Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes at The Place

Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes, The Place, February 12, 2022

Co-commissioned by The Place and presented there for a single night, Léa Tirabasso’s latest work, Starving Dingoes, follows thematically from her 2019 production, The Ephemeral Life Of An Octopus, but with a change of focus and a maturity of expression. Starving Dingoes is an unsparing meditation on the complex biological and physiological processes of life and death imagined through the cultural and emotional responses of the bodies in which they take place. The title comes from the choreographer’s memory of seeing a pack of dingoes on an Australian beach, here transposed to the feral aspect of existence called apoptosis or programmed cellular death — a natural phenomenon in which damaged cells are encouraged by internal processes to commit suicide to avoid impairing healthy cells. In merging cytology with the struggle for survival within the entire organism, Tirabasso has drawn on her collaboration with cancer researchers, Simone Niclou and Aleksandra Gentry-Maharaj. The issue Starving Dingoes raises is how, in an ongoing and cyclical process, the body deals with the presence of unhealthy ‘rogue’ cells that have lost their ability to die, leading to disease. While this meditation is highly personal, it is also timely to consider, by extension, how individuals within a given society co-operate or fight to ensure their own survival and that of the whole group. 

To engage with these questions, Tirabasso sets up a rich choreographic alchemy between the biological and the human, at times with pathos and at times with humour, without fully dissociating the two; it is the humbling humour of Starving Dingoes that makes its unexpected vision of life and death all the more accessible. The program describes the work as ‘a race for five dancers’ — Catarina Barbosa, Lauren Ellen Jenkins (substituting for Laura Patay), Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Alistair Goldsmith and Laura Lorenzi — ‘who explore the vital, albeit brutal, necessity to stay together’. This is the way we see them starting the work (under Nicolas Tremblay’s light) as five anthropomorphic cells inching forward very slowly like beached turtles (on Thomas Bernard’s fine cork-strewn shore) while singing a chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s nineteenth century opera, La Traviata, in their own protoplasmic language. But it is not long before dis-ease sets in both metaphorically and choreographically; bodies clash, disperse and reform in a constant effort to heal until the rogue cell is identified and killed. It is like a diagnosis through the intrinsic wisdom of sensation rather than through rational observation. What is counterintuitive is that at the heart of this process is compassion: the image of Goldsmith succouring the other four is remarkable for its communal inter-dependency as part of this regenerative cycle. 

In Verdi’s time, a ‘traviata’ was a ‘woman who has gone astray’, so the association of this particular opera to rogue cells in the body is uncannily pertinent. The biological imperative of the science is imbued with the melodramatic impact of the opera in such a way that Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes creates deep ties between the two and enriches both. Johanna Bramli’s and Ed Chivers’s all-embracing score, which splices into its rumbling bass drone and electrical short-circuits Verdi’s sampled arias and choruses — as if we are hearing the opera from inside the body — adds to the atavistic, emotional resonance of the work. Unlike in the opera, where actions are decided through the volatility of emotions, the performers of Starving Dingoes embody processes that are emotionally blind, but this is where the power of the work’s juxtaposed layers exists. As part of her choreographic path, Tirabasso sought the expertise of Gabrielle Moleta who gave the performers a one-day workshop in animal transformation to train the body beyond familiar habits and traditions (it could go further as there are still traces of self-consciousness in the performance), but the effect on the language of the action is transformative. Seeing the performers wrestle for their communal health against Brekke’s rogue pathology while each sings Violetta’s final aria is to take opera and dance to profoundly cathartic levels.

Tirabasso and her team have done something more than create a show that in our precarious cultural climate may be seen in a handful of venues; I hope it receives much more attention for its performative qualities and the themes it conveys. Having got this far with such conceptual vigour and emotional urgency, Starving Dingoes deserves to have access to a further line of funding so that its full potential can be realised. But even more, the concept appears ripe for large-scale operatic treatment, a production of La Traviata, perhaps, as seen under the microscope that draws down the emotional heights of melodrama into the depths of physical survival. It could even become, if it hasn’t already, an allegory of our time. 

Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells

Curated by Carlos, Birmingham Royal Ballet, Sadler’s Wells, November 4

The Birmingham Royal Ballet program at Sadler’s Wells is titled Curated by Carlos, a branding that links the identity of the company to the personality and reputation of its new artistic director, Carlos Acosta. One of the selling points of the program is a ‘new duet’ with Acosta and Alessandra Ferri, but the solipsistic branding and the promotional focus on Ferri hardly constitute Acosta’s unqualified confidence in the image of the company he now leads. Uncannily, the effect of the three works he has curated, by Spanish and Latino choreographers, also serves to downplay the individuality of his dancers and promotes instead a uniformity that effaces them. 

