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We are excited to have started a week of company rehearsals in preparation of the replay of our show Anima this weekend!
Shows: Fri 8th & Sat 9th July
and Fri 26th & Sat 27th of August
Venue: West Hill Community Hall, Compton Avenue (on the corner of Buckingham Place), Seven Dials, Brighton BN1 3PS map
Starts: Outside Brighton Station at 7:45pm with a promenade performance to the venue. If it rains, or you can’t make it to the station, meet at the venue at 8pm.
Book online here
Created by the Karavan Ensemble, Anima is a dance theatre performance illuminated by orphan lamps and stories gathered from Brighton households combining dance, physical theatre, live music, visual imagery and intimate encounters.
Argus Angel Award Brighton Fringe 2011
‘In Anima, Yael Karavan and her brilliant company of international performers, the Karavan Ensemble, invite you to leave the everyday behind and go with them on a journey, an exploration of light and dark in a “magical feast” … Allow yourself to be entranced by this mysterious and luminously beautiful performance’ The Argus
Supported by Arts Council England and South East Dance
Paul is official photographer of Brighton Fringe Festival and took some great pics of our first night. Thank you Paul. More of his photos of Anima, and Brighton Fringe here
“All too often as adults, we forget the pleasure that can be had in surrendering ourselves unquestioningly to an experience. Young children have no need of logical explanations and are happy to abandon themselves to the sheer joy of being in the moment.
In Anima, Yael Karavan and her brilliant company of international performers, the Karavan Ensemble, invite you to leave the everyday behind and go with them on a journey, an exploration of light and dark in a “magical feast”. From the moment company members welcome you into the garden of West Hill Hall, carrying a random array of household lights collected from around the city and weaving a long string of red wool around the trees, themselves and audience members, you’re captured in their otherworldly performance.
Inside, the ordinary community hall is transformed into a place of shadows, as the company combines dance, physical theatre, shadow play, mime and the wonderfully atmospheric music of Tristan Shorr, to explore their theme. There’s no clear-cut narrative, yet somehow stories emerge. In one playful and witty scene, four female dancers play out a surreal and competitive game of cards behind fine muslin curtains. In another, an anglepoise lamp stands in for a telephone, while others are transformed variously into a babe in arms, a playful puppy and a wayward vacuum cleaner, as the dancer tries vainly to maintain a sensible “phone” conversation.
Allow yourself to be entranced by this mysterious and luminously beautiful performance. And make sure you begin the adventure by taking the Big Lemon bus from outside the Corn Exchange to get there – it’s all part of the magic. “
The Argus
Full article here
Rating: 5 stars
“A vibrant performer on the Big Lemon Bus, entertained us with cheeky banter and kicked off our journey into the collective unconscious at the Westhill! There, under a maze of red yarn we then entered the twilight world that is Anima.
Lamps and local tales fused to create a theatrical theme for surreal scenes including a Victorian tea party, eerie shadow puppetry, delicate dance sequences, a babel of languages, and even the story of creation. Powerful and subtle, this piece from the Karavan Ensemble managed to convey through art a human experience not easily defined – transient and infinite like light! Magical.”
By Monica Perdoni
Latest 7
Full article here
“Bizarre, trancelike, surreal – only such a slurry of words can come close to capturing Anima. For just as the essence of dreams is lost through verbal description, here too we have a performance which ventures into the indescribable.
Even the journey there was strange. The audience met outside the Brighton Dome where we were ushered into a private bus by an animated French mademoiselle who was dressed like a circus showman. She spoke with a stereotypically broken accent – which she assured us was part of the act – and kept the whole crowd entertained with her eccentric charm.
We arrived at the venue – a little community hall close to Brighton station – where crazed women ran towards us with lampshades, and an offbeat band played absently from the rooftops. Soon after, we were guided into a darkened room, and the performance began.
Eerie music, jerky movements, languages we could not understand: Anima plunged us into its unintelligible depths. We watched as this bizarre cast of dreamers enacted their fantasies, using lamps to trail around the curtains, create images on the walls, and even to explore their own bodies. Light was certainly the central motif of the performance, and as something both natural and manmade it disclosed a symbolic significance. The drive seemed to be a return to carnality – groaned repeatedly through the microphone – and indeed to the anima, which, as the flyer informs us, is ‘the archetype of life itself’.
The experience was carnivalesque, hypnotic, and derealised: a non-sequential trip through the human psyche. The phrase ‘weird but wonderful’ springs to mind, as Anima was precisely that, so if you have a touch of the freakish about you, it comes highly recommended.”
By Joshua Feldman
The New Current
Full article here
Photographs by Genia Mineeva:
Outdoor part of show, photographs by Lucy Muirhead:
Our one and only Marion! Bringing and warming up the audience who chose to arrive to the show on the Big Lemon Bus:
“A vibrant performer on the Big Lemon Bus, entertained us with cheeky banter and kicked off our journey into the collective unconscious at the Westhill!”
Latest 7
“As with last year’s popular A Ship of Fools, The Karavan Ensemble’s latest production begins in the centre of town with Marion Déprez conducting an impromptu conference with the oversubscribed audience before herding them onto the Big Lemon and keeping up her trademark barmy authority throughout the circuitous journey. Getting there is half the fun really.”
Total Theatre
