Resolution 2019: works by Vain, Minogue-Stone and Ben & Fred

Posted: February 13th, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Resolution 2019: works by Vain, Minogue-Stone and Ben & Fred

Resolution 2019: Works by Vendetta Vain, Elliot Minogue-Stone and Ben & Fred, January 29

Isabella Arboleda Tovar and Pauline Thuriot in Sighs, Cries and Lies (photo: Joon-Kim Young)

This year The Place has partnered with, among others, Jackson’s Lane, to cross-fertilize choreography with circus arts at Resolution. It’s a welcome initiative that hopefully develops the gene pool of both choreographic and circus expression rather than simply expanding the catchment area for Resolution’s artists. 

Vee Smith, who performs under the name of Vendetta Vain, trained at the National Centre for Circus Arts and Butterface is her first circus solo work. She is not the first to perform naked on a trapeze (though perhaps the first to do so at Resolution), but she approaches her performance with as little coyness and pudeur as apology. The title of her work is a derogatory noun for ‘an attractive woman with an undesirable face’, which is clearly understood to mean an attractive female body with an undesirable face. Vain makes this point quite evident by hiding her face, for most of the performance, under a muslin concoction tied loosely at the neck to which she attaches false eyelashes and a rude approximation of lips. But while our focus in Butterface is on the body and what Vain does with it, it is on our minds that Vain has focused her argument; the two don’t always acknowledge each other in the formation of her ‘message’.

There are two sets of projected texts, one that is designed to ease Vain into the performance as she enters behind two large feathers, and the other conveys the sexual animosity and stereotyping of the female circus artist as she performs on the trapeze. Because our eyes are watching her rather than the texts on the back wall, there is an argument that Butterface would benefit from Vain speaking the second set of texts while performing. It would give the taping together of her legs, for example, an edge of satirical wit over the comic absurdity of her actions. Vain’s choice of songs (FlawlessPaper Bag and She) show a natural sense of self-deprecatory humour and her subversive intelligence will not suffer fools. It’s a potent mixture.    

Elliot Minogue-Stone is a graduate of the incommensurable Orley Quick and the Hairy Heroines, inviting us in Sighs, Cries and Lies to ‘delve into platitudes, taboos, tangibility, big questions and odd sensations’ with the same lack of disambiguation he once brought to discussing big dogs and screwdriver heads. He takes an important step from performer to choreographer by creating Sighs, Cries and Lies on Isabella Arboleda Tovar and Pauline Thuriot who translate his sense of the absurd into another key. At first it’s a very low key, as the two bounce on to the stage in red shorts, white tops and trainers, arms enigmatically raised in front of their faces. But as Tovar begins to deck the stage in a wealth of props from a bright red shopping basket, the key begins to modulate. Sighs, Cries and Lies is not a work that can be defined by its external shape but by the paths that run through its apparent chaos, a physical grammar of associations and collisions that offer a fractured landscape of vulnerability. You make of it what you will; its meaning coalesces around a free association of props, popular songs, wit and repartee that Tovar and Thuriot weave into an emotional pattern that ultimately holds them — and us — together. 

Ben & Fred’s The Juggling of Science brings together two jugglers, Frederike Gerstner and Ben Nicholson, in a light-hearted introduction to quantum physics. The recorded voice of Professor Circumference introduces his two understudies with the tone of Listen with Mother but the principles in ‘possibly the most fun science lecture you could hope to see’ are staged rather than heard. Gerstner is a scientist in a white lab coat at her desk waiting for Dr. Dextrose (Nicholson), to arrive. With their wit and an ability to illustrate complex scientific notions like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the construction of an atom, dark matter and neutrinos through juggling, Gerstner and Nicholson have created a gem of crossover stimulation. The problem is that the crossover bypasses almost completely the choreographic nature of Resolution’s program. In his collaborations with Seeta Patel and Alexander Whitley, Sean Gandini has shown how the disciplines of juggling and dance can learn from and stimulate each other, but The Juggling of Science frames itself resolutely and unapologetically within science; it’s not a question of the excellence of the work but of the programming choices of this ‘festival of new choreography’.


Ian Abbott on Impermanence Presents…

Posted: February 6th, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ian Abbott on Impermanence Presents…

Impermanence Presents…at Bristol Old Vic, January 2019

Jane Mason in Night Flying (photo: Benjamin J Borley)

Impermanence Presents… is the result of a meeting between Tom Morris and Impermanence Dance; a season of curated works (five in a row from the 15-19 January followed by one each in February, March and April) presented in the newly refurbished Weston Studio by Impermanence Dance. The season is completed (on April 25) with Impermanence’s latest iteration of BAAL on the main stage; Bristol may have a new addition for small scale and experimental dance presentation adding value to the programming at Wardrobe Theatre and Trinity Arts.

Consider for a moment Pink Suits, Figs in Wigs, Jane Mason, Laila Diallo, Crystal Zillwood, and Tom Thom: what they have in common is quiet, intimate technique combined with virtuosic movements laced with shocking, live art pop and big cabaret bombast. If you whisk these artists, their voices and sensibilities in a performance cauldron you would come out with something very close to an Impermanence show; the presentation of these artists demonstrates both a dissection and curation of Impermanence’s own DNA. I will focus on the two full-length works I saw in the first week; Night Flying by Jane Mason with David Williams and Solo For Two by Jean Abreu.

Jane Mason and The Choreography of Things™ is an anchor to which Mason returns after employing this performance mode in her previous works Singer(string, tape, stage weights, sewing machine), Life Forces (slides, cardboard tubes, projectors) and now Night Flying. Jane Mason and The Choreography of Things™ is one of two operating modes: Jane doing and Jane dancing. It is a rare skill to be able to sustain attention while demonstrating an alternative function of everyday objects, but she succeeds in unfolding a mirrored Jacob’s Ladder, scattering galaxies of fine-grained sand or revealing a reflective blanket/satellite. She imbues these objects with a sense of importance and handles them with a care and delicacy that reflects her as a choreographer and performer.

