Acclaimed choreographer Cathy Marston took up a week-long APGRD/DANSOX residency at St Hilda's College from the 1st to 5th of June 2015.
Working with two professional dancers, Charlotte Broom and Aaron Vickers, and a group of Oxford scholars, Cathy spent the week choreographing to the ancient Greek text of Odyssey Book XI. The aim of the residency was to explore how the mythical content of Odysseus’ visit to the underworld (the katabasis), as well as its dactylic hexameter metrical form, can be translated into the medium of dance.
The culmination of the week's residency was a lecture demonstration on June 5th in the Ioannou Centre, in which Marston discussed her approaches to adapting works of literature into dance, with APGRD Visiting Scholar Tom Sapsford. Cathy then presented the material which she has developed throughout the course of the week, with performances by the dancers Charlotte and Aaron.
Cathy Marston has made works for several major European ballet companies, was director of Bern Ballet Switzerland (2007-13), and most recently was a Clore Cultural Leadership Fellow (20013-14). Cathy has a long history of adapting literary texts into unusual and thoughtful dance adaptations and has previously made works based on Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream), Ibsen (Ghosts, A Doll's House), and Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) amongst others.
