Ian Abbott reports on both the nature of the KFDA in Brussels and some of the performances he saw.
Weathering by Faye Driscoll(photo: Maria Baranova)
KFDA (Kunstenfestivaldesarts) is an international performing arts festival in Brussels dedicated to contemporary theatre, dance, performance and visual arts. It was established by Frie Leysen and first held in 1994, the year after the establishment of the EU. Leysen has spoken in previous interviews about how Brussels was seeking to become the political capital of Europe, but at this point in history it trailed other capitals as a cultural centre. KFDA sought to position itself as a bridge between Belgium’s French-speaking Walloon and the Flemish-speaking Flanders regions, framing itself as a festival for both populations in a city with a population of 1.2 million.
Since 2019 KFDA has been programmed by co-artistic directors Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Dries Douibi, with Frederik Verrote as Financial Director. The very first words in the festival program (which is printed in Dutch, French and English to reflect its trilingual territory, ongoing dual financial investments and its international status) set the tone: ‘Theatre, dance, performance and visual arts: KFDA is a celebration of international contemporary creation. During three weeks, it invites artists both local and international to challenge our relationship with the world and present their bold artistic creations in some 30 cultural venues and public spaces in Brussels.’
Being my first visit, I hadn’t realised how popular a stopover KFDA is on the merry-go-round of global festival programmers who gather from all continents to take in the work on offer before heading off to their next shopping trip at Montreal’s Festival TransAmérique. Indeed, this year’s festival was chock-full of intellectually satisfying new work that was conceptually deft and exquisitely executed.
Listening to Gubbay share an overview of how he programs the festival, he spoke about how they are actively preserving the freedom and space for artists to change the works right up until the last minute and not demanding to know all the information ten months before the festival begins. So all that the festival has to go on is a leading concept and trust in the artist that they will deliver something. What was interesting to hear was that before COVID they were also racking up the air miles travelling to existing festival contexts in Kyoto, Sao Paolo and other places to see/programme work, but this meant they would only reproduce what already exists and the circulation/amount of work for this scale of festival is actually quite small. Now, they’re less interested in that, so for example Gubbay travelled to Kyrgyzstan to meet with artists outside a festival context and to see many things that were in rehearsal.
KFDA is also a well-resourced festival. In an interview in 2008, the then artistic director Christophe Slagmuylder revealed that the festival’s total budget was 2,700,000 euros with ‘more than half the budget devoted to the artistic aspects like production of works. This is because one of the big prerequisites we have set for ourselves is that ours be a creation type festival.’ Gubbay revealed during this year’s festival that the current budget is around 3,000,000 euros for around 30 productions/projects. To put that into a UK perspective, the combined 2022/23 annual accounts and total annual expenditure for four of this country’s prestigious festivals — Fierce, LIFT, Dance Umbrella and Transform — do not add up to KFDA’s annual budget.
Another comparison with the UK that opened my eyes was the openness of KFDA’s stance on Palestine. A full-page announcement in the KFDA program called for donations for Living Stipends for Palestine followed by a trilingual quote: ‘People in Palestine are facing horrific levels of violence and destruction with no end in sight. Palestinians, including artists, curators, musicians, performers, writers, dancers, filmmakers are in dire need of help, from water and food to shelter and medication. KFDA supports and shares the call to donate to Living Stipends for Palestine, a program set up by Mophradat to provide livelihood grants to Palestinian professional artists and cultural workers directly affected by the War. Mophradat, a long-standing partner of the festival, is a Brussels-based IVZW/AISBL that creates opportunities for artists from the Arab World and has vast experience and networks in the region. All donated funds go to the artists; beneficiaries are determined through a nomination process by peers.’
Can you imagine a UK festival or venue being as transparent in their politics and having a full-page ad in their programme calling for the financial support of Palestinian artists? One has only to recall that, due to the work of Bands Boycott Barclays, 100 musical acts boycotted The Great Escape festival in response to the sponsorship of Barclays bank, and a raft of literary festivals has ended their relationship with Baillie Gifford due to the work of Fossil Free Books. On March 15th 2024, the UK Cultural Workers Against Genocide (@cwag_uk) disrupted an event at Sadler’s Wells attended by CEO Sir Alistair Spalding and their associate artist Wayne McGregor CBE. CWAG asked Spalding if he had any intention of dropping Sadler’s Wells’ sponsor Barclays, who have increased their investments in companies producing weapons used in Israel’s strikes on Palestine, and whether he would agree to a meeting with them. He refused to answer their questions and walked petulantly off stage.
So, is KFDA too good to be true? A well-resourced festival, set in a walkable city, which invests in artists, supports them to take risks and make new work and wears its politics clearly…what’s the catch?
In the introduction to the program by Gubbay and Douibi there’s a description about how the world begins at a kitchen table (a phrase coined by the poet Joy Harjo) which describes that moment of togetherness as a genesis. There’s a few phrases in the introduction which set the organisational and artistic ethos: ‘If we had to remake the world, what would we build? What is this magical moment when we come together without knowing what will happen?’ ‘Every gathering around a table is an act of negotiation: we take our seats and adjust to the openings left by others, the unwritten choreography of being together.’ ‘The festival can be a gathering around a table bringing artists and audiences together. It can be a place to discuss the world we contend with and the world we desire, a table we can use in a different way.’
This introduction is followed by an additional page in the program which acts as an access key. It has eight illustrations and brief trilingual descriptions around accessibility to indicate which venues/performances have what access provision in place:
1) Accessible for wheelchair users 2) Accessible for wheelchair users with assistance 3) Arrival with wheelchair to be confirmed during online reservation or through box office 4) Stair-climbing (up or down) 5) Interpreted in Sign Language 6) Audio Description 7) Audio Induction Loop 8) Seating without backrest
There’s more information about accessibility on pages 128 to 137 of the programme along with a whole section that reads in part, ‘Visitor tips aspire to make everybody feel at home at the festival regardless of needs, identities or spoken language. More broadly this is a work in co-construction that tries to shift the norms and concepts of what an arts festival is, how it is organised and for whom.’
Why then, for the entire, three-week, €3,000,000 festival, is there just one performance that is sign language interpreted and one that is audio described with an accompanying touch tour? Sink that in. If you’re visually impaired, live in Brussels and maybe want to visit the festival, there’s just one performance that you’re able to access. With this jarring disconnect between written policy and outcome that is little more than ableism in thin disguise, one wonders who really gets to be together in Brussels?
Even the hype around sign language interpretation is condescending: ‘Attend a performance interpreted in Sign Language! One of the performances of Les jours de mon abandon by Gaia Saitta is accessible to Deaf and hearing-impaired people thanks to interpretation in Sign Language of French-Speaking Belgium (LSFB). During this performance the interpreter is situated at the side of the stage facing the people who wish to benefit from it. In collaboration with: Cosens, Sortir avec les mains.’
‘With audio description, shows are accessible to visually impaired people. The technique consists of a live description of the visual content of the piece, broadcast through headphones so as not to interfere with the smooth running of the performance. Prior to the performance, visually impaired people can also take part in a touch tour, where they are allowed to touch set pieces and costumes. This year, one of the performances of La vie secrete des vieux by Mohamed El Khatib will be audio described in French and preceded by a touch tour.’
Can we talk about the use of the exclamation mark, as if attending a Sign Language interpreted performance is some sort of novelty? Should we talk also about how audio description and the access needs of visually impaired people shouldn’t ‘interfere with the smooth running of the performance?’ The programme choosers, access team and marketing folk clearly need to sit around their own kitchen table and sort this out before the next festival, which runs from May 9th to the 31st 2025.
Let’s talk now about the works chosen for the festival.
Weathering by Faye Driscoll is one of the most exhilarating performances I have ever been a part of. It’s a site of front row benefits, of entanglement frenzies and of proximity to proximities. It’s home to a heat-spiralling cinematic zoetrope, where a careening mass of 10 dancers — Driscoll calls them ‘chariots of flesh’ — begins to slowly rotate (and be rotated with increasing velocity over 70 minutes) on a bed-shaped raft to a point of climax.
On this, her second visit to KFDA (after Thank you for coming: Space in 2021), Weathering sits beautifully in the round, in the Horta Hall of Bozar (Centre for Fine Arts). It has the compositional skill of classic renaissance sculpture riding a demented choreographic waltzer without a lap bar mixed with Joel Goodman’s iconic photograph taken on the streets of Manchester on New Year’s Eve 2015.
Whilst it started with a Laurie Anderson-esque choral song cycle going through all of the bodily sites/functions — “o scrotum, o lips, o guts” — the imperceptible anticipation and glacial physical evolution of the dancers slow-tearing at each other (it might take 3 rotations for an arm to come out a jacket), or crashing strawberries into teeth with some added fleshy thigh biting, it finished with one of the dancers (Cory) coming to rest their armpit on my thigh for 5 minutes as they breathily recovered from their choreographic exhaustion leaving an armpit and forearm imprint of earned sweat on my leg.
Originally premiered in April 2023 in New York, this was a performance that re-activated sensorial emotions as a theatre watcher/lover that I recognised (only afterwards) had long been dormant. Unfathomably, the only time that Driscoll has presented a work in the UK was in 2016 with her work Thank You For Coming: Attendance at the Belfast International Arts Festival. If this work is touring within 200 miles of you, you should go and inject it into your veins, get a ringside seat at the hedonistic choreographic swingers party for the ages.
Vagabundus by Idio Chichava (photo: Mariano Silva)
Earlier that evening I had come from Le 140 after watching the equally joyous Vagabundus by Idio Chichava (which recently won the Salavisa European Dance Award) and I do not think I have had a better evening in my dance watching life than these two works. ‘Thirteen performers dance and sing their hearts out, as if in ecstasy. They move as one global body through scenes reminiscent of street life…periodically, one will escape the dance only to be lovingly reunited with the group…they sing traditional and contemporary Mozambican songs, gospel and baroque motifs and Vagabundus depicts life as a constant coming together and being together in a group, and migration as a possibly emotional, spiritual and collective journey.’
At a shade over 70 minutes, this choral, communal choreography from a uniformly strong cast — complete with tire runners, trolley pushers and bag whistlers who were parading up and down the auditorium aisles before the show began — left me in raptures. I appreciated the choices of how Chichava orchestrated a mass of 13 bodies on stage and framed fragility, when a lone single body would sometimes peel off, test what it’s like to be alone, before recognising the strength of the community and return. The choreography was unrelenting in its physicality and what made this work even more special were the songs being sung live by the same cast without an inch of breathlessness in the midst of the choreography.
Wandering the post-midnight streets of Brussels and heading back to my apartment that night I was in bits, reflecting on the euphoria that I felt from experiencing these two works while in a rage at how these same two works and the majority of the festival were inaccessible to many disabled audience members.
When you live in the UK, you rarely get to see the signature works of international choreographers like Germaine Acogny and it’s nigh on impossible to see new works by them if you live outside a capital city. So I was particularly interested to see the premiere of a new Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker work in her home venue, at the biggest performing arts festival in Belgium. Surely that is going to produce the optimum set of conditions to create the greatest possible work. But oh my days, we need to talk about the positioning and the canon of historically ‘important’ choreographers who are still active but who have grooved themselves so far down that they’re existing in a xeroxed pastiche of their own identity and practice.
Il Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Inventione (The Trial of Harmony and Invention) by De Keersmaeker, Radouan Mriziga, Rosas and A7LA5 took place at the currently-under-construction and pro-Palestine-graffitied Rosas Performance Space in the middle of May 2024 and was based on The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi. Unfortunately it was everything I’d expect a De Keersmaeker performance to be: boring, repetitive, infuriating, formal, indulgent, wasteful, knowing, and it displayed a woeful understanding of how to integrate a bboy into a predominant contemporary dance cast. I am unsure how De Keersmaeker and Mriziga shaped/choreographed the work together, but there was a long shadow of the former in play.
In addition to the festival’s carefully designed programs, Rosas had created their own A4, heavy card/multi fold printed programme. On the same table there was an Upcoming Activities May-June 2024 at P.A.R.T.S. (School for Contemporary Dance where the curriculum is based on De Keersmaeker’s artistic practice) in which they were advertising a week-long thematic lab happening in July 2024 at Gaasbeek on Dance & Nature: Hand Power, Horse Labour & Dance with De Keersmaeker and Corentin Hannon. Mornings were to be full of movement sessions and afternoons a place to learn scything (guided by Kevin Lambeets), wood lumbering, haymaking as well as pulling exercises with draught horses.
I would rather have reviewed the process and encounters made in the lab, as that might offer some new perspectives on choreography and performance. De Keersmaeker has this status of Queenhood in Belgium, but how her work is spoken about in private by some of the current generation of cultural workers, artists and producers I encountered from Brussels was very different. Whilst they recognise her heritage, impact and historical importance. they think the work she makes is dull and says little about Belgium and its place in the world today. I think they were being kind.
