Resolution 2025: Amy Mauvan, Jiwon Oh, Vivian Guyrá

Amy Mauvan, Blank Dress
Jiwon Oh, Jeonghee
Vivian Guyrá, Takoha

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, Friday February 7

Time slows down in Jiwon Oh’s intimate dialogue with her grandmother, Jeonghee Jang, showing the ‘transmission of memory…revealing what is passed on, forgotten, and transformed’ The focus is very much internal, shared between the two of them, as if Jiwon Oh had asked her grandmother to show her the games she used to play so that she could emulate them in her own body. Calling the work Jeonghee in homage to her grandmother, Jiwon Oh has created a timeless work whose movement and spirit are based on a game with a long piece of rope — as we arrive the two are splicing the rope as if they have been at work for much of the evening. The rule is to dance in the spaces made by the pattern of the rope on the ground, never on the rope itself. Jeonghee Jang plays this game with perfect rhythmic recall while Jiwon Oh extrapolates the movements in youthful exuberance. In watching her we see the youthful grandmother before our eyes. Utterly captivating.

Tekoha, by Vivian Guyrá, is like a danced manifesto, moulded by the social and political message that gives it birth. Guyrá ‘is a Latin American indigenous choreographer who utilises movement to raise awareness about ethnic and environmental issues.’ Tekoha focuses on the identity and cultural heritage of the quilombolas — descendants of African slaves brought to Brazil — through a dance in which accents are heavily grounded, relating land to culture, the physical to the spiritual. It has elements of ritual dance and contemporary technique but the former always governs the latter. Synchronous group movement alternates with intensely sinewy articulated solos. Tekoha is mysterious and deeply emotional.

In Blank Dress, Amy Mauvan is at first so cocooned within her swathes of tulle that the image of an ostrich without its neck comes to mind. The image has nothing to do with Mauvan’s own idea of inhabiting a wedding dress that interrogates its wearer, but Blank Dress has that quality of never quite stating its intention. Even the words of the opening recorded text are hard to grasp, leaving the development of the work wandering aimlessly. With the dramatic unfolding of Mauvan’s almost bare torso from the tulle, the dress finally finds its place but the wearer has no answers to its questioning.