Oona Doherty

With great impact, Oona Doherty catapulted to the skies of the dance world with her energetic and award winning works about identity, class and gender. At the Summer Festival 2020, she exposed the fragility of male gestures in the virtuosic and highly acclaimed solo HOPE HUNT. NAVY BLUE is Doherty’s first work for the big stage, a dark choreography for twelve dancers cast throughout Europe and original music by Jamie xx. Based on Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, that reflects his own depression and its overcoming, she translates the classical ideal of crisis and redemption into the present: the unison of the classical ballet is flavored with fear and dragged through an existential dread. Until a re-birth emerges, an attempt of freedom, of salvation, of future is re-stated. Doherty’s work is angry and defiant to the point of physical pain, but always also sensitive and tender, self-aware and in search of meditative healing. Thus, NAVY BLUE, which will be premiered with a multitude of international partners as the festival’s opening, with all its abyss is also an appeal to the beauty of life and for social change.