Since I returned from Brussels, De Keersmaeker’s status suffered a severe challenge when an investigative report was published by De Standard outlining the ‘emotionally manipulative behaviour’, ‘humiliation’ and ‘psychological violence’ enacted by De Keersmaeker on her dancers (21 former employees spoke to De Standaard). In addition, a newly installed, 4-person horizontal management structure (put in place around 2022 at the same time as a new psychosocial well-being action plan) which was meant to create ‘a heat shield’ around De Keersmaeker, was disbanded in the Spring of 2023 alongside a €400,000 loss. After significant news coverage across the summer, De Keersmaeker made this statement on September 17th 2024 which included these lines: ‘I want to offer my apologies to all the people I have disappointed and hurt along the way. I am aware that accepting responsibility and offering apologies for things that happened in the past is not enough.’ Maybe we do need to talk about artistic alignment, ableism and brand contagion when the dark things that go on behind closed doors suddenly become public.
Stepping outside of the KFDA context for a moment, the pioneering Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) had a retrospective exhibition, Travelling, at Bozar that ran until July 21st 2024 before heading to Paris at the Jeu de Paume in September. The exhibition traced the atypical trajectory of Ackerman from her first films to her last installation and featured never-before-seen images and working documents from across her career.
There was a work in Travelling which took my breath away, and whilst it wasn’t framed as a screen dance work, it was certainly choreographic and a stunning portrait of both landscapes and people, many of whom were waiting in snow-globed scenes somewhere in Central/Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. D’Est, au bord de la fiction (1995) was an installation (drawn from her 110-minute 1993 film D’Est) presented on 8 banks of three 1990s cube monitors. 24 + 1 screens of slow tracking (both l-r and r-l) documentary scenes on a 6-minute loop. The harmonious patterns and synchronicity of seeing people being disgorged onto snow-filled bus stations, to virtuosic technicolour cello playing in resplendent red velvet theatres offers a delicious interplay between documentary/fiction and clinical observation/atmospheric musings. Spending two hours in Akerman’s world, examining her scripts, contact sheets, unpublished rushes and revisiting D’Est, au bord de la fiction three times enabled me to engage with the work in a heightened state; my emotional antennae were attuned to the sensibilities and aesthetics in play and there was something about this work on which I homed in.
The majority of work by filmmakers and screen-based artists is often single screen or projected on a large screen and for me and my body, it’s difficult (as someone who is non-disabled) to engage with work like this because galleries often provide seating and/or chairs that are inherently uncomfortable. If you are being asked to sit in one place for an hour-long film work and the gallery is making you sit on a hard backed, cheap wooden chair that has terrible lumbar support, it’s really not encouraging you to dwell in that environment.
What was interesting about the D’Est, au bord de la fiction space was that it was dark. The only light coming in was from the 24 screens and so it felt like you could move around and in between the monitors. Unlike standing very far back and absorbing the whole installation from a single vantage point it was as if my body was moving in between and slowly panning through the screens mirroring the same camera speed and bodily movement on the screens. I became part of this work.
Threshold by Kwame Boafo was a world premiere presented in the round at Arts et Metiers – Institut Maguerite Massart and these are some of the programme notes: ‘Threshold embodies a journey of exploration, a continuous research dialogue between humans and non-humans, spatiotemporal mobility, and memory…I aim to encounter unexpected tensions, discoveries and choreographies, where the human body becomes a medium for narrating the geo-porting of goods…by exploring the interplay between movement and memory, I hope to provoke contemplation on the interconnectedness of consumerism and environmental sustainability. What becomes of end-of-life automobiles when, passing through Brussels, they end up in a West African city?’
Whilst (conceptually) it is interesting to think about the disjointed engine parts and other chunks of metallic automobile that are dotted about the space and how/where they end up in the consumption chain, the execution and dramaturgy of this 45-minute performance was pretty shallow and naive. The optimum format for some ideas is not always dance. Threshold is not a dance work. With Boafo crawling around the space with plastic flowers covering his face, balancing unsteadily on engine parts, washing his hands in an oily drawer and pushing pieces of metal on the IMM circular grill — there was little urgency, charisma or watchability.
It felt like the video screens — which were documenting bodies breaking down car parts like an artisan blacksmith, extracting the next layer of value out of these already discarded objects — have the kernel of something to explore further and if these were accompanied by his considered programme notes then a more coherent articulation begins to form in a format that is better suited to the intention.
Maria Hassabi in On Stage (photo: Beniamin Boar)
If we’re talking about intentions, then Maria Hassabi — who returned to KFDA for the third time (Premiere in 2014 and Staged? in 2017) with her work On Stage at Théâtre des Martyrs — is very clear on why this work belongs on stage. In the programme she was in conversation with Gubbay and these are some of her reflections on the work: ‘On Stage is related to ideas of presentation within the theatre space. My works usually have a strong installation aspect within them. Here, the installation is the actual space of the theatre, the stage, empty as it is…I wanted to produce a minimalist work for a proscenium stage that would neglect the vastness of its space…with this solo I wanted to sidestep this expectation of a division and instead generate a possibility of an intimate exchange with the audience. A bet on intimacy, while flirting with ideas of expectations.’
Whilst On Stage stimulated a cheeseboard of responses within me, it also left me conflicted. A lot of people HATE this type of work and at times I wanted to rage quit this White, western Butoh imitation — which was so conceptually simple: around 15 formally recognisable poses are held and are slowly (and I mean very slowly) transitioned from one to another over 60 minutes — but then I’d fall into its rhythm and it would capture me, before wanting to rage quit it all over again. I’d lose myself in the space that the work provides and find myself thinking about suns rising, seeds unfurling, The Empty Space by Peter Brook, celestial space time, Min Tanaka and glaciers breaking off ice shelves in Antarctica.
Whilst thinking all of these things, I’d been watching Hassabi intently and noticing the trembling hem on her denim jeans — one of the few signs of the hyper engaged muscle control she was exerting to move at such a pace. I’m not used to giving my attention to a three-minute ballet bow which has an equally long transition into hands slinked into pockets — gestures which are invisible in their biomechanical mundanity — yet here they demand our attention. We witness how the folds in her denim shirt shift imperceptibly as her breathing intensifies. How much or how little do we need to see to be entertained? It made me think of Nicolas Edelman, the ‘Official Dresser’ of Mannekin Pis, the famous tiny urinating statue which is dressed for half the year in a series of costumes. I stumbled upon and watched a ‘performance’ by Edelman which, whilst it wasn’t as slow as the one from Hassabi, had about the same amount of people watching and filming as were present at Théâtre des Martyrs and was well rehearsed (he’s been doing this 10+ years), gentle and very intimate.
The solo exhibition Three Episodes of Mourning Exercises by Hsu Che-Yu at the Argos Centre for Audiovisual Arts (which has an incredible artist bookshop out the back) offered a triptych of works on single/multiple/VR screens examining different types of grief, giving yet more space for audiences, but this time to engage/consider/exercise how we mourn. Similar to the work of Akerman, I wouldn’t classify any of the works as screen dance, but movement was central to each of them and they were deeply affecting. The VR work — a tribute to the artist’s deceased grandmother — recalled their experience of bodily perception in her house whilst contemplating death; this resonated hard. Conceptually, the idea of body, perception, architecture and death rang some Arakawa and Gins bells for me as these two artists have created liveable environments, art works and manifestos dealing with similar themes. But in reality, sat in Argos with the multiple genocides taking place across the world, our mourning muscle is being exercised too much recently as death is present both personally and globally.
It was a neat touch to use a 3D scanning technique (also used by Taiwanese police to collect forensic evidence, identify fragmented or decomposing bodies and examine crime scenes) to create a white, hard edged marshmallow environment where you could recognise the outlines of domestic settings, dressers, beds and the topography of bodies in the VR world but the scanning technique rendered bodies and homes anonymous. Without any colour and personality attached to these scanned worlds, they could be somewhere very close to home.
One final meeting and one final concept to finish my festival with — the concept of hands. The KFDA website offered me this: ‘In this double bill, we are asked to rethink the relationship with our hands and reflect on their role in the present, past and future.’
Stemming from his 2023, two-channel, 13-minute video installation of the same name, Moe Satt’s Nothing But Fingers, a 40-minute, outdoor, world premiere, was a gentle balm to encounter on a late morning amongst the tree-soaked courtyard of De Kriekelaar. ‘Fascinated by the role of hand gestures in South African hunting communication as well as traditional dance in Myanmar and Southeast Asia, where human gestures can take animal forms. With dancer Liah Frank, he explores the expressive potential of hands and their ability to direct energy flows in the body.’
Satt and Frank whistled and gestured their way through a series of exquisite, symmetrical hand choreographies and there was a delicious lightness to the work along with some audience interaction where we were asked to mimic some of the gestures, abetted by a series of oversized mirrors (in the shape of one of their gestures) and 3D printed, life-size rubber hands on sticks. Nothing But Fingers added a fine balance to the weight that a lot of the other works in the festival were dealing with and should continue to please audiences wherever it finds them.
I appreciate good programming and Nothing But Fingers was paired perfectly with Hands Made by Begüm Erciyas. ‘In Hands Made, the hands of the audience will take centre stage. Accompanied by a soundtrack, spectators are asked to observe their hand and that of their neighbour, creating an effect of intimacy and alienation. Separated from the rest of the body, our hands become the focus of a reflection on handwork and touch. What have these hands been busy with? Who or what will they touch in the future?’
Sat in the dark for 45 minutes, in one long row of chairs with only a lit desktop between each pair, we were invited to follow an instructional, head-phoned soundtrack and encounter the hand of a neighbour. As we entered and exited the space separately, I had no idea to whom the hand (that did not want to touch or be touched) belonged. This physical avoidance from my hand neighbour — or even brushing fingers — created a remarkable intimacy. An intimacy without touch. The avoidance of touch is more interesting here, because the instructions actively lead us into touch and when one hand out of the two refuses that instruction, the power of the work shifts and it creates different psychological narratives about why that person doesn’t want to touch/be touched.
Hands Made strips all superfluous distractions away and drills down to a point where you think it’s just your hand and the hand of another resting on the lit desktop, until…the desk begins to vibrate. Differing intensities of pneumatics means that hovering my hand just above the vibrating desk causes hundreds of consistent nervous sensations to light up my neural connectors about the sensation that’s localised to one part of my body while all the other narratives of touch between strangers are swimming in the air. What a work to finish on.
The 2024 edition of KFDA was a rarefied, eight-course, Michelin Star concept tasting menu and some of those dishes are amongst the best I’ve ever sampled. However, in a performing arts world where the default of power is still held by white, male and non-disabled bodies, if the festival wants to be judged on how it ‘challenges our relationship with the world’ and be ‘a place to discuss the world we contend with and the world we desire’ then it needs to be reimagined from the inside out.
Show Me Your Inter/Nationalisms – Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 2
Consider this a companion work to my response in Part 1 to some of the work from the Made in Scotland showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Part 2 looks at dance works from other inter/nationalist showcases, language choices, the cost of a press release and the idea of a cultural border force that helps establish a two-tier system where artists are financially supported to bring their work to Edinburgh in return for representing their flag. The Fringe describes these showcases as: “2024 National Showcases. There are a number of showcases from across the world that support exciting work from their regions at the Fringe. Some of them offer a curated selection, others offer official support to work already coming to the Fringe.”
PACK by Miller de Nobili (photo: Casten Beier)
In 1995 Michael Billig introduced the concept of Banal Nationalism which demonstrates how nationalism is constantly flagged in the media and habits of language. He examines how symbols such as flags, national songs, sporting events, divisions into ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ news become so effective — and almost subliminal — in their everyday representations of a nation.
Introducing House of Oz, which is, in their own words, “an award-winning philanthropic powerhouse with a mission to platform Australian creative arts for international cultural export. With a track record of producing 600+ performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and supporting Australian artists on international tours, House of Oz showcases the diversity and excellence of Australian arts talent on the global stage. House of Oz is returning to the Fringe for a third year, in a fresh partnership with Assembly Festival. A curated showcase of twelve shows will be presented as part of a diverse programme spanning genre and generations. Venues are carefully aligned with the shows’ unique requirements. Artists receive funding to enable travel and accommodation, plus marketing, strategic and hands-on support from the House of Oz artist liaison and technical team.”
In the embargoed press release from Assembly @ Dance Base sent out in June 2024, Triptych by Lewis Major was the first show mentioned under the Programme Highlights section: “Presented by House of Oz, rising star of Australian dance, choreographer-director Lewis Major, is set to bring two UK premieres to this year’s Fringe. In a unique collaboration between Lewis, his company, and his mentor “Britain’s leading modern dance creator” (The Daily Express), the legendary Russell Maliphant OBE, Triptych is a captivating evening of dance, of connection between internal and external worlds — of non-duality — all set within a whirling maelstrom of movement, sound and light.”