The company metamorphosed from the Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, settling in Birmingham in 1990, a city with a burgeoning cultural life that already counted Simon Rattle and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as one of its calling cards. The term ‘levelling up’ had not been invented at the time but BRB’s change of home was part of a politically favoured redistribution of cultural assets. As an art form, ballet is independent of its home city, but the company’s presence and achievements bring the city reflected pride and prestige in the way the late Pina Bausch gave the industrial city of Wuppertal an international reputation. Acosta has brokered a more direct relationship with Birmingham by offering a dutiful gesture of appreciation to the city in the first work on his triple bill, City of a Thousand Trades co-directed by choreographer Miguel Altunaga and dramaturg Madeleine Kludje, currently the associate director of Birmingham Repertory Theatre. Its title is taken from a nineteenth century description of the city at a time when immigration and industry spurred its enormous growth. The multinational cast of BRB already acts as a proxy for immigration, but Giulia Scrimieri’s set focuses uniquely on construction as the representative industry; scaffolding poles and wheeled wooden forms become the city’s leitmotif, handled throughout with balletic grace. The co-direction effectively divides the work’s focus: Kludje celebrates the value of the city’s individuals shaped by oral histories and recorded poetry by Birmingham Poet Laureate, Casey Bailey, while Altunaga celebrates the city’s homogeneity through the value of a corps de ballet. Mathias Coppens’ score serves both approaches but cannot unite them. City of a Thousand Trades is studious in its reverence but fails to deliver the kind of spontaneous reward for which the city might be remembered.

Daniela Cardim’s Imminent, to a lush but emotionally predictable score by Paul Englishby, starts from an existential questioning about the role of the individual in a society affected by calamitous environmental and political issues. With help from dramaturg Lou Cope, Cardim has extruded these questions into an abstract balletic form with Eilis Small as the individual in a flock of classically trained dancers in tunics for whom the answer to everything is either an arabesque or a pirouette. Only April Dalton’s set — a backdrop of white papier-mâché cliffs inset with an incongruous hinged door — gives any kind of direction to the work: a choice for the dancers of either passing through the open door into the mysterious light of the unknown or remaining in the comfort of unknowing. Some do, some don’t. It’s all a bit banal and underwhelming, questioning less the role of the individual conscience in society than the relationship between choreographer and dramaturg. 

Goyo Montero’s Chacona is evidently designed to be the ballast that will anchor the entire program. Choreographed to a full-blooded transcription by Ferruccio Busoni of Bach’s Chorale Prelude No. 3 and to three instrumental interpretations of the chaconne from Bach’s Partita No.2 in D Minor, Montero’s opening geometric corridor of dark-clad bodies sculpted in light has the brooding suggestion of a clandestine obsession. Imposed on the rectangular geometry of the dancers is a triangle with musicians at each apex: pianist Jonathan Higgins and a Steinway grand at the back with Robert Gibbs on violin and Tom Ellis on classical guitar on either side. Into this muscular environment Montero introduces the lithe Alessandra Ferri for a brief appearance with Acosta as her partner but they have no influence on the complex choreographic monolith that engulfs them; Ferri’s appearance and artistry are subsumed into the shadowy darkness of the stage. No sooner do they appear than we start to wonder where she and Acosta have gone; this is the reality of the much-hyped duet, a short interpolation that Montero has deftly concealed within his original construction. While it leaves the choreography intact the company recedes into its oppressive, sometimes brutal embrace. 

Dance Umbrella 2021: Dimitris Papaioannou’s Transverse Orientation

Dimitris Papaioannou, Transverse Orientation, Sadler’s Wells, October 21

Dimitris Papaioannou, whose new production, Transverse Orientation, was presented at Sadler’s Wells as part of Dance Umbrella 2021, might well agree with the late photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo who noted that, “Down here everything is symbol and mystery.” Papaioannou, who trained in the visual arts, has made his reputation by presenting symbols and mysteries for the three-dimensional stage. In addition to his 8 performers, he has an extraordinary team to help him, with set designers Tina Tzoka and Loukas Bakas, lighting designer Stephanos Droussiotis, costume designer Aggelos Mendis, props constructor Nectarios Dionysatos, and mechanical inventor Dimitris Korres. Dance Umbrella presented The Great Tamer in 2018, in which Papaioannou introduced a complex array of theatrical images that referenced a trajectory from Greece’s ancient heritage to NASA’s landing on the moon, harnessing his powerful graphical theatre to an overriding theme of cultural archaeology. Transverse Orientation anticipates a future archaeology by mapping the effect of human intervention on natural environments. The irony of the title, which refers to the nocturnal moth’s evolutionary method of travel, is that moths are notnaturally attracted to a bright light; they are deceived by it. Their evolved nocturnal navigation system is short-circuited by anything brighter than moonlight to the point of paralysis and potential death by predators.

Tzoka and Bakas present a bleak, almost two-dimensional stage with a long back wall, a fluorescent light fixture high on one side and a door flush with the wall on the other. The stillness is charged with dramatic possibility until the light crackles into action and the door opens to a small swarm of anonymous, two-legged arthropod figures in black carrying a ladder. Seen in silhouette, this ballet of frenzied walks and gestures is a masterpiece of comic exaggeration and surreal invention (one of the moths — Breanna O’Mara — returns later to do a rousing tap routine). 

When Emma Gladstone asked Papaioannou in the post-show talk about his creative process he narrowed his response to describing the constraints of a deadline on both the period of creation and on the shaping and editing of the material into an integrated performance. But for someone like Papaioannou who delights in creating work as a palimpsest of imagery derived equally from ancient mythologies, renaissance art, and surrealism, the choice of what images to gather and how to place them in his theatrical universe must correspond at times to the attraction of moths to a bright light. 

