Yorke Dance Project: Modern Milestones

Last Updated on January 20, 2026

Renewing the Tradition

4.5 out of 5.0 stars

Yolande Yorke-Edgell’s Yorke Dance Project (YDP) has a dual mission: to celebrate the roots of American contemporary dance and to work with veteran and younger choreographers to create fresh work. Tonight’s programme for Modern Milestones at the Linbury studio theatre, Royal Opera House, achieved both aims. A mixed programme of five works, four shorter pieces followed by a second half that showcased a new Christopher Bruce ballet set to songs by Leonard Cohen, left the packed audience cheering for an evening’s entertainment that encompassed the cerebral to the wildly romantic.

On the 100th anniversary of the Martha Graham company, it was fitting to open the night with Deep Song (1937), an early Graham work and a meditation on the Spanish Civil War. The dance embodies the physical representation of the human form in Pablo Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, Guernica. Solo dancer Amy Thake sat on a white bench, resplendent in a geometric black and white dress that opened up into a fan shape. To the sound of American musical pioneer Henry Cowell’s Sinister Resonance, a composition that uses just the inside of the piano as a sound source, she executed an impassioned series of stretches and holds, sighing and responding to the plangent melodic line interspersed with ominous low thuds. There was a Spanish elegance to Thake’s line with subtle flamenco references as the dancer moved from resistance to submission, acting out fencing lunges, clenching her hands and finally lifting the bench with her back. For a performance that was both stylised and very moving, Thake received a deserved ovation.

YDP Associate Artist Liam Francis is a dancer and choreographer, familiar for his work with ZooNation, who is marking the first year of his own company, FranDanco. Last night saw the premiere of his new workCast |X|. Built around a score created by composer Jethro Cooke, the composition is structured around found vocal samples that sit on top of a string drone. Starting and ending with a cacophony, voices and responses emerge, starting with the phrase ‘Don’t look at me like that’ with repetitions and answers developing the narrative. The dance ensemble, Liam Francis, Carina Howard, Eileih Muir and Harry Wilson, are initially caught frozen in the light, looking surprised to be there, but gradually the physical interactions emerge as the emotional tension and blame game ratchet up. The dance language in particular references the floor work of hip-hop, but through a refined contemporary dance lens. There are slow unison movements and then vibrant solos as dancers bounce out of the group, establishing their own gestural identities. A sense of uncertainty permeates the whole. We are left with the phrase ‘What would you have done?’ ringing in our ears.

The performance of Robert Cohan’s Lacrymosa marked what would have been the veteran choreographer’s 100th birthday. Created for YDP in 2015 and with a deeply moving score by Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, the work is a duet, based on the CatholicDies Irae and featuring dancers Eileih Muir and Jonathan Goddard as Jesus returning home to Mary Magdalen. With both dancers dressed in black, they took us through stages of grief and comfort, coming together and separating with a series of technically challenging lifts acting as the spine of the dance. The score’s strings buzzed like a bumblebee swarm as the bodies twisted and swirled, and the dance language built in intensity with the music. The piece slowed down as the strings ascended with the two bodies frozen in the position of a Renaissance Pietà in a conclusion that marked the finality of death.

The first half concluded with the UK premiere of a work by another woman contemporary dance pioneer, Bella Lewitsky, to recognise the 60th anniversary of the founding of her company. Not as well-known as Martha Graham, Lewitsky’s choreography for Kinaesonata is rooted in American abstraction. Dancers Abigail Attard Montalto, Elly Braund, Ellie Ferguson, Carina Howard, Maddie Smith, Pierre Tappon, Francis Thomas, and Harry Wilson were constantly kinetic, mirroring each other’s movement with semaphore signalling whilst wearing bright pastel-coloured singlets and leggings. The score was Argentinian composer Alberto Ginestra’s four movement Piano Sonata no. 1 infused with South American folk rhythms. The romanticism of the first movement was reflected in the dance, a classical romantic ballerina set against an abstract backdrop of three mauve intersecting lines. It contrasted with the fourth movement’s pounding toccata with its infectious rhythms prefiguring the ‘Tempo di Huapango’ cross-rhythm of Bernstein and Sondheim’s song America from West Side Story, with Bernstein having conducted Ginestra’s music before writing his score. The dancers concluded with Soviet style heroic poses and jumps, leaving the audience exhausted and elated.

The second half of Modern Milestones was the second new ballet of the evening, created for the company by Christopher Bruce to commemorate his 80th birthday. Troubadour was set to songs and poems by Leonard Cohen taken from his album Live in London (2008). Dancers Elly Braund, Liam Francis, Jonathan Goddard, Carina Howard, Edd Mitton, Eilieh Muir, Amy Thake and Harry Wilson took us through a selection of songs, Dance Me to the End of Love, The Future, A Thousand Kisses Deep, Suzanne, Boogie Street and First We Take Manhattan, as well as bringing to life Cohen’s wry spoken introductions. The men were dressed as the singer in grey suits and Trilby hats, the women in sultry, deep red dresses. Cohen was a man in love with love, and this work is both mainstream and achingly romantic. The men have all the agency; they tap dance, joke, soft shoe shuffle, and every so often explode into high-energy solos. The women struck sensual poses to the music that is so infused with the gritty romanticism of the Greek blues, Rebetiko. Women are passed around to the backdrop of a bouzouki tremelando, with the whole work dripping with a sensual transgressive religiosity reflected in the sinuous curves of the dance. There were Intimate duets, ensemble social dancing, male dances straight out of Gene Kelly and classic Hollywood, and an ending that descends into a Bacchanalian inferno.
Troubadour is not the first dance piece set to Cohen’s music, but it is certainly the best and could be extended into a full-length work, as it would resonate with a more mainstream audience.
This was an evening of dance that was thoughtfully programmed and that reflected both the vibrant history and the present of the contemporary dance scene. YDP are both archivists and innovators, creating their own equilibrium and aesthetic. Catch them while you can!

Yorke Dance Project: Modern Milestones

19–22 January 2026

Linbury Theatre 
Royal Opera House
Bow Street
London
WC2E 9DD

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