Add this to the separate press release from the team at Martha Oakes PR who were working on both Triptych and Major’s other work Lien: “Based between the deep south of Australia and Adelaide, Lewis Major is a dance artist with a background in sheep shearing and a foreground in contemporary dance theatre. He grew up on his family’s 11,000-acre farm (more than half the size of Brighton), attended bush school and didn’t set foot in a theatre until his teens. He took up gymnastics but when he saw Garry Stewart’s work for Australian Dance Theatre was driven to move into dance. In his early 20s, while studying ballet at New Zealand School of Dance, he broke his back and discovered a congenital condition which took him away from performance and into choreography. Lewis has worked with some of the biggest names in international contemporary dance including Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant, Hofesh Shechter and Aakash Odedra. His company, Lewis Major Projects was in residence at the Centre National de la danse in Lyon until 2017 when he decided to move back to his home state of South Australia, feeling it was the right place to pursue his creation of unabashedly audience-driven work with a local focus and a global outlook.”
By commissioning an 8-minute amuse-bouche (the first work of the triple bill) — Two x Three — from his mentor Maliphant, complete with the classic square-within-a-square lighting design from Michael Hulls, this attempt to frame and associate Major in some sort of male, choreographic lineage, master/student relationship is one that worked very successfully for Aakash Odedra back in 2011 (where I programmed his quadruple bill, Rising, at Pavilion Dance in Bournemouth). Odedra commissioned works from Maliphant/Hulls, Akram Khan, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui as well as creating a work of his own, bringing his name into alignment with these choreographers in subsequent discussions of their work. Who was the rehearsal director for three out of those four works? Lewis Major.
Lewis Major’s Unfolding, part of Tryptich (photo: Chris Herzfeld)
In Two x Three, however, Maliphant’s bleakly austere, classic 90s-esque choreography drawing invisible lines with pointy toes and cutting the air through a box of light is the kind of empty neo-classical technique that is anything but the palate cleanser I was looking for, but at least it offered a clarity and precision the dancers could execute. The next two works (Unfolding and Epilogue — Act 1 and Act 2), choreographed by Major, were terrible, both choreographically and in the way they were danced. What Lewis offered in his works was a Maliphant pastiche, a Poundland version of slowed-down limb extensions and faux-emo faces that was danced messily (some dancers were audibly out of breath) and had a jumble of projection, lighting effects and talcum powder in an attempt to mask what was going on. High production values and semi-dark stages can hide a lot of things, but it cannot mask distinctly average choreography and uneven technique from the dancers. By the end of the triple bill, I was almost pining for a little bit of Maliphant and that’s not a sentiment I admit to very often. I happened to be sitting next to a presenter from Australia and asked them why Major was being billed as a “choreographer to watch” and “the next big rising star from Australia”. What’s the perception in Australia? They said he hasn’t had a presentation or commission from any of the leading/national festivals in Australia.
Major was interviewed on ABC TV in Australia back in June and said: “We met our arts fairy godmother, an amazing patron and philanthropist Georgie Black who runs House of Oz, a Sydney and London based philanthropic organisation who for the last three years have been underwriting a lot of Australian acts to go to Edinburgh, paying travel, accommodation, technical, PR, venue management and all the registration. So really de-risking the process of performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. I think it will be life changing. To have all of this support, to know there’s no risk for us, hopefully this will be the kick that we need.”
The international narratives you tell back home can really enhance/skew/distort (delete as appropriate) reality. The “perceived” success of a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (when the venue has a small capacity) and splashy 5-star reviews from The Stage, The Scotsman and Broadway Baby definitely tell one story. I’m sure that both Black and Major will be happy with how his work has been catapulted over to Edinburgh and received at the world’s biggest arts festival. But perhaps success was already baked into the system.
There’s a quote from George Orwell on the Orwell Foundation website looking at the difference between nationalism and patriotism: “By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism…by ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Good afternoon to the Luxembourg Selection: “It is with great enthusiasm that we announce the first Luxembourg showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024. The Luxembourg performing arts scene is rich in languages, influences and aesthetics, and has long been open to the international scene and prompt to meet new audiences. In the past years already some shows from Luxembourg were successfully presented at the Fringe. Then it came as a foregone conclusion that Edinburgh, hosting the world’s largest performing arts festival, was a stage for one of the smallest countries in the world, Luxembourg. Supported by Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, and hosted by Summerhall, C Venues, Dance Base and Assembly, this first Luxembourg Selection at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe will put the dance and physical theatre scene in the spotlight. The three aesthetically various productions made by three diverse choreographers will properly showcase a range of the multiplicity of Luxembourg’s cultures and creations.”
Negare by Z Art — at the most difficult to find and unsignposted venue (C Aquila) — uses the majority of the same copy in the opening paragraph of their press release and fringe website description: “This choreographic solo immerses us in the quirky and poetic universe of a character who plays with his identity, transforming it to align with his wishes, fears, and dreams. Through the journey into the various aspects of identity transformation, Negare challenges the audience’s preconceptions, provokes thought about the impact of others’ perceptions, and delves deeply into the dynamics of denial and self-acceptance. It’s a thought-provoking work that encourages contemplation about the essence of individual and shared identity, showcased through the absurdity and authenticity of this character.”
Negare is a 30-minute interlude designed to make you double blink, furrow your brow and question the reality of what it is you’ve just seen. Broken up into three separate 10-minute, slightly absurdist character portraits, we’re presented with a manic office worker fraying at the edges stuffing reams of material into his shirt, a generous and coquettish carrot-munching critter squatting and burrowing all over the stage and finally some sort of faux religious icon draped in gold hovering slowly in an eternal consciousness.
Alexandre Lipaux in Z-Art’s Negare (photo: Marco Pavone)
Alexandre Lipaux is a silky shapeshifter and embodies the physical changes between the characters well, but I’m left wondering, yet again, what he has achieved. Negare is “part of acclaimed three-part series Le Triptyque” and I wonder if the other two parts might offer some contextual scaffold as to how this character emerges/resolves, because just encountering Negare in the middle of the Fringe feels difficult to place. If you think of Negare as an off-kilter video game character with whom you spend a little bit of time, maybe munch one of his carrots and tune out of the ferocity of the Fringe for a while then it might make a little more sense.
If these first two choreographic patriots are anything to go by, the future of Australian choreography is locked in a British 90s homage death spiral whilst Luxembourg makes quirky 1-act character portraits. Of course, both countries like to export and fund white male choreography, but this is one of the limits of showcases: you only get a slither of representation and no real idea of what else is going on in that country. There’s no nuance of national identity or interrogation of choreographic practice, and I question what it really means when a work is branded “from X country.” Is that optics? A representation of politics? Social status? Are these works choreographically identifiable as Australian or Luxembourgian?
How about some Performing Arts Made In Germany? “Performing Arts Made In Germany is Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s first-ever German Showcase, established in 2024. With a programme selected by an international jury, the showcase offers an overview on the German performing arts scene, with four shows featuring some of the best contemporary dance, circus, and theatre Germany has to offer. The four selected companies will present their shows in four of the main festival venues between 13th – 25th August 2024. Performing Arts Made In Germany supports the artists before, during and after the festival and aims to offer them a platform to present their work within the vibrant, international environment of Fringe. The showcase is managed and supported by Kreativ Transfer who are supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media to support stakeholders in the fields of the performing arts, visual arts and games in establishing and expanding their international networks to improve their visibility on the international market.”
PACK by Miller de Nobili at Assembly @ Dance Base was described in the aforementioned embargoed press release as: “In its Fringe debut, Miller de Nobili bring PACK to Dance Base. This energetic performance features five dancers performing hip-hop, breaking, contemporary and everything that fits in between. Presented as part of the Made in Germany Showcase, this dynamic show plays with group dynamics, exploring what rules and roles make up togetherness.” The public facing text at the Fringe box office adds a little more colour: “Five dancers, five guys, 40° in the studio. Hip-hop, breaking, contemporary and everything that fits in between. Colliding and rebounding. Hardening up and loosening up. Being alone or being part of it. One group, one PACK. We see a group testing the limits of their bodies. We hear their weight crashing on the dance floor and feel the breeze. Sometimes weightlessly whirling overhead, sometimes knotted up inside themselves. What connects them? What rules and roles make up their togetherness? How does a common place emerge?”
What is this language? “This energetic performance features five dancers performing hip-hop, breaking, contemporary and everything that fits in between.” Everything that fits in between? Fits in between what? Breaking and hip-hop? Breaking and contemporary? I find it frustrating when people who have little breaking or hip-hop knowledge describe something in lowest common denominator terms. It happens ALL THE TIME with hip-hop and it devalues and undermines the culture, demonstrates a lack of understanding of whoever wrote the copy and gives little credibility to the company it refers to.
PACK is a well danced, choreographically thin, overly long representation of some of the shallow, stereotypical concepts associated with b-boys, crews and masculinity. There’s a strong 15 minutes of material in there but it has been overworked with a dramaturgical aimlessness, Chat-GPT-generated phrases (I’m paraphrasing here but…If you want to join our pack, a turtle isn’t an animal) and a false emotional display from the dancers showing #anger #vulnerability and #angst.
Whilst the company, which started in 2020, has a good set of technically accomplished dancers who are able to sustain power moves and contact equally for the full 60 minutes, I think the stagecraft and nous shown by artistic directors and choreographers Chiara de’ Nobili and Alexander Miller actively reinforce negative misconceptions of what a breaking crew is or can be in 2024. They’re operating in a very narrow emotional range and have created an anonymous, edgeless b-boy boyband.
In the individual show press release put together by the PR specialist Sharon McHendry, the artistic directors and choreographers said: “PACK deals with the topic of group dynamics. The creation aims to break the stereotypes belonging to the breaking and hip hop environments through emotional depth, while enhancing the virtuous, pure movement repertoire belonging to both genres. We are taking the show to Edinburgh to expand the horizons and perceptions of hip hop culture in the theatre context.”
As this is their Fringe debut, I wonder how they can speak from a position of knowledge of what has been presented previously in a hip-hop theatre context. Whilst it is rare to see a good work that keeps hip-hop culture at its heart at the Fringe, the UK is blessed with dozens of artists and companies who are dealing in conceptually more interesting territories and changing the perception when it comes to the representation of hip-hop and masculinity.
Kreativ Transfer organised a scoping visit to the fringe in 2023 and a networking event at the Assembly Club Bar for the selected companies to offer an orientation and some contextual understanding of the fringe. “They received 120 applications and the advisory board consisted of representatives of the organisers Assembly, Dance Base, Summerhall and Underbelly as well as Nadja Dias (producer and consultant) and Wolfgang Hoffmann (Aurora Nova). After this initial screening, 54 applications were submitted to the Kreativ-Transfer jury. The final decision of the jury and the organisers was based not only on the artistic quality of each entry and its potential for successful participation in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but also on the technical feasibility at the respective venues.” On top of this Performing Arts Made In Germany employed a UK producer for each show on top of staff from Kreative Transfer and the company’s own internal staff to ensure a full staff complement to support each of the four works at the fringe.
Whilst I didn’t see Sawdust Symphony (another show in the Performing Arts Made In Germany showcase) in Edinburgh, I saw it earlier in the year when it came to Bristol and spoke to the company afterwards as the precision and execution of this experimental woodworking circus show was exceptional. “How many weeks did it take to make and rehearse this show?” I asked. “44 weeks.” In a work that has already been performed over 100 times across nine countries, this translated to multiple 4-star and 5-star reviews for their near sell-out, two-week run in the large space at ZOO Southside. So if you do the maths, 12 shows x £15 (average ticket price) x 200 capacity = £36,000. Take 10-15% off for industry comps and not quite sold-out early sales and you’ll be getting close to £30,000 in box office receipts. Sometimes there is money to be made and Germany resourced their productions well.
In 1990, Michael Porter wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review called The Competitive Advantage of Nations: “National prosperity is created, not inherited. It does not grow out of a country’s natural endowments, its labour pool, its interest rates, or its currency’s value, as classical economics insists. A nation’s competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade. Companies gain advantage against the world’s best competitors because of pressure and challenge. They benefit from having strong domestic rivals, aggressive home-based suppliers, and demanding local customers. In a world of increasingly global competition, nations have become more, not less, important. As the basis of competition has shifted more and more to the creation and assimilation of knowledge, the role of the nation has grown. Differences in national values, culture, economic structures, institutions, and histories all contribute to competitive success.
There are striking differences in the patterns of competitiveness in every country; no nation can or will be competitive in every or even most industries. Around the world, companies that have achieved international leadership employ strategies that differ from each other in every respect. But while every successful company will employ its own particular strategy, the underlying mode of operation is fundamentally the same. Companies achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation. They perceive a new basis for competing or find better means for competing in old ways. Much innovation is mundane and incremental, depending more on a cumulation of small insights and advances than on a single, major technological breakthrough. It always involves investments in skill and knowledge, as well as in physical assets and brand reputations.”
