The living cultural heritage of Robert Cohan

Abstract

In 2013 Robert Cohan, founder Artistic Director of the London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Co-Artistic Director of The Martha Graham Dance Company returned to the UK from many years living in France. Since then he has been much in demand as choreographer and teacher. With the Yorke Dance Project he has restaged his 1979 solo Canciones del Alma, and created a new work Lingua Franca which had as its starting point a section of his 1984 work Agora. In addition, in 2015 for Liam Riddick of the Richard Alston Dance Company he created a new solo entitled Sigh. This chapter explores his approach to translation, transformation and transmission in these works alongside a restaging of Forest (1976). The chapter frames Cohan’s work in the context of Living Cultural Heritage as posited by Iacono and Brown (2016).