Since 2007 Marston has been choreographer and director of Bern:Ballett, Switzerland. Born in Newcastle, she trained at the RoyalBallet School, danced in Europe for six years, and in 2000 became a freelance choreographer. Her work is marked by its imaginative range:Echo and Narcissus, made with composer Stuart MacRae, is a near-abstract dance opera based on the Greek myth; her latest piece,Hexenhatz for Bern:Ballet, tells the story of Anna Goeldi, “the last witch of Europe”.

Aletta Collins

Collins trained at the Place (the London School of Contemporary Dance) before performing and choreographing with London Contemporary Dance Theatre. Her work is often narrative in character, and her 2009 stage version of The Red Balloon, based on the 1956 Albert Lamorisse film about a Parisian schoolboy, was a miniature gem, with Collins transforming everyday occurrences – a rain shower in the street, a woman distracted by her crying baby, children misbehaving behind their teacher’s back – into a whirl of wit and incident.Awakenings, Collins’s 2010 piece for Rambert, based on the book of the same name by Oliver Sacks, which tells of his efforts to “unfreeze” his patients from long-term sleep states, demonstrates Collins’s exceptional ability to illuminate interior mental states through nuanced dance imagery. In Duet for One Voice(2011) she recreates Jean Cocteau’s experimental monologue as a dance suite, crackling with unsettling body language and overlaid with an original score by Scott Walker. Widely experienced as a choreographer of operas, Collins has few equals as a narrative dance maker. Nevertheless she has yet to receive a commission from a large-scale ballet company.

Charlotte Vincent

Vincent formed the Sheffield-based Vincent Dance Theatre in 1994, since when she has undertaken a series of highly personal explorations of the human condition: sometimes bleak, often poignantly funny. One of Vincent’s concerns is the way that female dancers are “lost” to motherhood. Failure to encourage mature female performers back to work, she says, will create a UK dance ecology “dominated by men and younger female artists whose work is valid but perhaps lacks emotional depth”. Her 2012 pieceMotherland is pictured below.

Jasmin Vardimon

Vardimon was born on a kibbutz in Israel. When she was 14 her dance class was drafted to cover a theatre stage with carnations for a performance of Pina Bausch’sNelken. Vardimon stayed to watch and thought: “This could be for me.” After training and working as a dancer in Israel she moved to London, and in 1997, aged 26, founded her own dance company. Her work often addresses socio-political issues: Justitia is a multi-perspective examination of a crime story; Park is an abrasive urban fairytale; 7734 addresses the Holocaust. In 2010 she choreographed a new Tannhauser for the Royal Opera. “As for Vardimon’s choreography of Venusberg,” wrote one critic, “the word sensational doesn’t begin to describe the daredevil whirl of tumbling bodies, acrobatic leaps, flailing limbs and seething eroticism she conjures.”

Source : Luke Jennings
The Observer, Sunday 28 April 2013