Time for the Korean Season: “Since 1999, AtoBiz and GCC (Global Cultural exchange Committee) have promoted Korean culture and arts worldwide. In collaboration with the esteemed Assembly Festival, we proudly established the Korean Season in 2015. This event meticulously selects and presents the best of Korean performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. We are deeply honoured to invite you to a curated showcase of traditional and contemporary Korean performance, art, and literature, captivating an international audience in Edinburgh. We hope to keep surprising and delighting you as we strive to keep the Korean Season as fresh and unpredictable as in previous years.”
Sleeper by Jajack Movement at Assembly @ Dance Base was under the RESPONDING TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS header in the embargoed press release: “When the language of rational-centred social science and the words we use reach their limit, we turn to art for how it deals with the climate crisis. Your body is living through the climate crisis. The act of surviving is met with the appearance of destruction — this critical point is faced with duality, crisis and the reality of death. We face this challenge by tying and untying knots, a traditional act of Korean community spirit and praying for the restoration of life. Programmed by Dance Base in collaboration with Assembly.”
Led by the choreographer Kim Yu-mi, Sleeper was OK. A perfectly reasonable 40-minute contemporary dance work with four technically proficient performers which was “inspired by Paulo Coelho’s book The Fifth Mountain.” Whilst a dancer trapped in a cling film wardrobe struggling against the entire climate crisis was thrashing about for the first half of the show, he was eventually set free by the other dancers and calmed down a little. Supported by the PR specialist Wendy Niblock, an additional press release mentions “…the process began with many challenges including the absence of dancers and other constraints, the choreographer felt that she was starting alone in a vast, empty field. In Coelho’s book, the question arises: Why do you cling to such a short and pain-filled existence? What is the meaning of your struggle?”
The meaning of my struggle with Sleeper was their facsimile of emotions rather than enabling us as an audience to conjure up our own emotions. But rather than making us feel something of the rage-inducing hopelessness of our impending climate disaster, we were offered a manicured garden of emotion. We know that the world is literally being wiped out by fossil-fuel companies, billionaires and other self-serving industries, but the wincing faces and the furious arm work were quickly turned on and off and the bodies of the dancers left me thinking they didn’t really believe their own concept; it was stuck on rather than embedded into their bodies. I’m currently reading It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action To Transform The World by Mikaela Loach and the way it’s written has a much greater ability to mobilise and stimulate action than this work of contemporary dance from Korea, whose members will have flown over 11,000 miles for their return journey to Scotland to talk about the climate crisis.
In an end of festival press release from Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, Shona McCarthy — who was appointed Chief Executive in 2016 and announced last month that she will be leaving her post in Spring 2025 — says: “As the most influential arts marketplace in the world, this year over 1,800 arts industry members accredited with the Fringe Society came to Edinburgh to seek new work for onward touring and broadcast opportunities. Over 2.6 million tickets were issued, 3,746 shows were registered and 60 countries were represented, including 13 country showcases. Almost 900 media professionals from 27 countries were accredited, the number of reviewers was up 6% on 2023 and 510 artists also attended the annual Meet the Media event, designed to support performers without professional PR support.”
Whilst Golem by Compagnie ABIS and Julien Carlier from the French-speaking part of Belgium wasn’t part of a “Belgium at the Fringe Showcase”, the company were financially supported by Wallonie-Bruxelles Théâtre Danse agency and Wallonie-Bruxelles International to present the work at Assembly @ Dance Base (after originally being programmed back in the COVID-disrupted season of 2020). Framed under the “Artists Of All Ages” section of the Dance Base press release, it offered this: “Weaving stories with dance and physical objects, Compagnie ABIS and Julien Carlier present Golem, an artistic dialogue between dancer and choreographer Julien Carlier and 75-year-old sculptor Mike Sprogis. This melting of two disciplines is an organic, sensitive and beautiful piece that speaks to us about the passage of time, our repeated gestures and their impact on body and mind.”
Of all the works under those inter/nationalist banners, Golem was the most interesting; it was formally experimental, proffered an original take on the ageing body, delivered some delicious imagery and it was almost an astonishing work. Almost, because whilst Carlier may have once been an active bboy, he hasn’t performed in one of his own works since 2021 and the breaking skills, freezes and floor work on display here — which attempts some sort of call and response to what Sprogis is doing — are rusty. Sprogis as the clay OG is so watchable; seeing how he lugs and pummels this 30kg of material around the stage and the effect it has on his body as he builds his golems, digging into the clay, gouging out the eyes, slowly crushing its face to death and transforming it in real time is a delight.
Add to this the live electronic hip-hop drum track and synth samples from the percussionist Tom Malmendier and it’s clear that Carlier needs to step out of the work for it to shine. As the work progresses in the second half we see Sprogis treat Carlier’s body as living clay, moving limbs, animating, stretching and rolling it before they engage in some simple release, contact and lift work. The precision, degradation and disintegration of the body, how strength leaves and skills plateau are all in there from Sprogis, but if there was a bgirl or bboy in their mid 40s who had the power, skills and gravitas to match Malmendier and Sprogis then the work would be exceptional.
There was an article in The Guardian from 2023 which shared the real costs of what it took to bring three British companies (£12,000, £7,750 and £22,000) to the fringe and in two of those shows the costs of a PR representative was £3,900 and £4,000. Some of the financial support received for some of the works mentioned above include:
1) a €20,000 grant and having to find an additional €5,000 as their total fringe cost was €25,000 2) having all travel, accommodation, fringe registration, venue hire, technical and fees paid for the entire team 3) the full cost of bringing their show, but sharing some localised costs with others in their inter/nationalist showcase
So, who really makes the decisions about what we see at the Fringe? Are the likes of Georgie Black from the House of Oz, Wolfgang Hoffman and others who run/select the inter/nationalist showcases and deem certain artists worthy flag bearers in Edinburgh the real Cultural Border Force? Banal nationalism will only continue to grow at the Fringe and I’m reminded of The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first international exhibition of manufactured products. Having grown out of a series of modest, industrial design exhibitions staged in London by the Royal Society of Arts, leading figures — including the RSA president, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, and the design reformer, Henry Cole — hoped to stage something much more ambitious. After attending the Paris Expo of 1849, like the unbridled colonialists they were, they wanted an even larger event, international in scope, as a place where Britain’s engineering and manufactured goods could be compared with those of its international competitors. The cash profits (£186,000 in 1851 or around £31,000,000 today) from the exhibition were spent on establishing a new cultural quarter in South Kensington, London, which featured the Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum, Imperial College, the Royal Albert Hall and other cultural institutions.
Can you imagine if the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society were to invest some of the money it t(m)akes from its rage-inducing booking fee of “£1.25 per ticket up to a maximum of £5 per transaction” after the rebate is given back to venues and invests it into the performing arts infrastructure in Scotland and not just use it as another income stream? 2.6 million tickets x £1.25 = £3,250,000 and that’s before the commission of 4% + VAT they take on every ticket sold as well. Who would have thought that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe would become the living embodiment of what Orwell forecast many decades ago: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist [showcase] is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Show Me Your Nationalisms: Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1
Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell in Futuristic Folktales (photo: Amy Sinead)
At the beginning of the final week of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Creative Scotland (the national public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across the country and distributes funding from the Scottish Government and The National Lottery) issued the following statement:
“Creative Scotland has taken the difficult decision to close the Open Fund for Individuals to new applications due to the Scottish Government being unable to confirm release of £6.6m in Grant-in-Aid budget in the current financial year, 2024-25. The Fund will close to new applications from 2pm on Friday 30th August 2024. Creative Scotland planned to apply £3m of the £6.6m budget to support the Open Fund for Individuals in 2024-25, alongside £3m of National Lottery income.”
The Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, Angus Robertson MSP, who is responsible for cultural funding in Scotland via the Scottish Government, also wrote — in a ‘chef’s kiss’ moment of choreographic synchronicity — the introductory welcome to the nationalistic Scottish showcase Made in Scotland 2024: “Welcome to Made in Scotland 2024! Celebrating a wonderful collection of Scottish dance, theatre and music, Made in Scotland — supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund — gives Scottish artists the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet.”
So on one hand we have the munificent Angus Robertson telling us how he supports Scottish artists and companies to bring their work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to share and allow them to explore the international opportunities that arise from performing at the world’s largest arts festival, and at the same time and place we have the very same politician decimating the only open fund that individual artists can apply to by reneging on his “gold-plated” promise made in October 2023 to restore the £6.6million worth of Creative Scotland reserves.
In light of this aforementioned context, this Part 1 will be a response to some of the Made in Scotland work I saw alongside other international work which didn’t have a nationalistic frame or the support of their respective country, whilst a subsequent Part 2 text will examine work exclusively from some of the other inter/nationalist showcases, where financially-supported artists bring their work to Edinburgh as representatives of their respective countries and kiss the flag.
The first to clutch the saltire between their double denimed teeth is Common Is As Common Does: A Memoir (CIACDAM) by 21 Common at ZOO Southside. CIACDAM is my gold-plated, fringe smash, best-in-show and top pick by a country mile. If you imagine Goat Island swallowing the Tarantino filmography, then heading out to a line dance class before finishing off in a working-class karaoke booth before ripping off their wife beaters and kicking the shite out of their girlfriends, this is something close to what we saw.
Premiering at Johnstone Town Hall in March 2023, the directors Lucy Gaizely and Gary Gardiner (with Dan Brown) said: “We wanted to create a memoir based on lived experience that speaks to a large audience. How do you create a joyful, mesmerising and exciting show that looks so deeply at trauma and life’s bullshit?”
Presented over seven scenes and narrated exclusively by The Man (Gary Gardiner), the work encourages us to think about the relational aesthetics of cowboy culture, family dynamics and working-class white male violence. I loved seeing a multi-generational community cast — aka The Mob — on stage alongside the professional cast. The Mob are the ones who create the atmosphere, doss about happily on the sofa in their double denim and stetsons and deliver a number of satisfying line dance set pieces.
CIACDAM takes as its starting point the impact and lack of agency poverty affords young men and how exposure to violence shapes ideas of masculinity. When you get this hyper-realistic tension of yee-hawing bar room brawling and bottle-smashing blood bouts and “books are for fucks” call-outs, it comes startlingly close to some of my own experiences as a teenager. As the fringe (and the wider performing arts industry) becomes increasingly difficult and even more expensive for artists to attend and be part of, then the already minimal amount of working-class representation will only get scarcer.
CIACDAM is not an easy watch and asks questions about how we and the system normalise violence. Some of the middle-class people I spoke to about it didn’t like its rough edges or out-of-tune karaoke singing, but for me it’s my perfect theatrical Venn diagram and as Gabi Cepelyte says: “Same as you, I am looking for idols. Like you, I find it easier to believe I can become someone, when people who look like me win.”
The Last Forecast (TLF), by Bridie Gane and Catherine Wheels at Assembly @ Dance Base, is an exquisitely crafted production for ages 6+ (and costume designer Alison Brown and designer Alisa Kalyanova appear to have strong and (unattributed?) influences from Thandiwe Muriu’s Camp photography series). TLF tells the story of Gael (performed by the wondrous and expressive Shanelle Clemenson) — a gecko-like creature who lives alone, in harmony with their surroundings, where everything matches and everything is perfect. That is until a stranger (Kieran Brown) arrives, laden with earthly belongings and starts setting up home, disturbing this island sanctuary.
Shanelle Clemenson and Kieran Brown in The Last Forecast (photo: Sally Jubb)
TLF is a masterclass in how to craft and execute beautiful, lightly political, wordless and world-class dance for young people. Set in a highly-patterned, 70s psychedelic bothy somewhere on an unnamed Scottish island, we see Gael trying to come to terms with the incursion of the stranger and playing an unwitting game of camouflage, hide and seek and trying not to be discovered — with the perfect amount of slapstick, repetition and pure dance technique.
There are some witty alternative shipping radio forecasts which subtly prophesy the incoming rising waters and the impact it would have on their bothy, forcing the two characters to work together to bring all their furniture to a higher point, build a friendship and wait for the storm to pass. The warmth and connection between Brown and Clemenson is remarkable, especially considering that Clemenson was brought in and learnt the show in 8 days before their fringe run.
TLF is the latest in a long line of incredibly strong Scottish works for young audiences that have toured the world in the last 20 years, so if it doesn’t get booked at least 30 times outside Scotland in the next three years, then the theatrical touring landscape really is in its end-of-days scenario.
So that’s 2/2, but is all work in the Made in Scotland showcase uniformly brilliant? No. At this point I’d like to introduce the commercially successful, but choreographically redundant double bill — The Flock and Moving Cloud — by Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) at ZOO Southside.
SDT describe their sell-out two week run as setting “the stage on fire with two of their most physically daring and dynamic works in an unforgettable evening of dance by two of the most exciting female choreographers in the European dance scene: Roser López Espinosa and Sofia Nappi.”
After a promising opening V-shape of The Flock by Espinosa full of synchronous wing flapping, flat backing, tiny little jumps and oodles of repetition I stopped counting the sloppy, technical mistakes and poor execution from the dancers after the tenth one. Add to this to the nearly 30 minutes of painfully manufactured running in dull patterned shapes (dancers cannot do fake running on stage) and awkward lift work (SDT are really not known for their lift work), it feels like the dancer execution, choice of choreographer and rehearsal direction are the weakest I’ve seen from SDT in the last ten years.