As we enter the studio we see all the composite parts (wigs, fan, guitar) laid out on the floor, to be revealed over the succeeding 70 minutes. We know what is coming but that doesn’t make it any less satisfying as the objects slowly make their way onto the stage through the bodies of the two performers. Night Flying self-defines as: ‘Drawing on ideas related to deep time, the night sky and landscapes of being, Jane Mason and her long-time collaborator David Williams explore a constellation of associations related to memory, change, wonder, scale and materiality’s imagination.’ It’s a choreography for the small hours, a choreography for the darkest part of the night, for the 4:07am in you when the streets and cities and landscapes are stilling, when the world has evacuated the day, when you are yet to meet the sunrise. 

The idea of choreography as a constellation or way of mapping the work is in play; there are clearly defined episodes when Mason and Williams orate themselves and their own histories, amplify their physicality when bedecked in cheap wigs, playing guitar or revelling in imitated bodies. While the ‘glue’ between these episodes isn’t always immediately clear, they exist together rather like planets in a bigger galaxy. 

The presence of Williams as performer and as co-creator alters the tone in comparison to Mason’s previous works but he slips into her orbit and complements the intensity and energy. Williams is a chameleon with significant solo moments as an end of the pier comedian/local radio DJ/bingo caller with exquisite rapid-fire, deadpan, witty wordplay; a gentle, sand-blowing floor sculptor or as lead dancer in his accurate skewering of the false curtain call modesty of European modern dance theatre with repeated bows, thumbs up and the humble chest touch. Together they fit.

As Mason describes the tale of her grandfather as author of an aviation manual on how to fly in low visibility, there is a neat parallel in how people may respond to the work. There are times when some may be unclear on what is going on and why certain things are happening but Mason and Williams are our deep space guides, inviting us and acknowledging us with a rich and considered visual terrain matched with an elegant deployment of language. Night Flying offers us a portal into significance and insignificance; it’s crafted with intimacy and delivered with poise. It’s everything and nothing. We are together and we are alone.

Jean Abreu’s Solo For Two is a 60-minute trio featuring Abreu (as choreographer and performer), Rita Carpinteiro and a robot: ‘Two dancers, two sides of the same coin, caught in a struggle to find their place in the world. A little robot called Macheba both interacts and observes the dancers, mirroring and absorbing our human identities.’ Guy Cools is on dramaturg duty and Michele Panegrossi is the creative technologist behind Macheba, which seems to be less a robot than a remote-controlled vehicle with a few basic modifications: a pivoting birdie that could turn on/off and nod, a palm sized projector intermittently casting green/grey visual noise and a sizeable bluetooth speaker giving directional sound capabilities. While recognizing that the creation of sophisticated robotics is an expensive process, Macheba is nevertheless distinctly underwhelming as a device and in the way it is used choreographically.

Abreu and Carpinteiro are admirable performers executing their movements with fine levels of punch and nuance, but what they are delivering is a choreographic vocabulary and narrative that is familiar, unnecessary and stale; how the work self describes and its translation into my audience reality is poles apart. Broken into around eight sections there are duets (where Carpinteiro displays fine physical execution by climbing all over, in and around Abreu whilst not touching the floor (echoing James Cousins’ There We Have Been seven years ago), solos (full of stuttering beginnings) and a particular passage that left me in a minor rage:

Contemporary Dance enters (stage left). Contemporary Dance continues to role, slap and sweat itself on the floor moving earnestly to an inconsequential soundtrack. Eight minutes pass. Contemporary Dance is enjoying the solo. The ceiling of the newly refurbished Weston Studio has some architectural merit but having attended three nights this week I can confirm the angle and lack of lower back support in row B leaves a considerable ache and discomfort in my body each night (I shall not be returning to the Weston Studio to see any more dance whilst this seating is in place). Contemporary Dance continues. We are still in a haze-filled semi-darkness. The robot has not moved. 

Both Night Flying and Solo For Two are made by artists who have been choreographing their own work for more than 10 years and performing for nearly double that; I’m left asking questions around the currency of ideas, audience connectivity and how artists continue to develop and exercise their practice. 

I recognise there is some comfort in familiarity (this is how the majority of film franchises, ballet and Company Wayne McGregor work) by following the tried and tested methods, ideas and executions, but Solo For Two left me with a conceptual hollowness, smelling the funding bid tick boxes (hello robot) and a weary emotional dissatisfaction. It is littered with the tired clichés that some artists/venues/curators working across dance are attempting to dismantle, ensuring audiences are not frustrated but embraced. 

A triple bill started the week featuring a solo from Bristol-based Laila Diallo — who choreographically christened the studio — recycling material from two previous works in a 25-minute short offering, a mix of pedestrian movement, a marking of the time/space with lx tape and a delicious recurring choreographic balancing astride a chair revealing mixed with a broken ballet technique; as a keeper of time and movement Diallo is a study of concentrated movement. 

I won’t mention the indulgent waste that was Ways of the Blue by Bandi Meszerics; the only redeeming feature being a knitted cyan balaclava tentacle beard that he wore for six minutes, but I do want to mention Tom Thom. Bookending the night in their double block colour boiler suits, slow-ankle-tapping and totem-pole-shuffling in the foyer on our arrival, Tom Thom continue at the interval until their stage time as the final part of the night. With their super worn soft leather footwear (even the soles had been worn away through the 1000s of repetitions) we are treated to a 15-minute remix of slow dance approaches to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Relax that never quite lets us get to crescendo. They are a classic performance art-pop cabaret duo with an act that makes audiences visibly recoil and cover their eyes in reaction to the way in which their shuffle/hug/dance manifests. An act of physical virtuosity.