This is an essentially existential metaphor that could relate both to the creative process and to the ideas around which the images are circling. In the opening section of Transverse Orientation, Papaioannou illustrates this metaphor with sardonic wit, making us laugh with him as his moths teeter precariously around a light source that is subject to electrical and mechanical failure. But then he subjects us (literally) to a powerful, roving search light that temporarily blinds us, a theatrical sleight of hand introducing us to more familiar territory: a colossal bull tamed and nurtured by a naked man and giving birth to a woman who is then carried away naked on the bull’s back. While Papaioannou is not averse to reusing visual imagery from his creative storehouse, he uses it here under a different light. The young woman (O’Mara) may reference Europa whom Zeus, disguised as a bull, abducted to Crete, and the young woman in her dotage (Tina Papanikolaiou) returns movingly to see what has become of her namesake. While Europe may be at a critical juncture in its history, its political situation pales into insignificance in the face of the current climate emergency. Two further images link the allegory of the moths to Papaioannou’s depiction, in drawn-out theatrical time and space, of the current environmental crisis. The door in the back wall opens on to a solid wall of granite blocks. They begin to force their way through the door seemingly of their own volition, an interminable stream of earthquake debris along with the odd surviving body. The bodies then pile up the rubble on the side of the stage and leave it there, a mere inspiration for acrobatic games. In the final image the goddess of abundance tips her bucket of water on to the stage while slowly descending beneath it. More water is poured on to the stage while the performers rip up the floor sections and scatter them on either side. Standing in the water is a man with a bucket and mop, acutely aware of his own inadequacy. 

What started off as parody has turned by degrees and digressions to darkest satire.

Normal Conditions/Nicola Conibere in Carareretetatakakers

Normal Conditions, Nicola Conibere, Carareretetatakakers, Lilian Baylis Studio, October 14

When a word is repeated faster and faster or fed through an electronic sampler, its sound can become dissociated from its original meaning through a process known as semantic satiation. It certainly happened to the title of Nicola Conibere’s new work, Carareretetatakakers, presented in her debut at the Lilian Baylis Studio on October 14. In a recorded section where the word ‘caretaker’ is repeated and sampled, the audible stretch covers a relatively anodyne ‘characters’ to what sounded like ‘kerry terriers’ and even ‘hairy dentist’. Just as the sampled sound of the word makes us wonder what we are hearing, the linear progression of Carareretetatakakers questions what we are seeing and, by extension, how we can understand the very notion of ‘taking care’. 

As we enter the triangular space with seating on its three sides, three performers — Helka Kaski, Annie Hanauer and Adrienne Ming — are already communing in a casual physical groove with Duncan MacLeod’s score of electronic bleeps. Lucille Acevedo-Jones’s costumes with large ruffled collars in shades of green, blue and lilac with matching smudges of lipstick have connotations of reptilian beings, where the calculated insouciance and concentrated immersion of the trio in their movement make our attendance feel superfluous. This technique of task-based choreography can have the effect of alienating an audience from the notion of performance, which may be its purpose; to place it at the beginning of a work is both a bold statement and a risky proposition. In the freesheet offered as we exit the theatre there is an example of a task called Multipoints that may well have been used to generate the opening sequence: ‘Find 3 points in your body, say one in your shoulder, one in your hip, and one in your knee. Let’s call them 1,2 & 3. Find 3 metronomes…set each to a contrasting rhythm, called a, b & c. Try to get point 1 to pulse to rhythm a. And point 2 to rhythm b. And point 3 to rhythm c. Try to do them all at the same time.’ 

Because Kaski, Hanauer and Ming are seasoned, charismatic artists, the effect of these shared circadian rhythms is hypnotic; there is neither self-consciousness nor pretension in their performance. Developing additional tasks that bring into play their musicality, idiosyncratic ways of moving and sense of humour, they lead us on through choreographic notions of support and care towards an expected apotheosis that will validate both the work and our presence. But Conibere has other ideas, ones that pull the theatrical mat from under our feet without ever letting on that this is her aim. As we can read in another section of the freesheet mystifyingly entitled “Meat/Yam juices on foil”, ‘How can we discover an inefficient movement vocabulary? How can we work with inefficient and wasteful choreographic structure? What would they mean, look like and do?’ And in response, ‘We discovered: multiple ways to deliberately disrupt, to frustrate to refuse flow. (We then noted how many very different forms of dance are nonetheless defined by flow). That expressions of stuttering and awkwardness and stalling offer forms for imagining relation differently.’

This last observation is significant, because it supports a gestural approach to communication that, while designed to be used performatively in a theatrical setting, is close to social life outside the theatre. The destabilization of Carareretetatakakers is that it undermines the notion of going to the theatre for entertainment (one audience member evidently realised this early on and walked out) and yet fulfils the notion of theatre as a mirror of the society in which we live. ‘Stuttering, awkwardness and stalling’ could be considered all the more relevant during the speculative opening up of society in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. Confidence and flow are in short supply. 

What the three performers nevertheless achieve — and offer as an effective antidote — is the cohesion of their relation; theirs is a conspiracy of collusion that leads them to encourage and support each other, the essence of taking care as performative ethics. The dance training of each — Hauer in ballet, Ming in jazz and Kaski in contemporary dance — is a metaphor for difference, but the inspiration they express through these forms, however deconstructed, becomes the way the three interact with, overlap and sustain each other.  

