Alternative Routes 2016 (The Dance House, Cardiff)

Giving young dancers an opportunity to create choreography of their own, National Dance Company Wales's Alternative Routes strand is an important platform to nurture and encourage blossoming talent. And it's interesting to see how the training these young dancers have soaked up by performing the choreography of more experienced artists informs their own latent talent.

AltRoutes2016 comprised three new works by NDC Wales's company dancers, plus one work by a former Company dancer and another by current Artistic Director Caroline Finn. It made for a pot-pourri of styles in what was a delightful presentation of where NDC Wales is in 2016, and the fact the new work is forged in collaboration with design students from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama made it all the more refreshing.

Preview: Alternative Routes 2016 (National Dance Company Wales)

Every year the next generation of young Welsh choreographers and designers are given an invaluable helping hand in their journey to becoming tomorrow’s innovators.

The annual Alternative Routes platform from National Dance Company Wales and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama is an important and admired for young dancers who have an eye on their own choreographic futures. It’s been going for more than a decade, and has helped dancers and choreographers at NDCWales develop, explore and improve their artistic ideas, together with design students from the RWCMD.

For an entire month these stars in the making work together on forming new work which is then presented to the public as part of a full evening of dance at NDCWales’s home at the Dance House, part of the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.