Resolution 2019: works by Cisarikova, Green and Harris-Walters, January 25

Posted: February 3rd, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Resolution 2019: works by Cisarikova, Green and Harris-Walters, January 25

Resolution 2019: works by Cisarikova, Green and Harris-Walters, January 25

All the works on this evening’s Resolution program begin with cogent ideas that have strong emotional integrity. Michaela Cisarikova’s I Love Myself, Do You? examines the duality of identity and self-worth, Sara Green transforms her own experiences of major spinal surgery in Burnt Out and Dani Harris-Walters traces a journey in search of fatherhood in Happy Father’s Day. Both Cisarikova and Green use striking imagery at the start of their respective works while Harris-Walters uses his presence alone to reveal his biologically-inspired choreographic exploration. While each beginning holds promise, in a Darwinian sense Harris-Walters is the only one to keep that promise throughout, ensuring its survival somewhere in our choreographic imagination.

What happens to a work that begins well but trails off in interest? Where does the interest go and why? Ideas in choreographic terms are argued primarily through the body and visual imagery, working with music as an emotional and rhythmic support. Each of this evening’s works places the body in a central role; Cisarikova suggests ‘the old Cherokee fable of two wolves fighting within you’ by the initial entangled embrace between herself and Jenn Vogtle; Green divides her persona into four performers each shaking off their oversized jackets as a metaphor of disintegration, while Harris-Walters takes us through his own body’s encounter with the process of procreation. It could be argued that Harris-Walters has an advantage by using text; without it the physical component would not add up to much of an argument, but it is the way he gleefully pairs text with gestures and unassuming hip hop sequences that engages the imagination of the audience. Borrowing from his own material, this process of engagement is like a mating ritual that depends on the maintenance of stimulus for its successful outcome. 

I Love Myself, Do You? opens on a billowing swathe of greenish gold parachute silk suspended diagonally from an upper corner covering much of the stage. In the middle of the silk is a hole through which Vogtle is supposed to rise in the dark on the shoulders of someone hidden underneath but a premature lighting cue finds her on her way up a little unsteadily and the magic is lost; it is on such small details that the fate of visual imagery depends. More importantly, for its overpowering spatial influence, the silk seems to have a relatively small impact on the work’s concept; Cisarikova joins Vogtle in the centre opening for a duet, seen from the waist up, that has a sculptural quality of both a physical and a psychological battle, but when the silk is later withdrawn its significance is called into question. Simeon Miller’s lighting makes clever use of silhouette projections inside the silk that present alternative identities, but when Anna Guzak slides out from under the silk, her role in the duality of good and evil seems superfluous. Ross Allchurch’s score accompanies the work but is not sufficiently anchored to keep it together. 

In Burnt Out Sara Green, with assistant choreographer Sara Kaspersen, sets out to translate experiences and memories of surgery through the filters of illustration (Simon Gardner) and music (Burnt Outby Jamie Jay and Carlos Posada of Low Island). The opening sequence, with costumes (and perhaps makeup) by Auriol Williamson and strong (unattributed) lighting, holds the space together in a tight theatrical form that has emotional clout, but as the four performers (Olly Bell, Steff D’Arcy, Orion Hart and Murielle Werthauer) disperse the space dissolves into a long improvised freeform section like a series of filmic takes all joined together and superimposed. Perhaps Gardner’s creative input may have helped us decode this section, but watching performers in various permutations trying to scale the back wall on the open stage has limited allure. Green has already worked with Low Island on their music videos but their relationship is quite different here, more complex and less well defined. 

The beginning of Happy Father’s Day is almost accidental, rather like the meeting of a sperm and an egg around which the work revolves. But Harris-Walters hooks us unerringly into his monologue with allusions and an imaginative acronym of Seven-Up while identifying himself not only with the gang leader, Tess Tyrone, but as the biological hero of the story. Once the penny has dropped, he is fully in charge of the stage, and whatever he does uncannily insinuates or illustrates his path. The image that remains is the final one, where after a caterpillar-like spiral trajectory towards the centre of the stage his head slides into the spotlight of conception. Mission accomplished.


Resolution 2019: Works by Lizzie Klotz, Katie Boag and Anthony Matsena

Posted: January 26th, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Resolution 2019: Works by Lizzie Klotz, Katie Boag and Anthony Matsena

Resolution19: Lizzie Klotz, E14 Dance Company and Matsena Performance Theatre, The Place, January 19

From left to right, Lizzie Klotz, E14 Dance Company and Anthony Matsena

The quality and effectiveness of the evening’s Resolution 2019 program at The Place, like many such evenings at this annual event, are defined by each choreographer’s response to the imposed time limit of (roughly) 20 minutes. It’s a notional limit that can be interpreted as a full work (the choreographic equivalent of a short story), an extract of a longer work that may or may not have been created or an essay in choreographic ideas that has the potential for elaboration. There seems to be one of each this evening. 

Lizzie Klotz’s Fawn is a carefully structured work that fits neatly into its 20 minutes; it’s an exploration of fawning ‘as an instinctive response to fear, threat and failure.’ By nature fawning has meaning only in relation to a person who is the object of the fawning, but Klotz paradoxically explores the emotional phenomenon in a solo for herself; Fawn thus draws a parallel between the act of pleasing oneself on stage and the performer’s desire to please the audience. The catalyst for Fawn is a ribald catcall in the street directed at Klotz’s ass that she recalls in high-pitched excitement at the beginning of the show and in an initial repeated sequence across the back of the stage she appears to relish featuring her admired physical aspect prominently. Fawn is structured in musical form, with an introduction of muscle-tone preening on a red carpet, the opening sequence facing away from the audience followed by a playful central theme, with feather headdress, stick-it note pad and microphone, of parsing the word fawn into its many meanings. Klotz then compliments individual members of the audience on how amazing they are and recapitulates her initial sequence. This time she faces front, whereby the gestures of self-satisfaction become a form of reverence. It is not exactly fawning, but the desire to please is evident and the applause at the end is a mark of its affect. As with To Suit at Resolution exactly three years ago, Klotz has created a miniature that is both succinct and subtle with a generous element of sass that sheds light on the vagaries of our emotional dependency.