The structure of Carareretetatakakers, from its use of triangular space to MacLeod’s musical collage of classical and jazz quotes over a metronomic beat, to its choreographic stuttering, awkwardness and stalling, all indicate that Conibere has set out not to indulge the audience. And yet, in her choice of cast, she has harnessed her structure to human values that transcend it.  

Shobana Jeyasingh Dance, TooMortal, Saint Pancras Church, September 24

Shobana Jeyasingh Dance, TooMortal, Saint Pancras Church, September 24

For a site-specific choreographic work like Shobana Jeyasingh’s TooMortal, conceived as a dance work for historic churches, the site itself is as much the subject as the choreography. Commissioned by the Venice Biennale, London’s Dance Umbrella, Stockhom’s Dansens Hus and Belgrade’s BITEF Festival within the European Network of Performing Arts (ENPARTS), TooMortal was first performed in St. George’s Anglican Church in Venice in 2012. Jeyasingh was attracted to a feature common to the churches in which TooMortal played: the box pew, designed for 17th and 18th century protestant services as an enclosed place in which family groups could listen to the sermon. In England, the Victorian proclivity for updating churches very often led to box pews being ripped out in favour of the open variety. London’s Saint Pancras Church, designed in 1819 in the Greek Revival style by William Inwood and his son, Henry William, was one of the last London churches to have box pews and one of the few to retain them. It was in this glorious interior that the 20-minute TooMortal was presented on September 24th. 

The sound of a single bell leads us into the church and into Cassiel’s sound installation, while the symbolism of Yaron Abulafia’s lighting, with its triangulation of the interior space made sculptural through a dense haze, imposes itself on our sensibility as we stand in the chancel looking down the nave at the rows of box pews that have become effectively a sectioned, three-dimensional stage. The choreographed space nevertheless remains close to its religious function, mediating between the tangible aspect of social life — more notable after the pandemic’s long period of enforced isolation — and the contemplation of mortality.  

At first the 12 dancers remain hidden inside their respective pews until the music summons them to emerge as if rising from the grave of their circumscribed fate. With each dancer in matching red dresses by Ursula Bombshell in each of six symmetrical pews arranged equally on either side of the nave of the church, TooMortal weaves together its constituent elements to map a contrapuntal journey of heavenly aspirations driven by a remix of James MacMillan’s Tenebrae Responsories that Cassiel has incorporated into his soundscape. The religious nature of the musical subject further enriches the sense of ecclesiastical space while giving the choreography the rhythmic pulse of steam turbines that gradually fragment into heavenly voices. 

Jeyasingh delves into the rich emotional states of her dancers to fuel this philosophical exploration of containment, both in social and religious terms. The pews are deep, so the focus of the choreography often appears to be from the waist up, a locus of emotional and intellectual processes. Integrated into this broad range of physical expression — from unbridled rage to concentrated meditation — are fleeting visual elements of Christian iconography like the horizontal pose of a crucifixion that reinforce the nature of the site while eliciting in the observer a metaphysical response of introspection and solace.

Soon after seeing TooMortal, I came across a dissertation by Lisa Marie Bowler on Theatre Architecture as Embodied Space, in which she writes, ‘The purpose of site-specific or immersive theatre work is often to destabilise any notion of a fixed social reality even further, by negotiating and reconfiguring how these spaces are used.’ Uncannily, such destabilization is evident in TooMortal through its many inversions: between the vertical aspiration of faith and the horizontal aspect of the performance; between the predominant patriarchy of the Church and the all-female cast; between the placement of the congregation and the altar, and between the sombre weight of the architecture and the lightness and fury of the dance. And given the nature of the site, which inherently invokes the historical past, the quality of the live performance is very much in the present as we watch the dancers in their finite space manifesting an all-consuming desire to transcend their physical boundaries. Sometimes confrontational, sometimes lost in their own suffering, they nevertheless seem moved by an intractable but invisible hand. Only towards the end do they make physical contact with each other, tentative at first but then interlocking over the pews, gestures of solidarity and love. The dancers never confront the audience; they are embroiled with each other in their own existential preoccupations as if we were not present. At the end, they stand with their gaze fixed on the infinite as if their identities had departed, and as the light and music fade, we see these corporeal Wilis slowly descend into the oblivion of their wooden tombs. 

Thomas Page Dances, A Moment

Thomas Page Dances, A Moment, Filmed at the Old Fire Station, Oxford, July 3

In writing the play, Moment of Grace, in 2018, Bren Gosling distilled the stories of three characters whose lives were irrevocably linked through the AIDS pandemic in the UK of the 1980s. Because Gosling was close to people affected — he dedicated the play to the memory of Shane Snape — he was able to incorporate his insights into the psychological stance of each character that allows us to better understand the socio-political environment in which they experienced the disease. The play deals with fear, loss, disgrace, shame and friendship as the scourge of AIDS began to impact the gay community through misinformation and rank prejudice and is based on a historic occasion, the opening in April 1987 by Diana, Princess of Wales, of Britain’s first dedicated AIDS unit at London Middlesex Hospital. In the version I saw, filmed in the first lockdown, Gosling mixes his script with archive video of Diana’s much mediatised visit in which she openly shook hands with nurses, doctors and one of the patients, which did much to counter the misinformation and prejudice around the spread of AIDS. The title’s ‘moment of grace’ links the defiance of Diana’s handshake with the courage of one of the consultants to admit, in conversation with the princess on live television, that he too had AIDS. 

