Primero – erscht
Choreography: Lisi Estaras
Ballets C de la B
Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells
5 May 2010

We ought to be grateful to Belgium – how did this tiny country end up making such an important contribution to dance over the past few decades? Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker is one of the names that readily come to mind, but Les Ballets C de la B have also enjoyed a true success story. Founded by Alain Platel in 1984 as a challenge, the collective has nurtured an eclectic range of dancers and choreographers, not least Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Argentinean Lisi Estaras is the latest example of a company member turned dance-maker, and with Primero – erscht, she offers eclectic, life-enhancing theatre in the best C de la B style.

Primero is a house of memories – padded chairs or a wooden buffet form the set, and the undercurrent of nostalgia is channeled by a mix of scratchy records and live Klezmer music, composed and played by the sole musician on stage, Yom. Lisi Estaras drew on the diversity of C de la B to bring together a strangely compelling group of dancers, as singular and heterogeneous as colliding memories. Primero starts slowly, with a boy (Nicolas Vladyslav) seemingly discovering the space he is offered, drawing geometrical shapes in the air and knocking over objects from a distance. He is soon joined by a lanky girl (Berengere Bodin), who wears a baby blue frock as if the child in her had grown too fast, by two other boys and by Lisi Estaras herself, as earthy and strong as Bodin is spindly and eccentric. (…)

» Read the full review in Ballet.co Magazine

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