It’s perhaps just as well we are directed to the bar before E14’s Danube for the contrast between the first two works is extreme; Danube is on a trajectory from somewhere bleak towards somewhere unimaginably dark. Choreographer Katie Boag has devised individual variations for six dancers (Nora Fancsalszky, Gintare Geltyte, Ashley Goosey, Agata Olszewska, Rikkai Scott and Loren Whyte) around a central theme of vicious separation and segregation, but instead of moving out from the theme the variations are drawn inexorably into it like a black hole, intensifying the visceral sense of suffocation. By fusing her work with Oskus Urug by the Tuvan composer and throat singer Radik Tyulyush, we are taken a few tones lower into an ever-descending underworld. While Tylyush’s sound is traditional, Ashley Goosey’s and Jack Hobbs’ original score is hauntingly contemporary to the point of synthesized gunshots that recall the event to which the work’s title refers: ‘The Shoes on Danube Bank’, a chilling memorial to the Jewish community of Budapest during World War II. The heart of Boag’s work, however, spreads from this specific horror to the very heart of darkness in a concentration of brutal imagery that lasts much longer than its 23 minutes. 

Matsena Performance Theatre’s duet, Lies To Be Truth, with choreographer Anthony Matsena and Cher Nicolette Ho, is a theatrical form of esoteric ritual in which the intense physical relationship between the man and woman is strikingly unfamiliar. If there is a degree of entrapment, Ho proves more than a match to the web Matsena appears to weave around her; in terms of sheer physical power, she gives as much as she gets. Matsena’s idiosyncratic gestural vocabulary is inwardly focused, his voluble, expressive hands performing an almost spiritual narrative to his body’s arcane machinations, but the tension builds between the two people until the need for a resolution becomes as urgent as the desire for water when parched. When it comes, however, it is disappointing in its saccharine romanticism as if all that had gone before was a fiction. It certainly didn’t feel that way; both the material and the committed spirit of performance require a less artificial ending — or indeed a further development of ideas — than that imposed by the notional time limit. 


Dance Umbrella 2018: Le Patin Libre in Threshold at Alexandra Palace

Posted: November 2nd, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dance Umbrella 2018: Le Patin Libre in Threshold at Alexandra Palace

Le Patin Libre, Threshold, Alexandra Palace Ice Rink, October 21

Le Patin Libre

Taylor Dilley in Le Patin Libre’s Threshold (photo: Romain Guilbault)

Seeing Le Patin Libre’s Vertical Influences on the ice at Alexandra Palace as part of Dance Umbrella in 2014 was a revelation, and a pleasure to see the company again on the ice at Somerset House in 2016, part reprise and part an essay of ideas for a new work. That new work, Seuil (Threshold), which premiered at Montreal’s season of international dance, Danse Danse, in April, returned to Alexandra Palace to fill the final slots in this year’s Dance Umbrella. Now in its 40th year, Dance Umbrella has a vision that looks at the outer reaches of the dance universe where the choreographic process may refer as much to ideas and cultural history as to the moving body. The stimulation of its programming questions the nature of dance by refusing to frame it, or in some cases by shredding it à la Banksy within the frame.

Le Patin Libre’s visual references — the ice rink, the skates and the freezing environment — anchor it within a framework of amateur pastime or of Olympic competition but its choreographic interest lies somewhere in between. The scale of Vertical Influences derived from the sheer speed and arc of it gliding motifs and its flock patterns; in Threshold the patterns are still there but have gained additional hints of abstract narrative in which the threshold of the group dynamic is challenged. Falling out and falling — the accident — have become linked motifs and the partnering takes advantage of locking skates and elements of contact improvisation. At the same time the creative inputs of music (Jasmin Boivin) and lighting (Lucy Carter with Sean Gleason) remain familiar.

One aspect of the performance that has changed is the audience perspective. For the first half of Vertical Influences the audience was seated high on one side of the rink lending the trails of speed and form a heroic stature. In the second half the audience was invited to sit on one end of the rink to watch from a different angle and the choreography was scaled, both broadly and intimately, to enhance the experience. For Threshold Le Patin Libre has eschewed heroic scale for a single, ground-level perspective for both halves of the program; the audience is divided at one end of the ice or the other. In an arena this size, the distance between the ends creates a problem of visual register: if a narrative element or one of Hamel’s virtuosic accents works for one end it is unlikely to read with the same clarity for the other. And although the choreography is not mirrored, there is an element of duplication so the performance is delivered proportionately to the two ends of the rink.

Operating at the mid point of the ice is an obvious compromise, and one of the motifs that works beautifully is the gliding formation from side to side across the ice of interweaving bodies, like lines of a poem. It is the kind of motif that is unique to skating but its gliding displacement patterns could equally have their inspiration in George Balanchine’s Serenade and they have a similar emotional mystery.

Nobody needs to tell Le Patin Libre — Alexandre Hamel, Pascale Jodoin, Samory Ba, Taylor Dilley and Jasmin Boivin — how to skate, but two outside influences have left their mark on Threshold, particularly on the second half. Choreographer Anne Plamondon has worked on individual vocabulary, notably a solo for Ba that extrudes his natural elegance into more classical forms, and dramaturg Ruth Little (whose Dance Umbrella Motive Force lecture is online) has carved out of the swirl of lines and speed a kind of form, be it an elegy on loss or individuality, a cinematic plot or an essay in dynamic structure and rhythm in which skating patterns form the grammar.

For a company that has already pushed the contextual boundaries of skating, the question for Threshold is which way it is facing, in or out. The new work is a step forward, but still very much along the lines of Vertical Influences, suggesting Le Patin Libre may be susceptible to holding on too safely to its initial inspiration. In the spirit of Dance Umbrella, the company might consider for its next move not so much a dramaturgical ordering of internal events within their form, but an external choreographic change in concept that, while harnessing their vital energy, speed, and dynamic balance takes them further outside their frame.