When Gosling suggested to choreographer Thomas Page that he respond to Moment of Grace, the idea was to present both his play and the choreographic response as a double bill. “I am very interested as a writer in collaboration with other creative forms. Also, I wanted to open a dialogue between older and younger generations of LGBTQ people about the English AIDS pandemic. Art is always great for opening up dialogue.” 

Even though Page describes the work on his website as “two performers explor[ing| what it was to be gay in the 80s when the UK was full of fear and ignorance”, is it possible — borrowing from R.D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience — to know the experience of another, let alone the experience of another forty years ago? Art, it seems, can only make marks on a surface or in space that point to that experience while the audience is left to reconstruct those marks and pointers in their own mind, to distil an emotion of what that original experience might have been. In this sense, A Moment is very much an exploration in movement by the two performers, Page and Llewelyn Lewis, of what it is to be gay today, at a time and in a society where homosexuality is more accepted, and, thanks to antiretroviral drugs, AIDS is no longer a death threat.

The setting of a bare stage under Rachel Luff’s moody lighting and Robert Singer’s evocative score gives A Momenta sense of existing on a raised dais floating in time. An arresting image draws us down to a domestic scene in which Lewis stands centre stage, fully clothed, in an overhead cone of light, repeating the close, enveloping gestures of one taking a shower. Repetition — a choreographic motif favoured by Page — etches the image in our memory while suggesting the languor and routine of the everyday. It is only interrupted by rising side lights signalling Page’s entrance into the space, coming to rest with one foot on one of the many items of clothing scattered around. The presence of clothes responds to a line in Gosling’s play spoken by Andrew as he looks back at his life: “I used to be interested in clothes, clubs, buying records. And men. Now my life…what life?” For Andrew and others in his position the desire for gratification must have seemed so insignificant in the face of death, but for Page and Lewis the clothes seem by contrast to be casual attachments, choices to wear or abandon. Page describes the ensuing duet as ‘moving through themes of paranoia, intimacy and oppression’, but his seismic palette has few ups and downs, few moments in which transitions from one emotion to another are clearly established. To adapt daily movement to the stage as a communicative structure to relay ideas and emotions requires a choreographic vocabulary that has the clarity of language in visual form. Page’s response to Gosling’s play is more an open-ended reverie between two men that softens the contrast between the themes it purports to address, as if Gosling’s social concerns have been replaced by Page’s existential ones. It will be interesting to see the live pairing of the two, as was intended, as an indication, perhaps, of how far the present LGBTQ+ community has developed from the initial AIDS crisis and how much it owes to those who endured it. 

(The two works premiered together at the 2018 Bloomsbury Festival but were transferred during lockdown to the screen, the format in which I saw them).

KVN Dance Company’s Coppelia at The Cockpit Theatre

KVN Dance Company, Coppelia, The Cockpit Theatre, September 2

In 1934, Adrian Stokes wrote about the relationship between action and music in ballet: “The action does not interpret the music, nor the music the action. They would appear to belong to different atmospheres. Yet they cannot be held apart, since the picture they compose is unforgettable.” This is very much the impression of the opening night of KVN Dance Company’s Coppelia at The Cockpit Theatre. Here the ‘different atmospheres’ include the costumes, sets and lighting, each on their individual layers of experience, that combine with the cast to create a high-octane performance that is in turn heightened by the proximity of the audience to the action.  

This is not a revival of the already much revived Coppelia choreographed in 1870 by Arthur Saint-Léon to a score by Léo Delibes, but, borrowing from contemporary musical jargon, a re-mix. Taking the traditional ballet’s narrative structure as a starting point, choreographer/director Kevan Allen, composer Rickard Berg and sound designer Henri Latham-Koenig have produced a masterful mashup of dance styles, sounds and popular Delibes tunes with turntable-inspired rhythms and beats that transform the action into the immediate present. Wendy Olver’s costumes, too, displace the characters from classical ballet to a sophisticated enclave of extrovert bohemians, in contrast to Justin Williams’ modular set retaining the sylvan character of the original. Throughout KVN Dance Company’s production of Coppelia these similarities to and divergences from the traditional ballet endlessly encourage and subvert our expectations. 

Coppelius is a maker of automata, or mechanical dolls, and his great project is to give life to one of them, his ‘daughter’ Coppelia. His persona is a fusion of three characters in ETA Hoffman’s eerie psychological short story, Der Sandmann. One is a shady itinerant oculist selling lenses, another an alchemist and the third a physics professor versed in occult sciences with a Promethean desire to create life in his mechanical dolls (Der Sandmann was published just two years before Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein). There is no place for the uncanny in the Delibes score, however, with the result that Saint-Léon’s doctor is downgraded to an eccentric but misguided doll maker in a small German village. Despite Allen’s desire to question “why Dr. Coppelius was so intent on creating a life-sized clockwork doll for himself”, and his brief suggestion of an answer in erotic gratification, his characterization of Coppelius (Michael Downing), remains — despite Berg’s promptings — more Saint-Léon than Freud.

