth Dance team!

Saw a huge crowd gathering for the performance in the centre of town today!

There were massive cheers from the crowd as the dancing started in High Street.

What an amazing performance!  IDFB got loads of other dance groups together to perform.  I saw belly dancers, street dancers, ballroom, Latin and Bhangra dancers performing.

Today’s performance was a brilliant success, and I hope to see another one soon!

Thanks to Ruth for these great pics! She will be back next week with her shots from (in)visible dancin’ – don’t miss it!

If you’re a young person and would like to get more involved in dance activities in and around the West Midlands, drop DanceXchange a line to see what opportunities are out there.  You could join the DanceXchange Youth Forum, gain valuable work experience through volunteering, or take part in dance classes to improve your technical skills.

Click here to get in touch with our Youth Dance team!

The weekend kicked off with a diverse Triple Bill at The Patrick Centre, Birmingham Hippodrome, featuring works from Ahmed Khemis, Salah El Brogy and Muhanad Rasheed (Iraqi Bodies). We managed to catch up with Ahmed and Salah to have a chat about their work and a bit about their dance history.

Next up, we welcomed The Assassination of Omar Rajeh, a piece covering the political killings of journalists in Lebanon. Dancer/choreographer Omar Rajeh of Maqamat Dance Theatre talks about his work in the video below:

A Double Bill at Ikon Eastside featured Meryem Jazouli’s Kelma (The Word), based on the life and poems of famous Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, followed by Iraqi Bodies’ Insomnia, created in Iraq in 2005.

Aataba (The Threshold) was performed at The Patrick Centre and below, Moroccan choreographer Taoufiq Izeddiou talks about this work.

Nacera Belaza’s Le Cri, a physical and emotional tour de force and combined Arabic chanting, Maria Callas vocals and disco beats, and Les Sentinelles , an exclusive preview prior to its premiere in Paris, brought the weekend to a thrilling close.

To see the photos, visit the IDFB Flickr Page or join us on Facebook.

Our IDFB Outspoken Weekend was supported by The British Council. It was also one of the outstanding projects granted the London 2012 Inspire mark, the badge of the London 2012 Inspire programme which recognises exceptional and innovative projects inspired by the 2012 Games. Find out more about the Inspire Mark here.

Shirts are available in the following sizes only:

Children
5-6 116cm
12-13 152 cm

Adult
Small Lady Fit
Medium
Large

Any queries, please phone 0121 689 3170 or email info@dancexchange.org.uk.

Facebook fans, we’re giving away 10 goody bags worth around £20! Each bag contains exclusive Festival merchandise. For your chance to win, simply write on the IDFB Facebook Page’s wall what you have seen or took part in at this year’s Festival. The first 10 people to post will receive goody bags.

If you attended IDFB 2010’s indoor or outdoor events please fill out our audience survey, and if you took part in workshops, classes or other activities, please fill out our participant survey.

We look forward to hearing from you and really appreciate you taking the time to tell us what you thought of your IDFB experience. As a thank you, everyone who completes the survey by the closing date will be entered into a draw to win some brilliant prizes. Prize draw winners will be notified by email or telephone by Monday 21 June 2010.

Please note that we can only accept responses from those who are aged 16+, so if you’re younger than this, perhaps you could ask an adult to fill it in on your behalf.

Hope to hear from you soon and thank you again for being part of IDFB 2010!

The first thing I noticed was that the gallery smelled strongly of paint – bright white paint.  The second was Xavier Le Roy sitting in the corner of the stark white research lab he’d fashioned for himself – a bare room with just a table and chair in one corner, and a ghetto blaster in the other.

When Xavier started to move, it didn’t seem to be Xavier moving, but a hydraulic robot with uncannily authentic noises to match.  Robo-Xavier pumped and clunked and shifted across the room, until he got to his ghetto blaster and pressed play to give us…the deafening sound of silence. Absolutely nothing.

This, Xavier later told me, was a trick to ‘sharpen your perception and your relationship to listening and seeing’.  It worked for most of us but proved to be a little too much for three girls in the front row who were already shaking with laughter.

