Wendy is a writer, dancer and choreographer.
A 30 minute tv documentary about her, Making Mimi, can be found on this website and on Youtube, along with extracts from her theatre work. Wendy is known internationally for her innovative and beautiful stage shows combining text and dance.
Wendy’s books and theatre work largely explore cultural myths about the history and contemporary lives of women, with a focus on the arts.
In 2008 she created Sirocco, an annual weekend festival in the U.K. which ran until 2013. Sirocco celebrated the meeting of East and West via the inspiration of dance and music.
She has written and presented programmes for BBC Radio and continues to teach, lecture and perform internationally.
Wendy is based in the UK and on the island of Mallorca.
Wendy Buonaventura Radio 4 Interview
Extract from the Matthew Parris radio 4 series Off The Page; Wendy talks about sensuality, along with chef Raymond Blanc and singer Catherine Bott.
THE HOURS THAT WE’VE DANCED…
A celebration of tango in words, music and dance by Wendy Buonaventura & Company
Tango emerged in the poor barrios of Buenos Aires in the 1900s and its popularity now is a global phenomenon. But what is tango? Dancers say…
“…it is the search for a man and woman to be together”
“…the triumph of hope over experience”
“…sex and death – that’s tango!”
In this new play four men and women at a dance evening sit and talk about their lives. What brings them back, week after week, to dance away the night to the melancholy, combative music of the tango? And how are the dramas of their lives reflected in this dance? In between their stories couples take to the floor to tango, accompanied by live music.
Encounters and Boundaries
A review of THE HOURS THAT WE’VE DANCED by Oliver Byrne
Eight dancers, four actors, two musicians, one singer: Wendy Buonaventura’s performative riff on tango The Hours That We’ve Danced, moves seamlessly between the spoken word, song, music and dance. The performers exist in their separate spheres, each of them self-contained. The boundaries lie between the ways in which they tell stories through sound, movement and spoken word, each following the others in beautifully choireographed sequences united by the intense passion of the singer. Each encounters the other as the actors’ stories follow one on the other, interspersed with dance, violin and guitar.
The tango is unique amongst partner dances in its complexity. The dedicated beginner in jive, salsa, or pretty much any other couple dance, can learn a few basic steps in two or three lessons: enough to venture around a dance floor. The tango, by contrast, requires not only a vocabulary of steps but skill in being a leader or follower. Each partner responds to the other in what is essentially a conversation in movement; the boundaries between couples dissolving as they become one.
Whilst each dance lasts only minutes, the actors’ reminiscences in The Hours That We’ve Danced cross time and space, from past to present and general to specific. Tales of displacement and separation following political conflicts are balanced between stories of unexpected meetings. The dramatic centrepiece of the work is the supreme hope that greeted the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the crowds hugged, kissed and danced until dawn. There, at the Brandenburg Gate, the great boundary that divided Europe from north to south, the symbol of separation between East and West dissolved to create a million joyful encounters. And, from the universal to the specific, we hear of hope and trauma on the dance floor, of close encounters and bitter rejection. Both, Buonaventura stresses, lead to self-understanding as the actors reflect on what these often chance meetings mean to them.
In the final dance of the show the couples several times exchange partners mid-dance as they glide around the floor, melting the boundaries between them and reinforcing the often transitory yet joyful nature of human encounters.