Allen maintains the traditional setting of the ballet, dividing the action between the village square outside Dr. Coppelius’ studio in Act 1 and the inside of his workshop in Act 2. With a quick reversal of elements, Williams’ set suggests what is outside and what is inside, but they are insufficient to counter the choreographic similarity between the acts, making the two joined scenes of the second act appear a variation of the first. This is also because Olver’s tastefully exaggerated costumes blur the distinction of the characters between villagers and a successful rollout of Coppelius’ dolls. In the first act the balance of all the elements works so well that the occasional longueurs of classical ballet — the drawing out of the narrative into entertaining divertissements — appear to pass over into the latter part of the production. Nevertheless, the thread of the story is still clear through the interactions between Franz (Danny Fogarty), Swanhilda (Marina Fraser) and the doctor, while the other characters swirl around and through them as forces that maintain their prodigious energy and colour from beginning to end. 

KVN’s remix of Coppelia is Allen’s first production for his new company and is clearly a vehicle for his brand of artistic fusion. Under Mike Robertson’s lighting, the costumes, music, sound and choreography work brilliantly together, each egging the others on to greater expression, but by the end the story tends to melt away into the performance. It begs the question of what Allen will do next with his expressive palette. There is a sharpness and an awareness in his choreography that points perhaps to an energetic satire, a field of dance that is sadly under-represented in an era that desperately needs it. Rather than following the well-mined route of updating classical ballets, Allen and his team could give a contemporary choreographic edge to a period costume drama, for example, or a comedy of errors. With a sharper focus, their populist approach, humorous touch, choreographic asides and excellent handling of form could provide a vital antidote to the current sense of malaise.   

Breakin’ Convention 2020: Social DisDancing at Sadler’s Wells

Breakin’ Convention, Social DisDancing, Sadler’s Wells, December 11

Yes! A live performance at Sadler’s Wells in a brief respite from Covid restrictions. The subtitle of Jonzi D’s Breakin’ Convention riffs on government guidelines to produce Social DisDancing, an event tailored for a smaller audience at Sadler’s Wells than would normally attend this annual celebration of hip hop, proscribed by current safety regulations assiduously carried out by the theatre staff. 

Since its inception in 2004 Breakin’ Convention has mapped ‘the origins and evolution of hip hop culture from around the world and around the corner’. Embodied in its ethos is a resistance to the norms of western theatre art and a choreographic celebration of Black identity, channelling the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement long before it materialised. The killings of George Floyd — once a rapper affiliated with Houston’s Screwed Up Click — Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland are three recent reminders in the U.S. of the systemic racial violence that constantly feeds into hip hop’s emotional charge.  

Looking at the three stage performances and two films presented at this year’s Breakin’ Convention, the notion of resistance and defiance is ingrained in the choreography both in its physical power and unyielding psychology, but the enemy is sometimes within. Mental health issues are prominent in O’Driscoll Collective’s One%, where oppression is internalized as a struggle between bboy Marius Mates and his shadow, Jamaal O’Driscoll, while in Botis Seva’s solo filmed portrait of depression, Can’t Kill Us All, he takes themes of his BLKDOG and personalizes them, with his young rambunctious son as an antidote to his own dark state of life. The framing of the film by Ben Williams adds to the impression of suffocation in Seva’s powerfully tactile performance, drawing a parallel between the politics of mental health and those of racial discrimination. 

Jonzi D’s film, Our Bodies Back, created with poet and performance artist jessica Care moore, is overt political resistance not only to the murder of Black women but to the pervasive anti-Black attitude to women. Three dancers in three cities — Nafisa Baba in London, Bolegue Manuela in Hanover and Axelle ‘Ebony’ Munezero in Montreal — each choreographed their response to moore’s words, filmed by three cameramen and seamlessly edited by Ben Williams. The power of each of these women is self-evident, but if their choreographic resistance takes its coiled force from the incendiary anger of moore’s delivery, it also extends through their bodies into an expression of hope and freedom, giving anger wings. The outdoor settings in which they are filmed may have helped this impression, but it’s also in moore’s metaphor of the body as both crime scene and source of inspiration. Invoking Judith Jamieson and Katherine Dunham, she incites these black, female bodies to continue resisting with unfettered confidence; Munezero resists with eloquence, Manuela with power and a Baba with soaring spirit. 

In Boy Blue Entertainment’s Untethered 3.0 there is an overt sense of existential oppression that explodes in passages of virtuosic solo and ensemble dance. Here, the men (and Nicey Belgrave) remain resolutely within a style that has the aggressive DNA of hip hop while remaining self-referential; unlike in Can’t Kill Us All and Our Bodies Back, there is no way out. And yet, at the end when the cast relaxes and smiles to the applause of the crowd, the mask of aggression drops for a natural expression of joy. Could this not be a starting rather than an end point? Resistance can take many forms: in an early work, Aeroplane Man, Jonzi-D demonstrated a form of resistance filtered through his ebullient, sardonic wit and a freedom of movement grammar. It communicates on many levels and is still relevant today. How relevant will Untethered 3.0 be in 10 years? 

The all-female A.I.M Collective’s Suspended was the one stage work that had no difficulty in exuding an exhilarating sense of mystery. The technical acuity of the performers is clear and there is an imagination at work in the choreography — the work was created by the company’s founder, Sean Aimey, along with the cast — that breaks up the force into contrasting filigree elements. The result is a sense of strength and resilience that breathes self-confidence.        