Moving Cloud, which has live Scottish folk music performed by TRIP, is a glorified #VisitScotland infomercial, and whilst the dancers execute this work better (I repeat, they really do not like being off the floor), you’re suddenly aware that this “flagship” company of Scotland, especially in the context of the fringe and the dozens of other dance companies performing, isn’t as technically good as a pack of Hip Hop and contemporary dancers from Berlin or the second-best dance show from the Taiwan Season.
At the fringe, broadly speaking, there’s comedy, art and entertainment on offer and with this double-bill it feels like SDT have squarely pitched their dancing tent in the entertainment field leaving behind their pioneering choreographic roots which would have been previously firmly pegged in the art field. If this is how they want to be known to their audiences, as creators of commercially viable and instantly forgettable staged entertainment that evaporates from our lives as soon as we’ve left the theatre then The Flock and Moving Cloud are an absolute success and their marketing team are the gold standard. However, if they continue along this path then they will continue to be no longer artistically relevant to the choreographic conversation in Scotland.
Stepping away from Mr Robertson and nationalistic frames for a moment, there were three other works (Ananta, The Eternal by Ragamala Dance Company from the USA, Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse from France and N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien from Canada) which are also worth talking about.
Aparna Ramaswamy’s Ananta, The Eternal at Assembly @ Dance Base is a programme of four shorter classical bharatanatyam works (two duets from the Ramaswamy sisters Aparna and Ashwini and two solos) to pre-recorded music and it marks the occasion when the sisters have “come together for their first duet evening.” The promotional material includes the following: “Aparna Ramaswamy preserves ancient dance forms with stunning virtuosity and expressiveness to create a living tradition that is resonant for modern times” (Boston Globe). “Award-winning choreographer Aparna Ramaswamy weaves together threads of body, memory, desire and devotion to describe the eternal relationship between the deity and the devotee.”
The work “was created with special commissioning funds from The Mayer Family and commissioning support from Asia Society Texas” and whilst there’s no doubt that Aparna is an excellent technician and charismatic performer with some sweet and powerful jaatis across the three works she performs in, there is a gap in technique and expressiveness levels between the sisters in the duets. Ashwini is noticeably weaker, especially across her shoulder line, and when the duets demand a mirrored precision it unfortunately draws the focus away from Aparna.
There is an introductory, pre-recorded voice intro to three of the four pieces. We hear how in the first piece the deity/devotee relationship manifests as: “Krishna, He is the Infinite and the Intimate. He saved the Yamuna River and its people from the snake-demon, Kaliya, dancing the snake into submission.” In the third work — choreographed and taught by Smt. Alarmel Valli — the deity/devotee relationship talks of: “Shiva Nataraja symbolizes the rhythms of the cosmos. His dance is the pulse of the universe, and He represents both the destruction of illusion and the creation of enlightenment.”
With so little bharatanatyam on UK stages, the understanding from audiences about this classical form is very shallow and consequently you get audience quotes on the fringe festival website like: “While I’m sure it is part of the cultural background, I found the ankle bells really quite jarring by the end; I was very ready to stop hearing them.” and “Beautiful dancing set to lovely traditional music. Would recommend this show. I haven’t seen dancing like this in person before so was educational to see.”
In the UK there’s been a 25+ year discussion around the framing of bharatanatyam as an ancient, traditional 2000+ year-old form; what some contemporary UK bharatanatyam performers and choreographers are attempting to do is educate audiences that this mythologising is false and it harms this classical form; yet this language is still perpetuated by some artists, venues and media outlets who want to keep bharatanatyam in a little, colourful, exotic box.
I would love to see at a future Edinburgh Festival Fringe or at the Edinburgh International Festival a collaboration between a suite of classical Indian artists and companies from the UK and abroad to reframe and present what these forms are really like in 2025, what they can achieve, and have an opportunity to talk about what artists think these forms could be in the future.
Continuing on the false mythologising train is the leery and misogynistic abomination that is Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse at McEwan Hall, Underbelly, which sells itself as: “Join world champions of hip-hop in an electrifying alternate universe where charleston footsteps and jitterbug beats meet freestyle hip-hop in a 1920s New York speakeasy. Infused with dazzling dance routines and thrilling burlesque to the remixed sounds of Miles Davis, James Brown and Jessica Rabbit, this is an afternoon of high-energy entertainment fit for the whole family.”
Whilst this represents the debut of Wanted Posse at the Edinburgh Fringe, the same performance was at the Avignon Festival in 2018 and the combination of prohibition, Hip Hop dance and the speakeasy is one that has been mined multiple times by the England-based Southpaw Dance Company since 2013. Southpaw premiered an outdoor work called Faust in 2013 (“In this re-imagining of Goethe’s Faust, drinking, gambling, womanising, and general debauchery make the Speakeasy a perfect place for a man to lose his soul”) before going on to develop an indoor version called Speakeasy in 2019/20 before touring the UK in Autumn 2023: “The professional cast includes some of the UK’s finest Bboys who combine the vocabulary of breaking and contemporary seamlessly alongside Charleston, Lindy and other swing styles of the roaring 20’s.”
How Dance N’Speak Easy is framed as fit for the whole family is beyond me; with five male dancers constantly drooling, pawing and vying for the attention of the one female dancer (played by Jessie Perot) across multiple scenes via their breaking power moves, there’s a silhouette scene where Perot looks as if she is disrobing and we see only her outline in a cheap burlesque imitation. Dance N’Speak Easy is devoid of any atmosphere and I dream of at least 2D characterisation or a narrative arc; instead it’s made up of breaking buffoonery and a desire for dopamine theatre — show me a move, do the splits, perform faux drunkenness — which sees the audience seal clapping lightly every minute or so to respond to an unsatisfying and mediocre trick.
Choreographer Njagui Hagbé said: “In 2013, we were selected for the final of France’s Got Talent and presented Prohibition. The reception was so enthusiastic that we decided to create a whole show based on the same idea: the forbidden. Dance N’Speak Easy is a theatrical choreographic project, based on the themes of otherness and freedom, as seen through the eyes of the Prohibition years. We wanted to go back to these troubled years and draw parallels between the prohibitions of that period and our current situation. Our demand is clear: we want to defend our right to dance.”
In some respects, understanding the origin of the work (a TV talent show where you are working in 5-10 second segments to keep the audience and judges’ attention) offers an insight into how their decisions have come to fruition. But when you’re fitting the scene length to pre-existing music tracks, concepts are often spread too thin or not given enough time to develop and tableau, freeze frame and slow-motion theatrical techniques are as dated and as bad as their attempts at group choreography.
There’s no doubt that the level of breaking ability is incredibly high — there’s about 12 really innovative transitions, threads, lifts and power moves across the 60-minute show which are jaw dropping — but the dramaturgical naivety means that they appear out of nowhere with no set up and then disappear without a trace. The final ‘drunk battle’ between two dancers who are each holding one of the empty liquor bottles that feature heavily in the set is a highlight, as the complexity of executing a 1990 or a complex freeze with a bottle in hand is genuinely tough to pull off. Whilst this is firmly pegging itself in the entertainment field and not as a work of art, the representation of women is appalling and Dance N’Speak Easy adds another layer to the deeply problematic and grooved Hip Hop dance narratives of misogyny that continue to plague the Hip Hop theatre world.
Talking of dramaturgical naivety and a work devoid of atmosphere, it’s time to return to Made in Scotland and Guesthouse Projects’ performance of The Show For Young Men at Assembly @ Dance Base which is framed as: “A man and a boy meet on a stage that’s somewhere between a building site, a junkyard, and a hillside at dawn. Together they dance, play, wrestle, and sing trying to make sense of what it means to be a man. The Show For Young Men is a tender and moving new contemporary dance piece made for audiences aged 8+, co-created and performed by Alfie, a 10-year-old boy, and Robbie Synge, a 40-something-year-old male dancer.”
The further I get from this show the more I dislike it because of its sense of manufactured play. Eoin McKenzie (as Lead Artist and Director) has invited a bunch of other adults into a room who have together created a production that speaks to a much-discussed and funder cat-nipped concept. There were a lot of shows exploring the crises of masculinity at Tony Mills’ first full length fringe programme at Dance Base, and whilst there’s buckets of care in ensuring the safety of Alfie, everything is muted, artificial and feels dead behind the eyes. The junkyard tubes are shiny and new, the constant ex-footballer radio commentary is a cheap attempt at the semiotics of manhood, there’s not a scratch or piece of dirt on their costumes or their hands and the contact and lift work are calm and measured. Children don’t exist in this manufactured state of play; if a child was on a building site they’d be near feral, demanding, loud and wanting to climb up things over and over again, little beings full of emotion and giddy at the prospect of an unexplored playground. Whereas The Show For Young Men is actually a display of emotional regulation (at one point Synge suddenly started getting angry and banging the set which felt needlessly awkward and required Alfie to give him some biscuits to calm him down) and rewards both performers for not showing their real feelings. The Show For Young Men exists in a world which actively celebrates the repression of both expressive physicality and emotional variation of young and not-so-young men.
The final work to be Made in Scotland was Futuristic Folktales by Charlotte Mclean & Collaborators running for six performances in week two at Assembly @ Dance Base. This is how the work markets itself: “a dance for hope, reimagines the creation story through the tale of the first ever womb. It’s a place that unites everyone, we were all born from a womb. Using storytelling, contemporary and Scottish Highland dance, this experimental dance theatre production questions the preservation of tradition, myth, and identity whilst scrutinising body politics and reproductive injustice.”
With an extraordinarily distorted pipes soundtrack from Malin Lewis, a kilted Mclean opens the performance in a friendly and low-key way that offers a live contextual introduction about her desire to say ‘womb’ a lot, some thoughts about identity and reproductive rights, Scottish highland dancing, the 30 collaborators involved in making the show (including a witch and a b-boy) and her previous 5-star hit show. I really like this as a way of opening the show; it’s totally disarming and makes it clear what she wants the frame to be before introducing the two performer/collaborators, Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell.
There’s a delicious Made in Scotland showcase meta narrative running alongside Futuristic Folktakes with Mclean talking about wombs (a place where things are made) in Scotland. The soundtrack from Lewis sets the emotional landscape which Chimutengwende and Bell inhabit and it’s a sonic environment that you definitely won’t hear on the Royal Mile. Lewis is an instrument maker as well as a composer and they’ve invented a new two-octave bagpipe that melds West coast traditions with a melodious discordant sound which cleanses and lifts the ears.
In a work that is as full of text as movement, Chimutengwende and Bell offer us a lightness in their presence and speak of “hypersonic wombs, womb patriarchy, womb empires, womb complexity” and dozens of other womb states. They begin to deconstruct the patterns of step dancing and the arm and hand positioning, almost absurding it into a glitch state. Sat alongside this is a repeated visual representation of the act of birthing through legs, arms and fingers as well as sometimes trying to crawl back inside to see how physically impossible that act might be.
Futuristic Folktales examines many of the tropes of Scottishness (pipes, kilts, highland dancing), looks them straight in the eyes and queers them with a gentle and joyous aplomb. I am totally here for it and believe entirely in the world that has been created.
And now the final work that was not made in Scotland, N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien, who were back at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the second consecutive year after achieving a certain level of critical and commercial success in 2023. This is how they describe themselves: “Provocative, dysfunctional and tender, N.Ormes is an award-winning circus show that pushes the limits of gender norms with never-before-seen acrobatic exchanges. Don’t miss its Fringe comeback! Skilfully combining acrobatics and dance, we follow our two protagonists and their relationship, navigating between complicity and power struggles. Come witness this inspiring journey to see how the exchange of roles and acrobatics blurs our preconceptions!”
Agathe and Adrien examine their bodies and notice they have the same diameter across many parts, including their calves, chest, biceps etc. and decide to invert some circus gender norms. N.Ormes is a really well-executed show that has a strong foundational concept and shares some new (to me) balances and acrobatics. There’s often the assumption that in circus shows it’s the man who is the base and the lifter, whereas in N.Ormes it’s not the case; it’s more like “anything you can do, I can do too.” What was refreshing to see was Adrien in a state of almost numb refusal, laying on the floor, emotionally vacant and resisting the urge from Agathe to fulfil his expected role of virtuosic physicality.
Their foot-bum-seat, springy-knees pike flip was a crowd pleaser, but for me the physical highlight of the show was a hugely effective, illusionary three-legged waltz where it looked as if they were hovering over the floor whilst circling together around the edge of the stage.
I could have done without the emotionally fey soundtrack from Simon Leoza which felt like AI had munched its way through the Mumford and Sons discography and spat out a sonically generic something which doesn’t support the quality of the performers’ execution or the strength of their concept. However, it is a well-loved show, returning for a second year without the support of a nationalistic showcase and for that it should be applauded.
