Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The two figures on the stage at Sadler\u2019s Wells\u2019 new\u00a0outpost in east London cut very different silhouettes. The artistic director and co-chief executive, Sir Alistair Spalding, channels boardroom casual in an open-collar blue shirt, dark cotton trousers and brown Oxford shoes; the\u00a0dancer and choreographer Jules Cunningham wears Dr Martens boots and drainpipe trousers, hair clipped short at the sides and top, long at the back. One stands slightly stiffly, hands in pockets; the other \u2013 who was once described as \u201chalf Giacometti\u2019s Walking Man, half\u00a0rubber band\u201d \u2013 stretches and flexes as if ready to\u00a0perform. Two uniforms, one mission.When we meet, the opening of the theatre on the edge\u00a0of the Olympic Park is just weeks away. Cunningham \u2013 among the first of the company\u2019s newly appointed associate artists \u2013 will be one\u00a0of the first artists to perform there with a double bill\u00a0entitled CROW\/Pigeons. Spalding\u2019s demeanour belies an\u00a0iconoclastic spirit. In his two decades at the helm he\u00a0has transformed Sadler\u2019s Wells. His first move on becoming\u00a0artistic director in 2004 was to turn a\u00a0theatre\u00a0that staged both ballet and opera, alongside popular performance groups such as Stomp, into an out-and-out contemporary dance venue that created its own work. \u201cI looked back at when Sadler\u2019s Wells was really\u00a0successful, and it was mostly in the Lilian Baylis era,\u00a0because work was being created \u2013 artists were in the\u00a0building. It was a creators\u2019 space.\u201d\u00a0In 2005, he appointed a new tranche of associate artists, including Akram Khan, Jonzi D, Matthew Bourne, BalletBoyz and Wayne McGregor. In the years since, he has added more names to that roster \u2013 Sharon Eyal, Hofesh Shechter and Crystal Pite among them. Ahead of the new theatre\u2019s opening, last year he brought on seven more, including Cunningham. \u201cYou need to keep thinking about what\u2019s happening now \u2013 what a new generation is saying \u2013 and to continue on that path,\u201d says Spalding.Jules Cunningham had a working-class upbringing in\u00a0Liverpool and trained at the Rambert School in London before going on to work with Merce Cunningham (no relation) Dance Company and Michael Clark Company. In\u00a02017, Cunningham branched out on their own with Julie Cunningham & Company and a piece at the Barbican called To Be Me, in which Cunningham danced to the poetry of Kae Tempest. In an interview that year, Cunningham spoke about a frustration with dance: \u201c[When I first joined a company] for six months I danced Sleeping Beauty in a tutu, with my hair in a bun. I was a fairy, and I didn\u2019t feel like myself at all [\u2026] I\u2019m gay, and my experience of the world is not represented on the dance stage.\u201d\u00a0Today, they say, \u201cI suppose the life of being a dancer is\u00a0like taking on somebody else\u2019s vision and physicality. I was just at a\u00a0point in myself where I was like, \u2018I don\u2019t want to\u00a0be doing someone else\u2019s movement.\u2019 And in Kae\u2019s poem there was the line \u2018Time to be me now\u2019, which was like, \u2018OK, it\u2019s time to start the next chapter.\u2019\u201dAt that time Spalding was looking to commission three works to mark 20 years of the Sadler\u2019s Wells building in Islington, and asked Cunningham to create one of them. Cunningham\u2019s piece, m\/y, took its inspiration from Monique Wittig\u2019s novel The Lesbian Body, described in Wittig\u2019s New York Times obituary as a story where \u201clesbian lovers literally invade each other\u2019s bodies as an act of love\u201d. For Cunningham, the\u00a0piece was another big personal step: \u201cObviously I\u2019ve been a queer person my whole life, but having that be present in what I was doing did feel like a really massive thing for me. It [also grew out of] my feeling of watching dance over the years where every relationship that\u2019s portrayed is very straight. Even if it\u00a0doesn\u2019t mean to. I\u00a0wanted to really shift that.\u201dTheir next work for Spalding, how did we get here? (2023), saw them dancing with fellow Merseysider Mel C. Some hardcore Spice Girls fans turned up to every show. \u201cThere were\u00a0people who would never usually come to dance,\u201d says Cunningham, \u201cso many people came\u00a0because of their music interests. And I think that\u2019s such a\u00a0nice thing, the crossover audiences and experiencing new things. Those were good times.