One had mild hysterics poorly disguised as a coughing fit and this was the cue for all of them to creep out.  I was disappointed by this – no-one seemed to be bothered by their giggles, least of all Xavier himself, and I think the commonly held misconception that contemporary dance takes itself so seriously audience members shouldn’t be amused is one of those invisible barriers that prevents people from going.  Dance, like other artforms, can see the funny side and doesn’t mind a bit of mild mirth.

Plus, those girls missed the best bit – when Robo-Xavier was replaced by a strangely indeterminate, breathing, changing and evolving life-form.  Xavier used his clothes and incredibly bendy body to morph from one being into another, each spending a fair while moving around the research lab and exploring the space.

And now it was my turn to start giggling, because Xavier Le Roy’s bare, upside-down back, with obscured legs and tiny arms poking from the bottom looked for all the world like a big plucked chicken.

This is the beauty of Self Unfinished – what Xavier is or resembles is entirely up to the audience, who each add to his performance with their own imaginations, so everyone walks away having seen their own interpretation of his show.  Xavier later told me there was no intention behind the shapes he created:

‘There is not from my side the aim to make you see something precise, like the chicken for example.  I don’t think about the chicken, I didn’t see the chicken myself the first time, so it’s very much about…the reception that you have as a spectator whilst you are watching it. You as a subject, you are different from your neighbour, and you have a different background, and you have a different imagination, etc. So you are using the performance differently, so the work is very much about these differences.’

Self Unfinished is, Xavier said, a palindrome – starting backwards and moving within its sequence before changing direction and moving forwards.  When going forwards, Xavier walks up to the ghetto blaster and presses play one last time…

Upside down
Boy, you turn me
Inside out
And round and round

Click here to listen to Nicky’s interview with Xavier.

Fresh from providing the live soundtrack to five performances of IDFB 2010’s outdoor show piece Utopia,  Birmingham’s favourite gypsy sons The Destroyers will launch their 2010 UK and Ireland tour with a night of fiery bohemian revelry at brand new Digbeth venue The Crossing on Friday, 4 June.

The Summer Gypsy Ball, which will be streamed live via www.thedestroyers.co.uk, features East London brothers-in-arms Urban Voodoo Machine plus live visuals from Syzygy and all embracing DJ sets from the Jibbering collective and Marc Reck, and will offer a sneak preview of the 500 capacity music theatre – complete with state of the art lighting and sound systems – which is set to launch later this year.

The riotous fifteen piece collective, The Destroyers, return with explosive new material in preparation for their summer tour, which takes place in London’s prestigious Lovebox Festival, Ireland’s Spraoi Festival in Waterford and Birmingham’s boutique weekender Moseley Folk Festival in September.

The ball coincides with the beginning of Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month in the UK and will pay homage to a nomadic culture rich in both tradition and musical exploration. With careering Klezmer rhythms, Mariachi brass, Balkan strings, traditional Irish melodies, uptempo ska, gypsy jazz and punk-polka amongst other ingredients, The Destroyers have embraced this genre-defying approach, and in doing so reflect the cultural and musical make-up of their home city as well as a love of gathering and interpreting new and established influences.

The band’s front man Paul Murphy said: “Gypsy music has been a source of immense inspiration for us – the word gypsy itself conjures up many things. Firelight and painted caravans. Swirling skirts and stamping feet. Hand clapping and stirring guitars. A people for whom music is life-blood.”

“I don’t have to be a fortune-teller to predict that The Destroyers’ Gypsy Ball with the Urban Voodoo Machine is going to be one whirling spectacle of a gig. Only the dead won’t dance,” he added.

2009 saw The Destroyers release their debut album Out of Babel and embark on a 24 date tour, which took in single launch parties in London and Birmingham, five shows at Glastonbury in four days, an impromptu set at a tiny Norfolk village fete, as well as triumphant shows at Trowbridge and Shambala Festivals.

Tickets are £12 on the door or £10 in advance from www.theticketsellers.co.uk. Early bird tickets are at £7, but hurry because this only applies to the first 77 bookings!