Dance Umbrella 2018: Dimitris Papaioannou’s The Great Tamer

Posted: October 26th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dance Umbrella 2018: Dimitris Papaioannou’s The Great Tamer

Dimitris Papaioannou, The Great Tamer, Sadler’s Wells, October 16

Papaioannou

A scene from Dimitris Papaioannou’s The Great Tamer (photo: Julian Mommert)

Dimitris Papaioannou is an image maker. His work, The Great Tamer, presented at Sadler’s Wells as part of this year’s Dance Umbrella, is yet another unique expression of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre legacy, though he does not so much choreograph on the body as use the body as an element in his choreographic manipulation of images. Both the body and the images are in turn dependent on a scenography that anchors the entire work. At once the prow of a ship, the surface of the moon or the scaly, fenestrated skin of a mythological globe, Tina Tzoka’s set is the archaeological repository for Papaioannou’s narrative. Costumed by Aggelos Mendis and under the lighting of Evina Vassilakopoulou, the bodies of his performers emerge on to or are dug up from the depths of the stage as a succession of images that form a complex, slow-release system of cross-cultural references over the course of an hour and fourty minutes. One could spend the evening forensically identifying the images, which might be easier — though less rewarding — than connecting them to the arc of Papaioannou’s vision. The Great Tamer is more like a cinematic montage that relies for its effect on the cumulative association of its individual sequences whose pace Papaioannou carefully controls. He is in no rush to run his images by us — if it takes ten minutes to brush up the debris from a broken plaster cast and put it in a plastic bag, we have that much time to appreciate the ruse — but he also risks losing us in the wealth of connections and references that make up the work. True to the nature of his wordless reflections there is no synopsis in the program to use as a guide; instead he uses the grammar of strong, sometimes visceral imagery, wit and potent juxtaposition to set out his visual landscape. In his post-show talk (which you can find online thanks to a partnership between Dance Umbrella and Middlesex University’s ResCen) Papaioannou’s landscape comes not only from his own fertile imagination but also from that of his performers during improvisation sessions. However, he is the one who sets the tasks and organizes the trajectory of the resulting imagery.

His ten performers are named in the program but their personalities are subservient to the rendering of Papaioannou’s visual vocabulary. His almost dispassionate use of bodies as corporal fragments, mythological hybrid beings, fully suited astronauts or as painterly tableaux vivants reduces the emotional impact of the performers and in a work that evidently relishes the naked body the effect is more clinical than sensual. Papaioannou has been making work for more than thirty years so he knows what he is doing; the challenge in seeing The Great Tamer is to identify where it lands in our own universe. There are images of pure circus that in their surreal associations, like the performer who digs his rooted shoes out of the floor and walks off on his hands, destabilize or perhaps redirect our poetic appreciation, while others, like the man with his fist excavating the womb of a supine woman as she slithers off stage are unsettlingly oblique.

Archaeology is a metaphor throughout The Great Tamer; it is the act of uncovering or digging up artifacts that connects our knowledge of ancient civilizations with current history. The astronaut excavates not only floating moon rocks — Papaioannou is a master of theatrical illusion — but a naked body, a figure of Christ arising from his tomb. It is as if he is joining the dots between the achievements of his own country’s cultural heritage and the development of Western culture via Mantegna, Botticelli, Rembrandt and the NASA space program. Within this excavation of historical time as the great tamer, the decision to incorporate fragments of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (famously used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey) into Kostas Michopoulos’s sound design may also be referencing Sigmund Freud’s work on the excavation of memory in Vienna. In this game of free association, Walter Benjamin’s use in Berlin Chronicle of the same metaphor of digging uncovers one of many possible clues in understanding the intricate layering of The Great Tamer: ‘Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.’


Dance Umbrella 2018: Colin Dunne’s Concert at The Pit

Posted: October 21st, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dance Umbrella 2018: Colin Dunne’s Concert at The Pit

Colin Dunne, Concert, The Pit, Barbican, October 17

Colin Dunne

Colin Dunne and Tommie Potts in Concert (photo: Maurice Gunning)

Colin Dunne is a virtuoso traditional Irish dancer whose latest work, Concert, presented in the intimacy of The Barbican’s Pit as part of Dance Umbrella, is a homage to the virtuoso traditional Irish fiddler Tommie Potts. Potts was, according to the program note, a ‘singular and complex figure in the history of Irish traditional music’ who died in 1988 and whose sole album recorded in his lifetime, The Liffey Banks, is the basis for Dunne’s work. The album ‘reflects the complex contradictions in Potts’ musical career: his deep appreciation of traditional music alongside a desire to break it apart.’ The same two artistic poles might describe the arc of Dunne’s carefully constructed dance homage.

Dunne first heard the music in 2001 while studying for a Masters in Contemporary Dance at the University of Limerick, so Concert is a project he has been considering over many years, collecting and refining his ideas. With the help of director Sinéad Rushe, sound designer Mel Mercier and lighting designer Colin Grenfell, he has organized his research as a sophisticated experiment in what appears to be a converted shed strewn with musical and dance materials — three plywood sheets of flooring, a turntable with the vinyl copy of The Liffey Banks, a piano, a fiddle, shoes, floor microphones, a cassette recorder and various speakers.

At the start he lays down his terms of engagement with a brief demonstration close to the front of the stage to give an idea for those in the audience like me who hadn’t seen him in Riverdance of the basic rhythmic patterns of traditional Irish step dance. Unfortunately I am in the third row and if I can see the rhythms of the dance distributed throughout his upper body his footwork is obscured by the two rows in front. As it progresses, however, it is clear Concert is conceptually and intellectually post-Riverdance; Dunne places himself in relation to traditional Irish dance in the way Potts did in relation to traditional Irish fiddle music. He describes Potts’ music as ‘slippery’ and his homage is in part to render its rhythmic irregularity in choreographic and theatrical form.

With the help of Mercier’s sound design Dunne brings to the stage the voice of Potts himself talking about his music; there is a synchronicity between the two. With adept editing they strike up a conversation that places them in the same aural universe. When Dunne later balances a sheet of plywood on its edge and has a video of Potts playing projected on to it, the two also share parallel physical universes. Mercier also plays with the autonomy of the various audio sources; in constructing his concert Dunne has to will his turntable to present Potts’ album as if the two are sharing their respective knowledge and experience, jamming together and exacting the same standards of reverence and relevance for their respective arts. He is in effect conversing with whatever drove Potts’ musicality, his rhythmic structure and notes, and he digs into his own dance as if interrogating Potts with an enthusiasm and drive that motivates his interpretations.