\u201dThe new theatre \u2013 which would not exist without the legacy of the 2012 Olympics \u2013 is all about finding new audiences for contemporary dance in an area of London and\u00a0the UK not traditionally well served by arts venues. \u201cSadler\u2019s Wells has, as well as an international and national audience, a\u00a0very local audience too,\u201d says Spalding. \u201cObviously there are lots\u00a0of people from Hackney coming to our [Islington] theatre at the moment but we want people from the other side of the Olympic Park coming here as well. We\u2019ve designed the programming so that\u00a0there are places where people who have never seen contemporary dance [can come].\u201d National and international companies will visit and the theatre will also be home to the\u00a0new Rose Choreographic School and the hip-hop training centre Academy Breakin\u2019 Convention. Whichever side of the theatre you approach from, you\u2019ll be dazzled by giant neon signs reading \u201cYou Are Welcome\u201d.\u00a0The stage is the same size as the\u00a0one in Islington, meaning shows can transfer between the two; but the\u00a0auditorium at the new theatre is\u00a0significantly smaller (550\u00a0seats as against 1,500), creating\u00a0a\u00a0more intimate atmosphere better\u00a0suited to smaller-scale productions. The\u00a0seating can\u00a0be retracted and\u00a0the space can be used in different configurations or as\u00a0an immersive venue. The opening season will see Sharon Eyal transform it into a club dance floor and Mette Ingvartsen recreate a skate park.\u00a0For Cunningham\u2019s CROW\/Pigeons, danced by Cunningham, Harry Alexander, Matthias Sperling, Nafisah Baba and Yu-Chien Cheng, the staging will be end-on. The double bill\u00a0is connected by the queer American musicians and performers Julius Eastman (1940-1990), a minimalist composer and contemporary of John Cage who died homeless, and Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016), an accordionist and central figure in post-second world war\u00a0electronic music. Both artists were outspoken about sexuality, race and marginalised groups.\u00a0In the mid-\u201970s, Eastman performed in a work by Oliveros. Cunningham reimagines that moment in CROW, while Pigeons is danced to Eastman\u2019s composition \u201cGay Guerilla\u201d. I\u2019ve seen rehearsal clips of Pigeons and the moves are, well, very pigeon-y, I suggest to Cunningham, for want of a better adjective. The idea for it occurred to them during lockdown: \u201cI was walking in the one hour you were allowed out, and the streets were really quiet, but I was noticing pigeons and thinking, \u2018Oh, they\u2019ll have a little bit of an easier life now that there\u2019s fewer cars and fewer people.\u2019 And it made me think about groups of people who are viewed as a nuisance: people who are homeless, but you sort of get to ignore them in a way. Because it\u2019s just there and uncomfortable. So that was the beginning of Pigeons.\u201d\u00a0About CROW, Cunningham is more enigmatic, other\u00a0than\u00a0to agree that in terms of bird impressions it\u2019s less \u201ccrow-y\u201d: \u201c[Symbolically] crows are generally quite dark, you know,\u201d Cunningham says. \u201cThere\u2019s so much that\u2019s happening in the world that\u2019s unbearable to comprehend. So we\u2019ve been thinking about how to hold all\u00a0the things that are going on for us.\u201d There are worse places to start than Spalding\u2019s new ark.\u00a0CROW\/Pigeons by Jules Cunningham and Julie Cunningham & Company is at Sadler\u2019s Wells East on 27 and 28 March, as part of Dance Reflections By Van Cleef & Arpels. how\u00a0did we get here? is available free on Sadler\u2019s Wells Digital Stage from\u00a010 to 31 March, sadlerswells.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic The two figures on the stage at Sadler\u2019s Wells\u2019 new\u00a0outpost in east London cut very different silhouettes. The artistic director and co-chief executive, Sir Alistair Spalding, channels boardroom casual in an open-collar blue shirt, dark cotton trousers and brown Oxford shoes; the\u00a0dancer and choreographer<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":213948,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-213947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":213949,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213947\/revisions\/213949"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}