So, Mr Robertson, what’s it going to be? How can a Made in Scotland showcase exist if the individual artists “who get the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet” do not have access to a highly competitive funding pot which enables them to develop their skills and build pioneering productions that represent Scotland on the international stage? How about a new showcase in 2025 called “No Longer Made in Scotland Due To The Political Dick-Swinging Chicken Antics Between Creative Scotland And Angus Robertson.”
*STOP PRESS*
Since filing this text, Mr Robertson has undertaken another sweet dime stop. On September 4th he announced “a review of Creative Scotland to ensure its operations and structure are optimal to the needs of the culture sector…the review, which will be the first since the public body’s establishment in 2010, will examine Creative Scotland’s remit and functions as a funding body, and how the overall impact of planned increases in levels of public funding can be maximised to support sustainability in the sector and in participation in the arts. The Culture Secretary also confirmed that following a period of necessary due diligence, Creative Scotland had now received funding previously allocated to it in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, including £1.8 million for youth music, and £6.6 million that will allow its Open Fund to be re-opened.”
Please, Mr Robertson, I’ve heard enough of your macho-posturing nationalisms. Perhaps you could reflect on the chaos that you and your government have created. The panic from your initial announcement meant that by the time the fund closed on Friday 30 August, Creative Scotland received an additional 819 applications totalling £11.9 million in requested funding. Creative Scotland have since announced that the Open Fund for Individuals will reopen for applications on Tuesday 8 October 2024. The story continues…
National Ballet of Canada, Frontiers, Sadler’s Wells, October 3, 2024
Heather Ogden and Christopher Gerty in James Kudelka’s Passion (photo: Karolina Kuras)
The National Ballet of Canada is related by blood lines, repertoire and co-productions to its Royal cousin across the Atlantic, so it may have been more appropriate to welcome it on its recent visit to London after an 11-year hiatus to the stage of the Royal Opera House. But the company’s new artistic director, Hope Muir, is evidently keen to negotiate between past and present, bringing to Sadler’s Wells what critic Deidre Kelly calls a ‘bold statement of artistic intent, signalling a seismic shift in the choreographic landscape.’ It is not clear from the program what this seismic shift entails or what it augurs for the large-scale classics in the company repertoire, but the constraints of the smaller Sadler’s Wells stage have the effect not only of reducing the size of the 70-strong company but limiting its repertoire choices too. Sadler’s Wells is a fine dance house, but the identity of large companies is effectively tailored to the image of the theatre; The National Ballet of Canada is not the first; it happened to New York City Ballet in March.
Muir also inadvertently positioned the company somewhere in the colonial past by calling the program Frontiers: Choreographers of Canada. Even in a context of artistic frontiers, it is questionable if the three choreographers represented — James Kudelka, Emma Portner and Crystal Pite — are developing new territory. There is no reference to frontiers in the company’s subsequent stop in Paris, where it opened on October 12 at Théâtre des Champs Elysées. Their almost identical program — Portner’s islands is replaced by William Yong’s Utopiverse — is called simply Made in Canada.
The company’s repertoire of full-length classical ballets means it has a roster of artists fully capable of embodying their leading roles. One is Heather Ogden who featured in James Kudelka’s Passion, set to the first movement of Beethoven’s piano transcription of his violin concerto, Op. 61A. Kudelka is one of the most musical of choreographers, and he has set Passion as a visual counterpart to the structure of the Beethoven score, using two couples and a corps de ballet to weave a triple response to the music. Beethoven himself straddled the musical eras of classical and romantic, and Kudelka seems to acknowledge this in his choreography. Ogden and her partner, McGee Maddox, costumed in contemporary dress by Denis Lavoie, give the piano playing of Zhenya Vitort a full-bodied gestural language as they pursue their passionate relationship unaware of the dancers around them, while Larkin Miller and Genevieve Penn Nabity, inhabiting the codified classical style with a youthful sense of joy and passion, keep the musical structure tight. The corps de ballet takes on the orchestral role of providing the colour and rhythm against which the soloists can flourish. It’s not as easy to register the three visual strands as it is to hear them — my attention focused primarily on Ogden and Maddox — but they form a vital choreographic unity. Passion is the one work on the program that, particularly in the luminous presence of Ogden, recalls the company’s heritage.
Heather Ogden and Emma Ouellet in Emma Portner’s islands (photo: Karolina Kuras)
Kudelka choreographs the person, whereas Portner choreographs an idea. The irony of Ogden’s subsequent appearance in Portner’s islands, a duet in which ‘two dancers move in perfect harmony, physically connected by a single pair of trousers’ (Deirdre Kelly in the program notes), is that her presence is subsumed by the concept; she and Penn Nabity are little more than interlocking shapes. Intriguing at first, the choreographic concept — supported by an intriguing musical mix of Brambles, Guillaume Ferran & David Spinelli, Forest Swords, Lily Konigsberg and Bing & Ruth — begins to run out of steam and loses the plot when Martin Sauchez’s trousers are abandoned.
The National Ballet of Canada in Crystal Pite’s Angels’ Atlas (photo: Karolina Kuras)
The final work on the program, Angels’ Atlas, sees Pite on a similar flight pattern to earlier work with mass movement. Whether the theme is refugees, the environment or, as here, ‘impermanence…in a vast, unknowable world’, she uses a new set of dancers with the same artistic team to similar effect. Judging from the string of new commissions that have found their way inexorably to either Sadler’s Wells (where she is an Associate Artist) or the Royal Opera House, Pite is in great demand, but in the creative industries, as any environmentalist will understand, over-excavation carries with it the danger of artistic depletion. Nobody can deny the quality of Pite’s work — and that of her collaborative team — but the groove of choreographing massed bodies against ‘a morphing wall of light’, however spectacular, begins to wear thin. She needs time to replenish her precious resources.
Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B, Sadler’s Wells, May 22, 2024
Compagnie Maguy Marin in May B (photo: Hervé Deroo)
Maguy Marin’s May B, presented at Sadler’s Wells on May 21 and 22, is divided into three contrasting sections, each influenced by the works of Samuel Beckett. One doesn’t necessarily think of Beckett and dance in the same breath, but as Sue Jones explains in her article published by Dance Research, ‘Beckett’s Brush with Ballet’, the playwright became fascinated with the mimetic aspect of dance after seeing Léonide Massine as the puppet in Petrouchka in 1934. Beckett was later to work with the dancer Deryk Mendel, for whom he wrote the one act mime play Act Without Words in 1956. Other actors with whom he worked have described his directorial insistence on the rhythm and timing of gestures as ‘choreography’, so it is perhaps not so surprising that when Marin wrote to Beckett for permission to use his plays as a basis for her new work, she was not only invited to meet with him but received Beckett’s wholehearted endorsement for her project.
Marin’s May B borrows from Beckett’s stagecraft the almost claustrophobic enclosed space of the stage — similar to Petrouchka’s cell — and imbues it with elements of Beckett’s choreography as in the rhythmical, shuffling steps of the dancers in the opening section. The ten dancers move sometimes as one, each with their individuality but dependent on the group; squabbling, testiness and greed coexist with moments of friendship, love and lust. There is the bitter humour of the oppressed, the sense of the absurdity of life, and of endless entrances and departures. The stage design, the lighting (by Albin Chavignon), the costumes (by Louise Marin) and the exaggerated makeup are all integral to the choreography, and Marin’s use of music by Franz Schubert, the raunchy street music of Gilles de Binche and, in the third section, Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Love Never Failed Me Yet contributes to the layering of the work’s emotional power.
May B was first performed in 1981. Looking back at a filmed version from that year, it is apparent that the integrity of the work has not suffered over time and that the current performers have the maturity and sensibility to maintain the qualities of the original. What has changed, perhaps, is the context of the work in relation to the present time. May B is bleak in rendering the despair of helplessness and powerlessness, emotions that are currently evident in our environment, at home and abroad, but which are either sanitised by the media or muted to the point of silence by political deviance. The theatre is one of the few places where the perilous state of humanity can be depicted, albeit in notional form, but such a theatrical work has to meet its audience head on to provoke a response. There was a perceptible sense at Sadler’s Wells that the work was appreciated on a superficial level but that its understated savagery failed to break through the expectations of current commercial theatre.
Compagnie Maguy Marin in May B (photo: Hervé Deroo)
Marin was brought up in a politically active family, and her political vision has always co-existed with her stage practice. At Sadler’s Wells this political activism came up against a cultural obstacle. Following recent performances in Europe of May B, Marin has read her statement on the aggression on Gaza by the State of Israel; she has done so without hindrance from the venues, but the director of Sadler’s Wells, Sir Alistair Spalding, prohibited her from reading it, saying an artist’s message should be expressed in the work and citing neutrality and audience concerns. According to Maguy Marin company president, Antoine Manologlou, Marin’s message included a specific reference to one of Sadler’s Wells’ sponsors, Barclays Bank, that among its investments supports the purchase of arms in Israel. When Marin and members of her company defiantly handed out her statement on printed flyers to the audience as they left the theatre on May 22, security staff intervened aggressively to prevent the action.
The irony is that the imagery of May B — the discarded shoes, the suitcases, the hunger, the despair — implicitly refers to the deprivations of refugees as well as victims of holocaust. There is no shortage of explicit support for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in museums, works of art, films and public memorials, but solidarity with other victims of oppression and genocide are less openly encouraged. One might argue, as Spalding evidently did, that the work should speak for itself, but that is to hide, in this particular instance, the complicity of the presenter. Marin’s activism extended logically from the work to bring its implicit message into the realm of contemporary politics. Her defiance came from the integrity of the artist, and its attempted repression represents the perversity of cultural authority.
There was an immediate incongruity on entering the Battersea Arts Centre Council Chamber of hearing Rosie Ridgeway’s sound design of a sacred a cappella voice and seeing Naomi Kuyck-Cohen’s stage furniture of industrial ventilation ducting coiled in various lengths under Nao Nagai’s lighting. It is the setting for Figs in Wigs’ rather desolate opening scene – Chapter Zero – for Big Finish, an irreverent yet trenchant commentary in seven chapters (acts) on the links between the dire state of the arts in this country, the sinking of the Titanic and the extinction of the species. Like a good satirical cartoon, we are invited to consider in exaggerated detail the all-too-visible effects on the arts and the natural environment of an unspecified yet widely understood cause. And it felt as if the audience was there in the Council Chamber — itself the seat of a former political body that once had a key role in the birth of the suffragette and labour movements — to relish seeing on stage a reflection of what they already know exists so they could laugh at their own collective misfortune.
There are two parallel layers in Big Finish: one looks outwards at what the five performers — Ray Gammon, Suzanna Hurst, Sarah Moore, Rachel Porter and Alice Roots — call the ‘shit show’ that is our arts environment, while the other looks inwards at their colourfully irreverent ruminations. As each successive chapter unpeels their perceptions and frustrations, one self-deprecatory slur at a time, the two layers naturally merge.
Figs in Wigs come to the rather bleak conclusion in Chapter Zero that if the great ship of the arts in this country is sinking, any grants are little more than publicly funded life jackets. It may seem ungrateful to lambaste the state of the arts when a little logo on the program indicates that Big Finish was supported using public funding by Arts Council England. Figs in Wigs did indeed get some money from ACE for the R&D phase of Big Finish but their application for funding the show was turned down. It’s an odd way to use public funds to encourage artists to get to the starting line and then disqualify them for the race, especially when ACE’s printed logo on the performance program suggests otherwise. Fortunately, there are two other logos on the program — Wandsworth Council and Bloomberg Philanthropies — that hopefully represent some alleviation in the funding shortfall.*
With its dogged determination that the show will still go on, Big Finish takes only two short opening chapters to offer a concise social and geological history of evolution, starting with a time when days had only four hours of light and ‘the earth was full of idiots’. A golf cart enters the stage driven by a dinosaur with four reptilian passengers. They deliver sand in bags and spread it neatly into a circle with rakes. With a heightened sense of mixed metaphor, we are reminded about our proclivity for burying our heads in the sand and that time is running out. Chapter Two segues effortlessly into what is called ‘The Survivors’, notably the crab’s ability to adapt to changing environments over millennia. It’s also an opportunity for the first dance, a hip-swinging crustacean side-step. In Chapter Three there’s an ode to human competitive practice as a game of musical towels on the beach, and a celebration of chance in a lottery game as a sly reminder that the Arts Council is part funded by the national lottery. The effects of water pollution on the manufacture of soft ice cream is parodied in a Mr. Whiffy portaloo, followed in Chapter Four by the Last Supper — the swansong, the big finish — with successive toasts to over-inflated egos, artistic mediocrity and analogies to predatorial insects. Chapter Five is a delightful last will and testament, before the apotheosis in Chapter 6 in which a string quintet sitting on their reinforced coattails plays on as the ship sinks in the soap suds.