Concert is not simply about a meeting of minds, however; Dunne is reflecting on his own understanding of Irish dance and where he might take it. In bare feet on a piece of plywood with the use of floor microphones he explores the rhythm of steps and sound patterns as if to share with Potts what he is working on. He experiments with sampling the sound of his footfall along with his whistling and musical phrases on the piano and fiddle, creating an intriguing soundscape that accompanies his steps. Through Mercier’s adept editing, Potts offers his own characteristically terse critique.

But if Dunne’s communion with Potts has its personal, almost esoteric aspect, Concert is also an occasion for him to defy the accepted belief that the jigs and reels Potts recorded on The Liffey Banks are undanceable. It’s a challenge Dunne takes on with passion and humility. When he dances we see him entering into the music as if called by a siren into slippery, dangerous waters; he demonstrates his skill by resisting any possibility of being pulled down by the current. The effect is a buoyancy of footwork and mental agility that merges the idiosyncrasies of musician and dancer into a riveting performance within a performance.


Dance Umbrella 2018: Annie-B Parson’s 17c at The Old Vic

Posted: October 5th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Dance Umbrella 2018: Annie-B Parson’s 17c at The Old Vic

Big Dance Theater: Annie-B Parson’s 17c at The Old Vic, September 27

Annie-B Parson

Big Dance Theater in Annie-B Parson’s 17c (photo: Manuel Harlan)

In its 40th anniversary season, Dance Umbrella opens appropriately with New York’s Big Dance Theater in a production of 17c directed by choreographer Annie-B Parson. Its inclusion in the program is both a sign of the intelligent and risk-taking selection process that characterises this annual festival and of the diverse strands that define contemporary dance. Parson’s choreographic approach to theatre cannot easily be pigeonholed, although the inspiration of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre is evident. As she says in the program interview, ‘Having been immersed in the prosaic, structural, and virtuosic pedestrianism of the early Judson Church dance-makers and second-gen Judsons, I was intoxicated by Bausch’s use of dance in relation to costume, sexuality, relationship, scenario and character.’ Parson’s development of the Bausch legacy diverges distinctively from other European examples, and it is indeed refreshing to see her New York take on dance theatre on a London stage — too little seems to cross the Atlantic these days — and the Old Vic, once the second home for Sadler’s Wells Ballet under the stewardship of Lilian Baylis, is an ideal setting for it.

On a structural level 17c is a reading of selected entries from the seventeenth century diary of Samuel Pepys as if it had been selected for a monthly book club meeting, probing what a contemporary reader might find or relate to in the author’s unashamed accounts of his daily routine. Although the diary is very much a product of another time, it turns out there is a lot that is surprisingly contemporary, from health concerns and pillow talk to sexual dalliances and outings to the theatre. Such obsessive detail in a diary inevitably draws comparisons with today’s social media confessional culture.

It goes without saying that Pepys as a prominent civil servant — he rose to be Chief Secretary to the Admiralty — would not have survived long in the current #MeToo media environment and yet his diary’s prosaic descriptions of his sexual exploits betray not a whiff of compromise. It is this transposition from 17c to 21c and back that gives the production its dynamic and its satirical sense of humour, as if Saturday Night Live was broadcasting an episode from Restoration London. Parson almost immediately places us in a simulacrum of a seventeenth century television studio by turning Jeff Larson’s video cameras on the audience to project back a vision of us seated in an intimate auditorium waiting for the play to start. Five bewigged characters in flourishes of elegantly tailored costumes (by Oana Botez) flit across the high-production stage (courtesy of Joanne Howard and Joe Levasseur) mixing archaic prose with contemporary idioms as if literary phraseology had imploded in a mash-up of innuendoes, cross-references and quotations from Euripides to Judith Butler and from the muted 17th century playwright Margaret Cavendish to Roland Barthes. Central to this treatment of Pepys’ diary is Parson’s championing of the lost voice of Pepys’ wife, Elizabeth (Bess), whose own diaries had been burned by her husband in a fit of pique. Since we cannot read her, Parsons brings her to life in movement through performer Elizabeth DeMent.

As a choreographer working in theatre Parson says in the program, ‘I believe strongly in both the supportive and poetic power of structures that stem from dance-making tools that are unique to choreography, forms that can hold both a narrative and an unrelated ongoing movement piece at once, allowing the two elements to collide and resonate with each other.’ Invoking Bess through her body rather than through her voice may seem like a small concession to a dance audience in what is a heavily texted and scripted work, but it is also one of the more obvious concessions in what is essentially a choreographic treatment of time and place. One of the happy ‘collisions’ in 17c is between the presence of Bess as a dancer and Pepys’ commentary in his diary of his wife’s decision to learn how to dance and how, characteristically, he becomes jealous of the dancing master, especially when Bess requires another month to study with him. ‘A gentleman never dances so well as a dancing master’, Pepys wryly comments.

In effectively illustrating a historical narrative while invoking the current consciousness of forgotten female voices Parson borrows from theatrical devices to create an awareness of our present. As a choreographer she uses a wide-ranging sense of spatial and temporal movement to influence the more theatrical aspects of 17c, maintaining an ambiguity of form that makes a case for the ongoing development of dance theatre.


Ian Abbott at FiraTàrrega in Catalonia

Posted: September 25th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ian Abbott at FiraTàrrega in Catalonia

Ian Abbott at FiraTàrrega, Tàrrega, Catalonia

Colectivo Lamajara in Labranza (photo: Tristan Perez Martin)

Tàrrega is a Catalan town ninety minutes west of Barcelona, one of a number in the region that hosts an annual Fira (fair) presenting a selection of Catalan, Spanish and international work. Tàrrega has a reputation for presenting a spectrum of outdoor circus, dance and theatre work in the baking September heat and this is the final program of current artistic director, Jordi Duran Roldós.

