Dancers get down to work at Lakeside Theatre (From Gazette)

Dancers get down to work at Lakeside Theatre

10:00pm Monday 28th November 2011 in Leisure By Neil D'Arcy-Jones

WORK is perhaps a bit of a touchy word for many people at the moment.

With the global financial crisis, more people are out of work and some who do have a job possibly aren’t all that keen on it, with pension cuts and pay freezes.

A timely subject for a piece of theatre then.

Henrietta Hill, from the Dog Kennel Hill Project, agrees.

“We wanted to find out how people value what they do,” she explains, “how they approach work and what they think of it.

“We researched the idea last year in Colchester, speaking to all kinds of people who are involved in the craft industry. Basically, anyone who makes something.”

The results have formed a double bill of shows. The Devil and the Details is a darkly comical play, revealing the harsh truths in the sinister working relationship between a choreographer and a dancer.

Hinterview is a wry, solo quest that looks at how sometimes you have to have a collapse before you can regenerate.

Henrietta adds: “The starting point for us was looking at our own work, putting on a show and how it’s an absurd thing to do.

“One of the things we’ve always done as a group is look for the absurd within us and this fitted in nicely with that.”

Dog Kennel Hill Project is a collective company of dance artists, which includes Henrietta, Ben Ash and Rachel Lopez de la Nieta.

Recent performances of different works have taken place at the Barbican, Whitechapel Gallery and the Aerowaves Spring Forward Festival, in Slovenia.

As well as interviewing people in Colchester, this double bill of shows, collectively titled Working the Devil, was developed at the Lakeside Theatre at Essex University and was part of the British Council showcase in the Escalator East to Edinburgh 2011 programme.

Working the Devil: Double bill Lakeside Theatre, Square 5 University of Essex Thursday, December 1, 7.30pm £10, concessions £7, Essex University students £5 Tel 01206 873288, www.essex.ac.uk/artson5