In choreographic terms, there’s a danger that a genre as powerful as hip hop can become trapped in its own form (the same can happen with a genre like ballet where the past fails to adapt to the present). What Our Bodies Back and Suspended seem to suggest is that female intuition and power have a vital role to play in the development of hip hop and of Breakin’ Convention in particular. 

Ian Abbott on Pagrav Dance Company’s Kattam Katti

Pagrav Dance Company, Kattam Katti, Cambridge Junction, October 7

In the current political climate in the UK, making, rehearsing and presenting art takes courage because of the barriers the government are actively erecting to make it almost impossible for freelancers to survive and to not leave the sector — not only performers but also producers who are attempting to support dance, music and other performing arts.

There are many theories as to why this is happening, but financial return to the exchequer cannot be one of them. In the week I was invited to see a production of Kattam Katti by Pagrav Dance Company (PDC) in a closed performance at Cambridge Junction, Arts Council England published research by the Centre for Economics and Business Research that the value to the UK economy of the arts and culture sector is £13.5 billion and employs more than 230,000 people.

PDC has been working on iterations of Kattam Katti for over two years; it was originally due to premiere earlier this year at Sadler’s Wells with additional dates at Folkstone’s Quarterhouse and Milton Keynes’ MK Gallery. The company describes the work as: ‘Created by Urja Desai Thakore it transports its audience to Uttarayan, the world-famous kite festival that takes place in Gujarat, North India. Tales of competition, danger, excitement and unity in a landscape that wonderfully evokes both the solemnity and delight of this hugely important celebration are vividly brought to life…a neo classical work with a contemporary feel and strong roots in the South Asian dance tradition. It features original music, performed live, by four musicians who interact with and move around the four dancers.’

Offering employment for over 20 freelancers (4 dancers, 4 musicians, film crew, and production staff) for anywhere between a week and four weeks during this time is an act of courage; Thakore and creative producer Nina Head are to be applauded for achieving this. The performance I saw was three-and-a-half weeks back into rehearsal and the final two days of the week were dedicated to creating a new screen dance version by The Motion Dance Collective which will be released further down the line.

In 50 minutes, Thakore has created a snapshot of Uttarayan, a glimpse into some of the windows, characters, joys and physical rituals involved in making, flying, battling and celebrating kites at the festival. We see explicitly how the kites are constructed with the abrasive manja string that is coated with coloured, powdered glass that cuts your competitor’s string and, as Subhash Viman Gorania mimes, can cut your own skin, too. In the classical and contemporary kathak and bharatanatyam work I’ve seen before, musicians and singers are fixed either stage left or right and remain seated throughout the performance, lessening their presence and impact as live performers. What is refreshing in Kattam Katti is that the musicians are unfixed; they themselves are like kites traversing the stage on the winds of their own musicality, providing physical and aural emphasis to the choreography. Praveen Pratap on flute is particularly accomplished in his physicality and abhinaya whilst creating rippling melodies that cover the stage. The benefits of having the musicians and singers move — and move comfortably — around the stage is that Thakore has built her cast of 8 into an ensemble equivalent to the size of a Scottish Dance Theatre or Motionhouse production, creating a sense of theatrical scale to which this work could adapt in its future life. 

There’s a suite of literary (Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 debut novel The Kite Runner) and wider cultural references around kites, Uttarayan and the idea of atmospheric flight that Kattam Katti sits alongside (Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, a 1999 film by Sanjay Leela Bhansali has a whole song about Uttarayan, Kai Po Che, sung by Shankar Mahadevan and Kavita Krishnamurthy). The 2013 film Kai Po Che! directed by Abhishek Kapoor — the title is originally a Gujarati phrase that means I have cut — is a film based on Chetan Bhagat’s 2008 novel The 3 Mistakes of My Life which explores cricket, friendships and religious politics, but there is a scene that references the festival and offers a visual marker of how the city sky is covered in kites and how many thousands of people participate in it. There is genuine joy in the festival and on stage the sense of camaraderie between the entire company comes through; the ease with which they interact (especially in COVID times), trust each other and play with such grace is testimony to what Thakore has built in the rehearsal room.

The kite as a choreographic entity is fascinating and how it relates to Thakore’s primary kathak movement language is one of the most interesting aspects of Kattam Katti. A kite is steered by both the atmospheric conditions and the flyers themselves; it’s a constant and delicate negotiation, a balancing of conditions and ambitions to keep it in the air for as long as possible. A kite and a kathak body are technologies of movement and mobility; they’re not strictly directional and they are composed of loops, deflections and circles that can tell narratives whilst folding in and back on themselves. Whilst early on in the work we see the recognisable biomechanical movements of holding the kite, flying, tugging and keep the tension, the final sequence is quite brilliant in showing how these movements are fleshed out, built into and embellished using a wider kathak vocabulary. I wanted to see more of this bringing of the two movement worlds together rather than sequences of kathak followed by kitely recreations.

In some of the group kathak choreography, there is need for a little more polish and finesse in the execution of movements from a couple of the dancers, but each scene is elevated by the musicianship and compositions from Kaviraj Singh, Gurdain Singh Rayatt, Hiren Chate and Paveen Pratap. The musical arrangements are part of Thakore’s directorial role but the compositions are the work of each individual musician; Singh’s rhapsodic vocal work layered with Rayaat and Chate on the hypnotic udu and the beating rhythms on the kanjira for the dancers to ride give a visual and aural sense of being aloft. We are musically transported and immersed in an elemental space, shifting our perspective and scale to play amongst the kites; because the musicians are moving and playing the instruments around the stage there’s a three-dimensionality in play which adds so much to the visual world of Simon Daw’s moveable kite-tail, tangle-trip set design.

