It has been 20 years since the Cape Dance Company (CDC) first took to the National Arts Festival stage in Grahamstown – and they’re celebrating 2015 with Blue, a production of four pieces by three choreographers.
 
Artistic director Debbie Turner, who established the CDC in 1995, considers the National Arts Festival as a major highlight on the company's calendar. The Festival runs from Thursday, 2 to Sunday, 12 July.
 
Why Grahamstown? “It’s one of the biggest arts festival in the world,” says Turner. It offers her company the opportunity to hone its profile and allows her dancers to perform on stage in front of a very appreciative audience.

The Festival offers dancers a fantastic learning curve and “many of the CDC’s young dancers who have gone on to the world’s stages cut their teeth in Grahamstown”, she says. 
 
“Everything that could have happened to us, has happened in Grahamstown – including lights going out 40 seconds before the curtain falls,” says Turner. But the years of experience have given the company a deep confidence in staging a show under any conditions – and they’re now able to put up a show in two hours flat.
 
The Company’s passionate investment of time, energy and focus, has led to it being regarded as one of South Africa's most impressive contemporary dance companies. “The CDC celebrates the beauty of the human form,” says Turner.
 
“While other companies may be driven by socio-political issues, our chief motivation is to communicate the beauty of the human form,” she adds.
 
Blue can be regarded as the embodiment of this desire. The four works by acclaimed choreographers will see CDC dancers working in their trademark neo-classical style to deliver their remarkable technical virtuosity and artistic skill in four pieces: 
 
  • The all-male work choreographed by Christopher Huggins for Blue is a favourite of Turner’s, who says she relishes working with an all-male cast; 
  • Huggins’s In the Mirror of Her Mind, danced to Gorecki’s Symphony No 3 Opus 35, sees a woman reflect on her loves and losses; 
  • Bradley Shelver’s ‘Scenes’ was inspired by the notion of creativity, and is danced to the music of Gallasso, Bach, Beethoven and Riley; and 
  • FadeOut.Five, a work by South African-born and trained dancer/choreographer Belinda Nusser, is a contemporary work commissioned in 2014 by the company.
 
Turner’s personal highlight each year is the great warmth the company experiences from National Arts Festival audiences. “We’ve been to Edinburgh Fringe four times, but Grahamstown is really something special,” she says.

Turner says she’s noticed a change in the make-up of the audience – especially in the past five years. “We get very diverse audiences in Grahamstown,” she says - from the Xhosa grandmother with her young grandchildren to 21st-century sophisticates. “This is because dance is interpretable by everyone – we communicate the heaviness of art, but also the lightness of life.”
 
The Cape Dance Company will perform Blue on from Thursday, 2 to Saturday, 4 July as well as on Monday, 6 July. Tickets are between R77 and R90. To book, visit www.nationalartsfestival.co.za.