Most venues at FiraTàrrega are at most a fifteen-minute stroll from the centre, but Colectivo Lamajara invite us to meet at a bus stop on the edge of town and drive us about two kilometres through a flat, arable landscape with the heat haze warping the horizon. Upon disembarkation a silent guide carrying a staff greets us and leads us further through this vast acreage; parallel to us, about 300 metres away, we notice another body, walking with poise and precision balancing a set of sticks on her head. Our perspective and odometer are being set for Labranza. We carry on until we are gathered on semi-circular hay bales in the dusky light with outbuilding shadows beginning to munch their way across the sun-drenched fields. The next 30 minutes sees our guide, the woman we had seen earlier and an additional dancer toil the land and their bodies, playing with bamboo poles and casting up red soil dust clouds as they slap, caress and roll in the late summer light. With a slower pace and the ability to shift focus from our foreground workers to the acres of land behind them Labranzainvites us to slow down, consider land and landscapes with a trio of sweat-drenched performers. The only distraction is the grating faux Middle-Eastern soundtrack for the middle third which sounds like the Arabia World of any generic smartphone puzzle game. I’m left thinking about how agricultural bodies tend land repeatedly over the seasons and the comparison with the sweat and toil of dancers as they tend their bodies for audiences; suddenly I have an urge for the participatory aspect of Is This A Wasteland? by Charlotte Spencer Projects. The lack of my bodily investment in Labranza sees it fade from my memory as soon I get back on the bus into town and I begin to yearn for the derelict wasteland of Glasgow Southside.

With an even more limited presence of hip hop work than at Tanzmesse, Akira Yoshida’s Home tries to reconcile the gap between his dual choreographic identities as a b-boy and a contemporary dancer. At a sliver over 25 minutes Yoshida has the balance and control of both vocabularies and has success as a performer in blending the power and effortless fluid verticality of b-boying with the floor-based travelling patterns needed to move around space. However, Home is conceptually thin, narratively stretched and is more suited to the Breakin Convention 10-minute cage to which so many hip hop artists are restricted. There are a lot of tiny choreographic details in the hands and the face that would have benefitted from a quiet studio theatre and it clearly reads from a frontal perspective rather than from the four sides of the audience, suggesting a creation process or an adaptation that did not consider an audience in the round. Yoshida is an engaging performer with a number of interesting uses of low centrifugal wrist spins that would sit well as a signature move in a battle context but as a choreographer he still needs to grow.

Block by Motionhouse and NoFit State Circus featuring 9 performers scaling, building and destroying an oversized Jenga tower for over 40 minutes is an outdoor dance/circus juggernaut that has been consistently presented in its home UK and internationally. With a new cast that has slotted seamlessly into the original mould, it’s a technically impressive feat in terms of Ali Williams’ original idea, design and production enabling just the right proportion of stability under foot and hand and wobble for a heightened audience experience. The tower rises fifteen metres which enables more than 4000 Tàrregans to see it from all angles in both the afternoon and evening version. Block is a model of collaboration, simplicity and marketing, and while it eats crowds for breakfast I’m left with firework emptiness after watching it. There are consistently dated and gendered choices from director Kevin Finnan and circus director Paul Evans in terms of lifts, power and control; we wait for 35 minutes before a female performer lifts a male performer over her head. This is a deliberate artistic choice to present female bodies as weaker and to consistently promote the strength of male bodies. In the rest of the show female bodies are treated like dolls — thrown, flipped, caught, saved (like the flyer in a cheerleading squad) and dragged around the structure — whilst an inexplicable series of fake acting arguments appear midway through that are badly executed and add little to the work. While FiraTàrrega’s artistic choices about power are highlighted against a backdrop of dozens of Catalan flags flying from balconies and thousands of yellow ribbons supporting the jailed pro-independence leaders, the gender politics and power choices of Block are woeful, dated and should be collapsed immediately.

In an attempt to improve the very visible lack of artists with a disability at FiraTàrrega, the organizers co-commissioned Hunting For The Unicorn by Becki Parker (England) and Vero Cendoya (Catalonia) with Stockton International Riverside Festival and Tin Arts. It’s a 30-minute end-on performance on the subject of autism, presented in an intimate 175-capacity converted set of steps. With Parker’s balletic lightness and Cendoya’s earthy rootedness — along with the guest unicorn — the performance consists of two 10-minute solos (made in their respective countries and via Skype) and a playful 10-minute object manipulation section with an oversized sequined picture frame, a laptop and a suit jacket, that clearly connects and resonates with its audience. Tin Arts, who support Parker as a solo artist (she is also a member of the newly formed Talent Hub), believe in presenting work that is authored by and is representative of our society. I agree; if we are looking at representation at our theatres and festivals, then of the 900 performances at Sadler’s Wells (for example) in their 2016/17 season, there should have been at least 9 from choreographers on the autistic spectrum. Since data is not collected, I suspect the reality is very different but Hunting For The Unicorn shows how such representation matters. After each of the three performances there is a post-show discussion that has members of the audience in tears thanking Parker and Cendoya for presenting a work that offers a choreographic and emotional insight into autism and how the world feels to them even though they do not identify as being on the autistic spectrum. A number of the audience share how they have a family member with autism and how the empathetic voice of the performance burrowed its way into their subconscious and triggered something previously unrevealed.

FiraTàrrega is like a better, warmer and more useful Edinburgh Fringe for those making and presenting outdoor work; there is easy access to international presenters/artists who are happy to talk alongside the most generous, largest and consistent crowds for outdoor arts I’ve encountered (2,500 people watching Company Chameleon’s Witness This). People are here to do business (Block secured four new bookings from this festival alone) and there are multiple chances to present work in the main Fira or on its fringe and you can see the works of peers from around the world. If there are towns/cities in the UK looking at how a festival connects to and is welcomed by its community in addition to attracting an international community of artists and presenters, the next FiraTàrrega is 5-8 September 2019.