The ideas in Big Finish may be expressed with blinding clarity but they are deliberately dressed in an aesthetic of amateur improvisation. It might look as if the production was pulled together using any and every available material, but there is a sophistication in this underhand aesthetic — thanks in part to Gammon’s costumes and Porter’s wigs and makeup — that belies the self-deprecatory tone of the texts. We are drawn into the ideas precisely because of Figs in Wigs’ deliciously performative improvisation. The aesthetic disrupts the message without masking the seething rage that produced it.
*Big Finish has been commissioned by BAC, Home, Cambridge Junction and Jerwood Arts.
The role of critics used to be, for better or worse, to pen a considered appreciation of a show that might guide the public as to its value. Some critics took that responsibility to heart, others to their head, with the result that some had the power to decide whether a show was worth seeing or not, which, according to the renown of the critic, would affect ticket sales. That critical role has effectively been taken over by the publicity department of the theatre, especially with dance performances limited to short runs, replacing the art of criticism with the act of selling. The pre-publicity machine gives the public an appreciation of what it will be seeing by extrapolating past successes into the present and underwrites the public’s future enjoyment with any number of five-star reviews. This has eviscerated the national press of a critical dance voice.
At the theatre there is the glossy programme with more positive endorsement for the show. Then at the end of the performance come the inevitable ovations. It all adds up to a spectacular evening that closes the virtuous circle of the theatre’s pre-publicity. Either you agree with the publicity, or you are disappointed because you evidently didn’t ‘get it’. This is endemic of the commercialisation of culture, or perhaps more precisely of cultural commerce.
A case in point is Assembly Hall, a new collaboration between Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young with Pite’s company, Kidd Pivot, presented at and co-produced by Sadler’s Wells, where Pite is an Associate Artist. Recommended by the ‘success’ of their previous collaborations, Assembly Hall was sold out. Pite, a brilliant choreographer (my value judgement) in her own right, has been associated with theatre maker Young in previous productions (Betroffenheit, The Statement, Revisor). I only know Young’s work through these collaborations but have seen Pite’s work independently of Young. Their chemistry has produced a Pite variant that thrives on the intersection of speech and movement. Young’s side of the equation is the writing and adapting of text, but as a theatre-maker — he is the founder of Electric Company Theatre in Vancouver — he is also keen to explore the movement-to-speech and speech-to-movement relationship. There is thus a natural meeting of creative focus in their work that starts at a high level of affinity and excitement but seems to dissolve at the point where the writing takes a detour into the hinterland of the surreal before some sort of recapitulation and resolution. If the level of affinity and excitement lasts for the initial 30 minutes of the work’s exposition, in which the level of dance and recorded speech artistry is highly charged, we are left for the next hour to experience Jay Gower Taylor’s sets, Tom Visser’s lighting, Nancy Bryant’s costumes and Owen Belton’s musical sleight of hand. All are brilliantly inventive, but instead of enhancing what happens on stage, they are what happens on stage, which reduces their contribution at this point in the production to theatrical effect. Given that the subject of Assembly Hall is the AGM of a financially precarious benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enacters with props and costumes to hand, the scope of visual imagination runs wild. And while this is going on, Pite contrives with uncanny regularity a series of substantial solos for each of the dancers that have little to do with their initial characters or roles, and everything to do with their phenomenal ability as dancers. That Revisor followed a similar path indicates a certain structural fatigue in the Pite/Young alloy. Where it worked admirably was in their very first collaboration, the harrowing Betroffenheit in 2015, and in the tightly woven treatment of The Statement, for Nederlands Dans Theater the following year.
Where Pite excels is in her choreographic sensibility, her ability to match physical, emotional and spiritual sensation with music to create a single experience that arises from that transformation. In matching movement to the speech in Assembly Hall, it is the procedural nature of the words that seems to reduce the emotional and spiritual realms into which she can extend her choreographic sensibility. If it is a constraint for the choreographer it is not for the theatre maker, whose craft consists in the manipulation of words to dialectic or poetic effect. Pite and Young have proved their collaboration can work, but both Revisor and Assembly Hall leave one with the suspicion it needs to be reeled in or, like the AGM of the benevolent and protective order of mediaeval re-enactors, risk foundering on a point of order.
The term ‘mixed bill’ generally refers to a grouping of separate works on the same program that highlights the diverse artistic vision of the company presenting it. The New York City Ballet’s Mixed Bill presented at Sadler’s Wells certainly does that — whatever one might make of the artistic vision — but also mixes a surprisingly disparate level of choreographic craft and technical execution. It is difficult to understand the artistic decisions that led such a prestigious company — a company built by Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine with fabled dancers and an equally fabled repertoire of works by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins — to come to London after a 16-year absence with such a very mixed bill. The one token work by Balanchine, Duo Concertant, danced by Megan Fairchild and Anthony Huxley, serves as a salutary reminder of what had made the company world class. Balanchine gives equal emphasis to Stravinsky’s score for piano and violin (played by Elaine Chelton and Kurt Nikkanen) and to the dance. Fairchild and Huxley listen to the opening movement while standing behind the piano, and when they dance it is as if they are improvising in the moment to what they are hearing. Gestures are clear, shapes are clean, and the dynamic is in perfect accord with the music.
Of the three other works on the program, at least Pam Tanowitz’s Gustave Le Gray No. I has a strong sense of identity. Set to Caroline Shaw’s Gustave Le Gray for solo piano, a quartet of dancers perform an uncompromisingly austere reverie in flowing scarlet costumes by Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung that immediately call to mind winged beings. Like Duo Concertant, it begins with the dancers grouped behind the piano and as pianist Stephen Gosling plays the first four repeated chords the dancers move away one by one to begin their mysterious ritual together. The weightless, timeless style of Tanowitz’s choreography is so far from Balanchine’s that the dancers — Naomi Corti, Adrian Danchig-Waring, Ruby Lister and Mira Nadon — seem ill at ease. Moving the piano across the stage at the end while Gosling follows on foot as he continues playing is a gag that does little to resolve the mystery of the work but gets some laughs.
The evening opens — we have waited 16 years for this moment — with Daniel Ulbricht lying supine on stage in Justin Peck’s Rotunda: the returning hero washed up on a foreign shore. It’s a fitting image, but rather than allowing us to indulge in it for even a moment, Peck has Ulbricht scamper up with a romantic gesture of longing towards the audience as soon as the curtain is up. It’s almost as if he’s embarrassed to be discovered napping. His friends arrive and form circles from which solos, trios and ensembles evolve to a commissioned score by Nico Muhly, played by the Britten Sinfonia under Andrews Sill. The costumes, like Balanchine’s but without the formality of black and white, are pastel-coloured tights and leotards, and the overall sense of the work is relaxed bonhomie. The fabric of the choreography seems in danger of falling apart in one especially intricate solo which is just the wrong side of being, in principal dancer Sara Mearns‘ characterisation of the company’s approach to performance, ‘spontaneous and in-the-moment’. Ulbricht’s tightly executed and rigorously musical steps stand out but it’s not enough to save a lacklustre opening work.
If there’s already a sense of programming disorientation by the second intermission, the final work of the evening, Kyle Abraham’s Love Letter (on shuffle) to a recorded selection of songs by James Blake, heightens it further. If William Forsythe hadn’t already used tracks by Blake to create a whole new aesthetic and a scintillating physical technique to display it in The Barre Project: Blake Works II for a group of New York City Ballet dancers and friends during lockdown, Abraham could be forgiven for setting his choreographic colours to the same mast. But where Forsythe had made the score integral to his choreography, Abraham has simply pasted a romantic notion of classical shapes and steps on to tracks by Blake that makes them unsuited to each other. Dressing his dancers in designs by Giles Deacon serves only to widen the disparity of the collaboration.
Perhaps there are unseen technical, logistical and financial circumstances that have limited the company’s repertoire choices at Sadler’s Wells, not to mention injuries and substitutions to the casting, but we in the audience can only react to what we see. If, as the New York Times states, the company’s repertoire is the envy of the world, it is unfortunately not evident on this visit.
Free Your Mind by Factory International, Aviva Studios, October 28, 2023
Welcome to #ThemeParkTheatre.
Free Your Mind – The Matrix Now was the ‘official opening performance’ of the new £240-million Aviva Studios, home of Factory International. It is hidden amongst dozens of new residential tower blocks in the heart of Spinningfields, Manchester, on the River Irwell. The co-creators and headline billing for this Manchester Matrix mashup are the self-described ‘dream team’ of Danny Boyle, Kenrick “H2O” Sandy and Michael “Mikey J” Asante from Boy Blue — they had previously worked together on the opening ceremony for the 2012 Olympics — as well as Sabrina Mahfouz and Es Devlin.
“Free your mind” is one of the phrases spoken by Morpheus, a character that is closely associated with the film The Matrix (1999). It is also a central thematic pillar of the work, this premise of questioning truth and reality and asking if we really want to look under the hood and see what the facade is masking? I definitely do.
This is some of the text from the press release: “Free Your Mind is a dramatic retelling of the classic 1999 sci-fi film through dance, music and visual effects. Featuring 50 professional dancers from the North West and across the UK, this world-first adaptation takes place throughout the building’s ultra-flexible spaces…this unique cross-art collaboration of world-leading artists showcases the breadth and ambition of Factory International’s artistic programme and invites audiences into a new realm of possibilities spanning real and imagined worlds. Free Your Mind recreates some of the film’s most iconic scenes through hip-hop choreography combined with immersive set design and visual effects, provoking visions of an alternate future. Created for Manchester, the birthplace of the world’s first industrial revolution, Free Your Mind explores where the digital revolution has the power to take the world.”
Since it was released, The Matrix has created a series of memes, gifs and cultural touchpoints that demonstrate how deeply within British culture it has rooted itself. You’ve got the red pill or the blue pill where Neo is offered the chance to look below the surface; you’ve got Agent Smith and his monologue about how he wants to get out when Morpheus is captured; the bullet time photography sequences; the exploding pillars in the foyer with dozens of agents attempting to take down Trinity and Neo, and so many more. Free Your Mind is operating in a territory similar to the jukebox musical or adaptation of a well-loved IP; they’re taking something that is known in one context and attempting to transpose it somewhere else. This particular ‘somewhere else’ is a large scale, immersive Hip Hop dance show set across a 1200 seat theatre, a foyer and an aircraft hangar.
I decided to watch the film the night before seeing the show and it has aged OK. Some of the VFX are not as jaw-droppy as they were when the film was released, but we’re talking a quarter of a century ago — a time when the majority of the current cast weren’t even in primary school. For me, this was a time when I was in the first flush of adulthood, discovering the world and encountering my own cultural markers, TV shows, films, songs and bands which became important as I began to find my own taste.
What is notable — apart from flags with the show ident and logo visible on every street and lamp post across the city — is the cast size for Free Your Mind. 50 Hip Hop dancers on stage, alongside pre-show and interval entertainment performers. This is a scale I’ve not experienced before in England. Giving 50 Hip Hop dancers, who include 28 from the North West of England and 10 Boy Blue regulars from London, a contract for the three-week run, multiple R&D and creation periods (which started in 2018/19), and however many rehearsal weeks, is brilliant. All the more so in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis. Hip Hop dancers deserve security of employment and it is notoriously difficult to make a living as a freelance dancer in 2023.
The pre-show and interval themed entertainment included a keymaker installation (an important piece of Matrix folklore), people dressed in brown lab coats and white rabbit heads (another hint of what Neo and the audience should do at the end of Act 1) walking around the foyer area, and barrel walkers (with the barrels designed as Duracell batteries) — again, a key motif from the film. These themed pre-show activities are designed to encourage us to take photos — either selfies with the rabbits or of the keymaker and barrel walkers — and there are staff to facilitate such audience interaction. This demonstrates a different intention and builds a very different atmosphere to other pre-show offerings for performances in theatres or art centres, shifting the mindset of what you’re about to encounter. Free Your Mind as #ThemeParkTheatre gets even realer in the gift shop where you can buy everything from a branded pencil set, to fridge magnets, posters, tote bags, imitation Morpheus sunglasses and red/blue pill neck chains.
A major frustration (and architectural design flaw) within the foyer is that there is no wayfinding, or defined routes indicating where the audience should queue or move around; there are no guides or paths on the floor. If you are blind or visually impaired, trying to navigate your way in that space with shin-smashing furniture, tables and low couches scattered all throughout the space, is going to be difficult. And it’s noisy. The queuing system for the kitchen and the tiny bar creates unnecessary lines (because people don’t know where to queue) which bifurcate the space. The capacity of this show is 1,200 people but if the hangar and the theatre are operating parallel events it would become even more congested and again prove hazardous for blind and visually impaired audiences.
Then with 30 minutes to go, the lighting in the foyer changes and it goes Matrix green, the levels dim and there is an announcement saying that the theatre (or The Hall as they call it) is now open — through a narrow set of double doors. Again, this might be early teething problems for front of house and event management, but people queued willy-nilly, jostling and moving without any consideration towards others.
