If Play is Play..., HeadSpaceDance, Royal Opera House

For such a young dance company, have already managed to make quite an impact. Spearheaded by the Northern Ballet Theatre leading-lights Charlotte Broom and Christopher Akrill – who describe themselves as producer-performers – the company’s opening programme Three & Four Quarters premiered in autumn 2012. It featured newly commissioned work by acclaimed choreographers Javier De Frutos, Luca Silvestrini and Didy Veldman as well as a reworked duet by Mats Ek, and was hailed by Londondance.com as ‘an opening programme that is about as good as it gets’.

Now HeadSpaceDance returns to the Linbury Studio Theatre with If Play is Play…, a collaboration with Olivier nominated theatre director Matthew Dunster – one of the Young Vic’s Associate Artists. The bar is set high with a cast of performers including Clemmie Sveaas, Gemma Nixon, Jonathan Goddard and Christopher Akrill himself.

Among Akrill’s many other achievements lie stints with Sweden’s legendary contemporary dance company the Cullberg Ballet.

As for the rest: Sveeas, Nixon and Goddard are all part of the exciting New Movement Collective, a group of choreographers and performers whose work transplants dance from the stage to the ‘real world’, creating physical responses to unusual architectural spaces. They presented the highly ambitious and critically acclaimed NEST at the disused Grade II listed Welsh Chapel on Shaftesbury Avenue last summer. 

The company isn’t giving away too much about the content of this new piece, which Akrill and Broom have termed a dance-drama. We’re particularly excited about this one, though, set as it is to be a meeting of minds and bodies from the London contemporary dance scene’s best known artists.