Ian Abbot at Edinburgh Fringe, Part I, August 2018

Posted: August 29th, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Festival, Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Ian Abbot at Edinburgh Fringe, Part I, August 2018

The Troth (Usne Kaha Tha), Army at The Fringe, August 16

Edinburgh Fringe

Daniel Hay-Gordon with members of the cast in The Troth (photo: Simon Richardson)

When Akademi chose Gary Clarke to direct and choreograph The Troth (a short story written in 1915 by the scholar Chandradhar Sharma Guleri) there was much consternation within the South Asian dance community. The organisation that receives Arts Council England investment to support and develop South Asian dance artists had actively chosen to employ a white, male contemporary dance choreographer for their signature WWI project.

Clarke is someone who has little connection to the South Asian community, the history of the Sikh Rifles in WWI or a familiarity with the myriad South Asian dance forms. The Troth features six dancers (Dom Coffey, Daniel Hay-Gordon, Vidya Patel, Deepraj Singh, Songhay Toldon and Subhash Viman Gorania) who gamely deliver what Clarke asks of them in a frothy piece of hollow melodramatic entertainment that serves only to reinforce the reputation of Akademi and Clarke.

Recycling a significant number of minutes and tropes from Clarke’s previous work COAL (1915 Belgium looks choreographically very similar to a Yorkshire 1980s coal mine) we see a yearning Patel mourn and repetitively deploy the Kathak spin as the dizzying emotional losses pile up (husband, son and first love). With the men thrashing, flopping, crawling and nearly dying for 25 minutes the only visual and/or historical point of interest is the archival footage/photography drawn from the Imperial War Museum and the Council of National Army Museum showing how colonial Britain captured on celluloid these choreographed moments of formation marching, trench digging and hospitalisation.

With an inexplicably homoerotic British/German soldier cameo from Hay-Gordon (also Assistant Director) there’s a black-leather-glove-biting sequence that has so little dramaturgical relevance and is so artistically and culturally out context and that it smacks of a signature self-indulgent move; I wonder how this section didn’t trigger Lou Cope’s dramaturgical alarm.

After seeing The Troth it is clear why Mira Kaushik (its Executive Producer and Director of Akademi) chose Clarke for this commission; riding off the back of Clarke’s commercial success of COAL across the UK, Akademi wanted a piece of that relevance. However, in their desire to build audiences in new territories, by employing a white male choreographer they have committed a bizarre act of reverse colonial exoticisation and by doing so continue the erasure of South Asian dance choreographers in the UK. The empire strikes back.

For another opinion on The Troth see the review by Nicholas Minns and Caterina Albano

UniverSoul Circus and SHIFT, Underbelly Circus Hub, August 15

Billed as “Hip Hop Under The Big Top”, this was the European debut of UniverSoul Circus after touring the US for 25 years. Our hosts Cheyenne Rose-Dailey and Lucky Malatsi introduced a dozen acts drawn from Colombia, Trinidad & Tobago, Cuba, USA, Guinea, Mongolia — and more — for a riotous 55 minutes of sugar joy and technical circus wizardry climaxing in a flawlessly smooth 12-piece Mongolian teeterboard act with four people balanced atop each other. Alongside the rainbow-wigged and whistle-mouthed Fresh the Clownsss charged with keeping the disappointingly small crowd entertained in between the acts there are nice touches of audience participation with lip syncing to paint rollers and the ever-present oversized inflatable balls slapped around the venue as each succeeding act is readied.

Unfortunately when I attended, the bone breakers contortionists were, “due to unforeseen circumstances” unavailable and although there were a couple of hip hop call and responses from our hosts alongside the odd east coast track, it would be hard to call this ‘hip hop under the big top’. Nevertheless in the increasingly white, able-bodied and middle-class fringe landscape, UniverSoul Circus should be celebrated for the exquisite technical execution, charismatic audience engagement and attention to detail in every act. In an active choice from founder Cedric Walker every member of the cast (and safety crew dressed in exquisitely tailored suits and bow ties) is a person of colour.

Seeing UniverSoul Circus after the recent gal-dem women and non-binary people takeover of the Guardian’s Weekend some of the thoughts of gal-dem’s Founder and Editor-in-Chief Liv Little came to mind: “As a black person I feel very undervalued as a consumer. If mainstream media and TV and film valued people of colour, you would see a lot more of us behind the screen and on the screen. So one of the most important things is who is getting to tell the story.”

I had seen SHIFT by Barely Methodical Troupe (BMT) immediately before UniverSoul Circus, a scheduling that emphasised the gulf in class, finish and care between the two companies’ works, yet SHIFT was in the smaller Circus Hub venue and still had at least double the audience. After their breakout hit Bromance in 2014 and having made and toured their previous work Kin (directed by Ben Duke) at last year’s fringe BMT appear to be a company ploughing a barren field. They need to take some time out to recharge, find inspiration from other places and come back with a quality product. Choreographed and co-directed by Ella Guildfoyle, the premise of SHIFT is loosely tied to a set of tricks, experimentation and testing the boundaries of multiple-sized blue industrial resistance bands alongside some appalling attempts at comedy/acting in between the predictable set pieces. Perhaps in their original run at Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May SHIFT was tighter, the performers less tired and the rush of a première had elevated safety endorphins, but in the middle of a body-and-energy-sapping run at the fringe SHIFT was lacking in care and the choreographic details were fraying. There were at least four tricks that resulted in stumbles and almost fail/falls demonstrating a weary set of limbs that were clearly not intentional; it’s close to this point that circus can become dangerous if those who are catching and responsible for each other on stage aren’t able to ensure standards of safety.

With a cast of four (Louis Gift, Esmeralda Nikolajeff, Elihu Vazquez and Charlie Wheeller) the only person to emerge with any distinction is Vazquez with a set of fresh b-boy skills, freezes and combinations that flickered temporarily but he is sorely underutilised throughout the rest of the show; his demonstrable control and ability to hold an audience’s attention is a pleasure to watch.