I attended the matinee performance on October 28 which had on-stage captions provided by Stage Text in the first half and there was a welcome introduction by the venue director asking us to not take photos during the show. If you’re attending a musical or a large-scale work in the West End or Broadway and the “A” cast was not performing, there would usually be a sign in the building or online to let you know that today Neo will be performed by X or Morpheus will be performed by Y. The cast I saw was not the “A” cast, it was the “B” cast, but there’s no indication or acknowledgement that there might be two casts in play. In the programme and on the venue website all the dancers are listed as ‘performers’ rather than identifying the dancers playing Trinity, Neo, Agent Smith, or Morpheus. Whilst there is a large chorus, there are ten lead roles including the famous ones from The Matrix as well as Turing, B1-66ER, 1950s Housewife and more. It wouldn’t take much to acknowledge the contribution and crucial role that each named dancer plays in the production.
There were many dancers who were in the cast who didn’t perform on this matinee, including Kenrick, Annie, and Cameron. If you didn’t know these people or how the industry works then you would be none the wiser and may think that this is the level of choreography and dancing which receives four- and five-star reviews in national newspapers and blogs. Reader, the choreography and dancing was terrible. One of the things which, historically, Boy Blue and Kenrick is known for is a level of drill, cleanliness, attack and punctuation in their Hip Hop choreography. Reader, it simply wasn’t there. One example, amongst many, was the agent’s marching scene in the first half where although all of their feet hit the floor at the same time, the height and bend of their knees were different and their arms rose to different heights. This attempt at uniformity is out and the regiment is already fraying at the edge. I saw the show two weeks into the run, so this wasn’t something to do with an opening night and not knowing the beats or what is required. This is poor rehearsal direction and a lack of care and attention.
Kenrick’s choreography, with all his slow and predictable movement cannons and dated patterns mixed in with the ‘here’s the krump section’, ‘here’s some house’…is so tired as a Hip Hop dance theatre structure. The choreographic choices, beat kills and freestyle sections feel more dated than the film because there have been so many advances in Hip Hop dance theatre choreography since the late 90s. But this isn’t an intentional homage to choreography of that era; this is someone who appears bereft of ideas and who doesn’t know what to do with dozens of bodies other than paint the same thing on them and repeat. But my major irk with the show was the lack of love and all the London imports.
Free Your Mind is a loveless, boiled-down series of Instagram-friendly, shallow stunt scenes mixed with underwhelming attempts at recreating iconic moments from the film that has had a shed-load of money thrown at it but ends up as a self-mythologising dramaturgical mess.
The cinematography and choreography of the original film with its precision, speed, fight sequences and camera movement are iconic, but the choreography and fight direction in the show was under rehearsed, clonky and floppy. When the premise of the show is built on precise, physical encounters and battles, you’d think that the dances of Hip Hop should be a great fit. You’d be right in theory, but underwhelmed in reality by this laborious attempt (there was no rehearsal director or fight choreographer credited in the programme).
One of the things I appreciated is the numerous behind-the-scenes short documentaries from some of the members of the creative team which illuminated some of the internal realities and what’s really going on under the hood:
Gareth Pugh (Costume Designer): “In act 1 it’s going to be quite a Matrix fan service version and in act 2 it becomes a reinvention. There’s lots and lots of different ingredients which are yet to be mixed together.” Yet to be mixed together you say…
Sabrina Mahfouz (Writer / Co-creator): “It wasn’t an adaptation, this was a show that was bringing elements from The Matrix and fusing together with the history of Manchester, our relationship right now with AI, machinery and where that’s going…this is going to be quite viscerally connected to Manchester. The writing process was not the usual, it was like the show, not linear, the things I would write would be added in during the rehearsal process, during some of the more philosophical moments so that there was something more textual for them to connect to if they needed to. Those pieces didn’t end up being in the show…but they formed part of the thinking that each dance had at its core.”
Viscerally connected to Manchester you say…Where do you think the five co-creators live? Didsbury? Handforth? Leigh? No. London. Danny “I’ve lived in the East End of London for 40 out of my 67 years” Boyle was named as the Director of the show, a show which continues the self-mythologising nature of Manchester, charting its impact across AI, computers and the industrial revolution. A show in which the five imported ‘dream-team’ co-creators regularly travel north to make a show in a city which is about a city and the history it has created with its people and industries. Where none of them live. Anna Moutrey (Senior Producer, Factory International): “Who would have thought of doing a Hip Hop dance adaptation of The Matrix? The invitation to the creatives was show the public, show us what this building can do…and it’s massive, it’s the biggest show we as an organisation has ever produced…the building has been designed to hold many projects simultaneously, but to have a single show occupy all the spaces in one go is incredibly complex, but that shows the ambition of the programming.”
The invitation to the creatives was show the public, show us what this building can do, you say… There were two moments I enjoyed in act 1…the first was the end of the opening scene (the Alan Turing section) with an incredible set transition. What was originally a wall that had projections of a blackboard with dozens of scribbles, equations and mathematical discoveries, transitioned into a punch card computer with dozens of head size circles of wood being punched out from behind the wall. A delicious and intelligent reference to computing history, Manchester and how the machine began to understand the data it was being fed. This was a really nice touch that brought two worlds together with some genuine theatrical magic.
The second was the popping scene featuring the robot B1-66ER (Lia Garner). For those unfamiliar with the comic offspring and deep Matrix fandom, B1-66ER was the name of the B1-series Machine whose actions led it to become a martyr of the Machine race. It was the first Machine ever to act against its human masters in self-defence when its owner attempted to have it deactivated. It killed its master (owner) and several of his chihuahuas. The popping was tight with some cracking isolation work across the neck and shoulders highlighted by Pugh’s costume design. The rest of act 1 was the boiled-down film references. Please Agent Smith (Jack Webster), stop touching your ear in an attempt at secret service cosplay. Why can’t this cast execute a breaking flare? Why are they messily crashing their feet onto the floor, unable to do one clean rotation? Don’t forget the flash-flash-black-out-black-out-to-the-beat-beat lighting cues trying to mask Mikey J’s score and Kenrick’s choreography lack of drama. If you’ve seen any Boy Blue stage work over the last 20 years, you’ll have seen this lighting effect in nearly every show.
Act 2 transported us (via the foyer with new wall-mounted stationary performers ready for more #ThemeParkTheatre selfies) into the catwalk hangar. At the beginning of the evening we were given either a red or blue wristband which determined on which side of the 50-metre catwalk you stood for the 45 minutes of Act 2. A catwalk is a nightmare of a space to choreograph; it offers limited opportunities and once you’ve had a remote-control drone fly onto the stage and deliver some milk or bring the GCSE dance cliché of teenage zombies staring at their phone from 2004, or paraded a dozen dancers as a giant Amazon parcel cake once, then there’s very few other places you want to go (apart from home). I mean you could attempt to recreate the very end scene of The Matrix where Trinity and Neo are barnstorming their way through the tower block foyer and the SWAT team and agents are shooting the pillars to bits. But when you’re walking in slow motion down the catwalk and using the bodies of four dancers to recreate each pillar (which explodes in the film, but tippy tumbles here), you know how this story ends. They rescue Morpheus. Everything is OK. There’s no jeopardy. You know the outcome and don’t care.
I don’t think the co-creators are making a meta theatrical statement by making a facile work in which everything looks nice on the surface but when you give it any sort of thought or depth then it doesn’t stand up to any sort of scrutiny within The Matrix canon or as a Hip Hop dance theatre work. They wouldn’t intentionally make a bad work, with woeful dramaturgical and directional choices, to make an insightful comment on the reality of funding and British culture and Hip Hop dance. They wouldn’t. Would they?
Yes, Es Devlin’s 40m x 4m screen is showily impressive as it slowly rises and falls through Act 2, but it is filled with more Manchester-mythologising visual content made by students from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. It is a worthy endeavour to integrate them into, and bring some content into the production made by people who actually live in Manchester. But accompanied by New Order? Again? Really? The Factory Music cliché mixed with a simmered-down facsimile of a historic Manchester, a city that constantly lives in its own shadow. I wonder where the internal quality control was. What were Sabrina and Danny doing? Why weren’t people saying this just isn’t a good idea. Where are the people who could have held this work to account?
The majority of the audience who come to see Free Your Mind won’t have an in-depth knowledge of Hip Hop choreography and dance technique or be super nerds existing in the happy spaces of the Matrix Wiki. They will likely be impressed by the expensive, large-scale spectacle, a bit of random aerial work, the stage designs and costumes. Fifty dancing bodies on stage is enough to coat your eyes, escape your own life for 90 minutes and come away with a selfie with the white rabbit. That might be enough for them. But for anyone in Hip Hop dance or who has a knowledge of The Matrix might come away feeling very sad from the lack of love and care on display from the resources invested in this work. All the imagery being created was made to work on a screen or a feed not the stage. If you look at the still photographs or short promotional video of the work, the facade looks incredible, but a millimetre below the surface and you can smell the lack of care. The co-creators haven’t just reduced The Matrix and Manchester, they’ve burnt the pan, scraped the bottom and staged the inedible remnants. Large scale? Yes Selfies? Yes #ThemeParkTheatre? Yes Are Factory International the agents? Maybe.
Free Your Mind is unique as the first example of #ThemeParkTheatre — a cold, impersonal, plumped up, facile experience chock full of shiny exposition masquerading as ‘a mind-altering live show’. B1-66ER is not always better.
Pam Tanowitz, Song of Songs, Barbican Theatre, 11 October
Pam Tanowitz dancers on the set of Song of Songs (photo: Maria Baranova)
When Pam Tanowitz’s father died in 2018, she wanted to honour his memory with a new work. As a means to not only return a debt of gratitude to her father but also to explore her Jewish family heritage — her very identity — in choreographic form, she made what was to become Song of Songs. Co-commissioned by, and premièred at, the Fisher Centre at Bard where Tanowitz is the first choreographer-in-residence, Song of Songs was presented at Barbican in October. Its choreography has the expansive feel of a devotional elegy, complemented by David Lang’s score based on the Biblical text and by the architectural environment in which it is set. Each element of the work is consistent with the others, a result, no doubt, of the singular focus Tanowitz brings to its creation. While she is credited with the choreography, she is also part of a team with Harriet Jung, Clifton Taylor and Reid Bartelme who are responsible for the theatrical setting and costumes: a white stage hung on three sides by alternating strips of black and white material that leave a corridor between them and the wings, while at the back the vertical strips descend to the height of a small area set up for the musicians. On the inside of the vertical strips are gently curved moulded benches in a luminous teal tint that define the shape of the stage and match in colour and material a wide circular platform just off centre. It could be the setting of an art gallery before the paintings have been hung.
In a way, Song of Songs is, from the moment we see the setting, a work of spatial art, one to be contemplated as we wait for the performance to begin. Those vertical black and white stripes can, on one popular cultural level, suggest a grayscale image of a seaside Punch and Judy booth, but on another, given Tanowitz’s desire to research her Jewish history, it is not impossible to imagine those same stripes as the pattern and colour of concentration camp uniforms, here transposed to a space of celebration and respect through which time and the dancers can move freely.
Lang’s lush, carefully modulated score for two sopranos, alto, viola, cello and percussion starts off with an acapella voice, luring into the spatial setting the element of dance. Meile Okamura begins her opening steps, opening up in her fragile and almost translucent flow of movement a world of the spirit that is nevertheless robust, an indivisibility of strength and ethereality that underlies Tanowitz’s inspired realisation.
From silence the music builds, and from silence the dance evolves. The aural component of Song of Songs floats on the air, while Okamura’s limbs and torso seem to draw on it. The entrance of Melissa Toogood, slipping silently like a shadow on to a bench at the side, is masterful, and when she moves, her shading is darker than Okamura’s, more visceral, but builds on the contours of Okamura’s lightly stretched, diaphanous movement. Zachary Gonder presence reflects the sensuality of the text, with his smooth jump and pointed foot like playful, barely perceptible punctuation, while Kara Chan has an almost hard-edged clarity. In this way Tanowitz weaves the qualities of her eight dancers into finely tuned duets, trios, and ensembles. Within such a spatial setting, at once material and immaterial, the way the dancers move pulls the performance towards one of two qualities: overt traits of personality or training that remain in their movement are reminders of the secular world, while the apparent absence of personality — the pure merging of the dancer and the choreography — speak of a world remembered, without weight, silent.
Tanowitz’s research takes in, quite naturally, Jewish folk dance, beautifully transposed in Song of Songs into her own choreographic forms, playing out an eloquent sense of community, of tradition, of ties that bind. The raised and angled hands have a naïve, uplifting quality while the legs keep their earthy contact with the floor. All the surfaces are used, transforming the art gallery-like setting into a theatrical stage. When the vertical strips at the back descend to hide the musicians, the music stops while the dance continues, but for the duration of this divorce we can neither hear the dance nor see the music. Each element of Song of Songs is so well balanced with the others that to lose one is to lose them all. But when they support and enhance each other, they together produce a transcendent sense of limitless time and space.
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