What is hinted at but feels like a missed opportunity is a commentary on class/caste. There’s a verticality in urban architecture and the Indian caste system where those who are richest (Brahmins) will predominantly own the tallest buildings, have access to penthouse apartments and therefore access to the wind. They are already at an advantage in the kite-flying stakes to the poorest (Dalits) who are deemed untouchable and who work in the streets. Having to mitigate all those structural inequalities to even get to a level playing field to engage in a fair Uttarayan could be further explored. 

There’s room in the work for this, to stretch the characterisation and abhinaya of the dancers (or even creating a kind of sharks/jets relationship between the musicians and dancers) whilst acknowledging that it is a festival of joy, celebration and festivity. However, for 17 days of rehearsal, in the depths of a pandemic, with the concern around touch and transmission, Pagrav Dance Company has created a portrait of a fascinating festival, a work of lightness that rides the wind-soaked eddies; their crack team of musicians combine to elevate the work to a higher realm.

Cathy Marston’s The Cellist broadcast from the Royal Opera House

Cathy Marston, The Cellist, from the Royal Opera House, May 29

Cathy Marston’s The Cellist, broadcast free online from the Royal Opera House as part of its Our House to Your House series, is inspired by and based on the life of the late Jacqueline du Pré, whose remarkable career was cut short at the age of 28 by the onset of multiple sclerosis. She lived for another fourteen years offstage but it is her early life from the discovery of the child prodigy to the end of her performing career that is the subject of Marston’s ballet. 

Du Pré’s emotional understanding and impassioned recording of Sir Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto made it synonymous with her name and popularised it as a major work in the cello repertoire. The score for The Cellist, composed and conducted by Philip Feeney and performed with soloist Hetty Snell, weaves the first movement of the concerto and other themes from du Pré’s repertoire into a musical narrative that follows the storyboard that Marston and dramaturg Edward Kemp lay out as a framework for the choreography. Marston makes the pivotal decision to personify the cello as a dancer (Marcelino Sambé), rather like Fokine’s use of personification in Le Spectre de la Rose. Sambé imbues the role with both dutiful acquiescence and a touching solicitude for Lauren Cuthbertson as du Pré but the coupling has the effect of reducing Cuthbertson’s interpretive agency, the very lifeblood of her art. Although her duets with Sambé are poignant, there is a sense that instead of playing the instrument, Sambé is playing her; he dances while she mimes. Ironically, the palpable bond between musician and her instrument is most apparent in scenes where Sambé watches helpless in the background while Cuthbertson struggles with her fatigue or her inability to play. 

As du Pré’s husband, Matthew Ball plays the self-assertive figure of Daniel Barenboim with charismatic elegance and charm. Like Sambé, he appears to dance Cuthbertson in a way that colours his love with ambition; Marston may be in awe of Barenboim but treats him as a dark prince. Ball’s opening solo on the rostrum ‘conducting’ Cuthbertson and Sambé in the first movement of the Elgar concerto is a highpoint in Marston’s choreographic invention; the full overhead sweep of Ball’s arm, his precise pirouettes and neat jumps on to and off the podium give the impression of someone in full command of his abilities. In the close-ups of Cuthbertson’s face — an advantage of the filmed transmission — one can see her commitment but choreographically she is overshadowed. Du Pré’s gift was her intuitive approach to making music, an internal maelstrom of forces and emotions expressed through the cello, but Marston seems reticent to let Cuthbertson dance out du Pré’s inner world with the physical sensuality and freedom with which she imbued her performances. 

The early years of their relationship saw both Barenboim and du Pré flourish, but it was all too brief. With Ball and Cuthbertson running around Hildegard Bechtler’s revolving set, Marston shows effectively the relentless pace of the subsequent international tours Barenboim planned both as soloist and conductor in which du Pré was intimately involved as part of the celebrity couple. 

It is clear from her biography that the seeds of du Pré’s debilitating illness were present before her whirlwind tours with Barenboim started but it is also clear that his concern for his own career did not cease with the end of hers; as a visibly weary Cuthbertson takes a break from circling the globe we see Ball continuing around the corner with undiminished energy in a devilish revoltade. 

In the path from precocious child to international star, du Pré was influenced by her mother, her teachers and her musical colleagues. Apart from a sensitively conceived role for Kristen McNally as her mother and a dreamy young du Pré (Emma Lucano), the other characters seem hastily sketched and the level of characterisation, particularly in terms of mime, is weak to the point of caricature; even Ball defaults to gestures that belong more to Tybalt than to Barenboim. A multifunctional ‘chorus of narrators’ embellishes the set as anthropomorphic furniture, mirrors du Pré’s physical state and embodies the legendary recorded legacy.

If some of the details are weak, the emotional core of The Cellist remains strong. Marston uses Cuthbertson’s dramatic ability to convey du Pré’s physical decline as a triumphant force of spirit over flesh; it’s what makes the stillness of the end, as Ball slips into darkness and Sambé spirals away from her, such a powerful moment, one in which Cuthbertson is once again totally engaged.