Resolution 2025: Aisha Naamani, Annie Kelleher, Gabrielle & Luke

Aisha Naamani,  No Idea What I’m Doing
Annie Kelleher, Where We Are Now
Gabrielle & Luke, Not Even A Pin Drop

Resolution is The Place’s annual festival of new choreography and performance works by emerging artists. This review was originally commissioned by The Place as part of Resolution Review, where established dance writers are paired with a cohort of new writers interested in writing about dance to cover each night of the festival. The original review on this page (and its companion review) can be found here: 

Resolution Review January 22, 2025

The pleasure of watching dance is to be able to focus on the body’s expressive qualities, and choreography frames those qualities in a theatrical setting. The consistency of a work is when the dance qualities match the choreographic frame. On this ninth evening of Resolution 2025 there is one work, Aisha Naamani’s No Idea What I’m Doing, where the consistency is palpable between Naamani’s dancing presence and the way she presents it.

The title suggests Naamani doesn’t take herself too seriously, but her performance leaves us in no doubt that she is in full command of her art form. She develops her idea of ‘an ode to the dawning realities of adulthood’ with an extensive arsenal of theatrical expression that keeps us wholly engaged in every detail.

The first work of the evening, Where We Are Now, choreographed by Annie Kelleher in collaboration with Jonathan Aubrey-Bentley, is framed in some kind of disaster scenario related to the climate emergency. When we first see them, Kelleher and Aubrey-Bentley are slowly shuffling towards us, leaning heavily on each other, mouths dry and eyes half closed like shell-shocked victims. Their gestures are not quite convincing, but when Kelleher breaks away to strut her gratuitous contemporary technique, the flight from disaster is unmasked and left in tatters. There is an episode of removing the tatters of their clothing in an epic struggle and a final exchange of epigrammatic barbs that sends up any seriousness. If the beginning was developed thoroughly and spliced to the surreal ending, Where We Are Now might be clearer.

Not Even a Pin Drop by Gabrielle de Souza and Luke Cartwright is ‘a narrative work based on Gabrielle’s experience of sudden deafness in one ear’, but without this program note the frame disappears. Tanisha Addicott as de Souza’s alter ego has gestures that suggest sudden deafness but the translation of her emotional states — ‘fear, hope, isolation, gratitude and disorientation’ — blends seamlessly with what appears to be a suite of neo-classical dances. Fortunately the five dancers — Addicott, Rosanna Lindsey, Maggie Kelly, Elizabeth Jeanna Ortega and Ellen Wilkinson — are a pleasure to watch, especially Rosanna Lindsey.
Not Even a Pin Drop comes unframed.