Weaving Paths through time – April/May 2007

Weaving Paths (through time) was an exciting partnership project between Black Country Touring, Wolverhampton Arts and Museums Service and the Sonia Sabri Company.

For the first three-weeks in May 2007 the Sonia Sabri Company were resident at Bantock House in Wolverhampton, creating extracts in response to the house and gardens, using Kathak (north Indian) dance and South Asian music, which was contrasted by western instrumentation.

During the residency the company could be seen and heard throughout the house creating new work. The team focused on creating work in a new area of the house over the period, which meant new performances were added to the event every week. The final day of performances showed all the work that had been created during the entire residency.

The first piece was set in the Drawing Room. The professional dancers choreographed a piece that drew upon the formalities of the room. The dancers told stories of possible conflicts and drama that could have disturbed the general staid atmosphere in the room. During the piece members of the public were given slips of paper with instructions, this meant that when the piece ended and the dancers all exited the room it left the audience were positioned and posed as if in a Tapestry of gentry life.

In the Arts & Crafts Room and Staircase a lecturer and students from the University of Wolverhampton with skills in contact improvisation co-created a piece with Sonia Sabri. The piece starts with the lightness of childhood play and builds into a turbulent transition into adulthood. The dancers are accompanied by frenetic strings and a deep resonating voice, the musical team was made up of both professional and community musicians.

The audience are then taken upstairs to the newly refurbished Billiard Room where power, competition and masculinity are portrayed through the rhythm of clattering billiard balls and stamping feet.

We were finally led outside to the beautiful Dutch Garden where Shikidim (a local belly-dancing troupe) began a dance, accompanied by Gulfam Sabri and two female singers singing a classical Turkish song. Sonia Sabri then danced a traditional Kathak solo inspired by the formality, geometry and splendour of the garden. The garden piece culminates with Sonia and the dancers and Shikidim joined by the young Kathakaars (trainee Kathak dancers) who are dressed in beautiful embroidered and opulent costumes and. Together they all animate the space through leaps and twirls.