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

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

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.

The Associates, Sadler’s Wells

The Associates, Sadler’s Wells, February 6

The Associates themselves (l to r): Kate Prince (photo: Simon Prince), Hofesh Schechter (photo: Jake Walters) and Crystal Pite (photo: Michael Slobodian)

Over the last ten years Sadler’s Wells has developed a roster of 16 Associate Artists reflecting the different genres of dance it produces. Artistic Director Alistair Spalding is not in the habit of putting together a program of Associates’ work but this particular one came about through the almost simultaneous request from two of them, Hofesh Schechter and Kate Prince, to test run their works in front of their home audience. Seeing an opportunity, Spalding called on the most recent Associate, Crystal Pite, to complete the program.

I am not familiar with Kate Prince’s choreography but here she directs Smile, a solo choreographed (with a little help from Shaun Smith) and performed by Tommy Franzén. He starts out as Charlie Chaplin’s famous tramp in a delightful riff on those familiar gestures but very quickly loses his way amongst the storage room full of props. It is only in the final scene nine tracks later that he wipes off his white face and black mustache, but he could have done it much earlier. If Chaplin’s tramp is the peg on which Smile hangs it is soon overwhelmed by all the imagery Prince/Franzén/Smith heap on it. There is clearly an attempt to contrast the comedic with the tragic without realizing (as Chaplin did) that both reside within the same gestures and postures. Prince separates the two with the result that Franzén can never gain the stature of the tragic because he is too busy trying to be funny.

There is only a pause between Smile and Crystal Pite’s A Picture of You Falling (2008) but the contrast is marked. Pite’s writing of dance has the clarity of a Joni Mitchell song or of a photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson: the focus is unmistakable and immediate. The writing is intelligent and meaning is built up with each creative element, from choreography to setting to costumes to light and sound. Linda Chow, who created the carapace-like costumes for Polaris in the Thomas Adès program, is here in more casual mode but dresses the dancers in layers they then discard as the story is revealed. In the hands of Robert Sondergaard light becomes a metaphor for space and time, and can speak as demonstratively as a dancer’s gesture, as it does at the opening when a roving light seems to embody the voice of Kate Strong recalling aspects of a relationship. Peter Chu and Anne Plamondon are the couple whose history is Pite’s subject and although it is broken up like snapshots shuffled from an album the emotional core is beautifully expressed through movement. “I am fascinated and convinced by the shared narratives that live in our bodies,” writes Pite, “the familiar, repetitive storylines that move across cultures and generations — and the body’s role as illustrator.” It is Pite’s ability to mine this illustrative potential of the body with such finesse that sets her apart as a remarkable choreographer.

Hofesh Schechter has a new commission for the Royal Ballet at the end of March and I wonder if he is either testing out some ideas here or if he is getting this piece out of his creative system to make way for the new. The barbarians in love is more delicate than his previous work, perhaps influenced by his embrace of François Couperin’s music, and comes across as a meditation on the past without setting out in any new direction. Lee Curran’s lighting through levels of mist and the white tops and dark jeans devised by Merle Hensel enhance a sense of searching for purity or redemption. The final section in which the six fine dancers emerge from the darkness naked or semi naked strikes me as an intensely personal statement; the dancers remain in the half shadow facing us self-consciously, using their arms in eerily simple gestures redolent of departure without wanting to go. The barbarians in love — the title itself is infused with ambiguity — is a strung together on a series of ethical imperatives or lessons intoned with intimate sensuality by Natascha McElhone that culminate in a recorded dialogue between her in the role of a teasing God and a skewered Schechter trying to justify his work. It borders quite heavily on the self-indulgent but there are mitigating factors. Whether the barbarians in love signals a turning point in Schechter’s creative output will not be known until the end of March with his new commission at the Royal Opera House.

Rubberbandance: Gravity of Center

Rubberbandance: Gravity of Center, Purcell Room, May 3

photo: Jocelyn Michel

In his essay on the relationship between language and style, Writing Degree Zero, Roland Barthes makes the case that literary style, having its origin in the ‘biology and biography’ of the writer, is a profound transmutation of these two elements through the medium of language that can carry man ‘to the threshold of power and magic.’ What strikes me in this notion is that style, be it literary or choreographic, is not a category, nor is it a conscious application of rules; its value is in its transformative force. Without such a force, style is as arbitrary as the words or steps or gestures that happen to comprise it. In dance, as in other performing arts, style is multiplied by the number of creative inputs and in the case of collaboration between dance, music, lighting and set design, the confluence of styles has the potential to drill down to our very core.

Victor Quijada’s work is an interesting study of language and style. His ‘biography and biology’ bridges forms of street dance learned in the ciphers of Los Angeles and contemporary forms of classical ballet in the companies of Twyla Tharp, Elliott Feld and Montreal’s Les Grands Ballets Canadiens. One can see these dual origins in his steps, but he transforms them with his dark, passionate persona into a style that can equally delve into the sub-currents of his life or strike a vein of laughter and light, as it did in his recent work for Scottish Dance Theatre, Second Coming.

Gravity of Center is an altogether darker work — it has some of the bleakness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road — that deals with the dynamics within a tight-knit group of five itinerant souls on the edge of survival: the tensions, jealousies, frustrations, violence, rejection and redemption. The style Quijada has created to express this is not simply illustrating a story; it is the story.

The narrative is contained within a small sphere of activity, perhaps an evening’s sortie; certainly most of it takes place in what appears to be night. A group that feels its way hesitantly across the stage is an image Quijada used in the opening of Second Coming, though there the narrative breaks up into fragments, whereas Gravity of Center keeps the action in a tight grip; it is almost claustrophobic, to which is added the seemingly inevitable smoke to make it all thicker still. Each of the five performers incorporates a single universal virtue or vice like characters in a contemporary morality play. Quijada is the patriarchal leader of the group; Elon Höglund is a grudging, brooding brother; Daniel Mayo is a gentler, more virtuous soul who is keen to prove himself, and Emmanuelle LêPhan is a free spirit, attractive and attracted, who is the cause of most of the tensions between the alpha males. Anne Plamondon is cast in the role of mother, healer and compassionate one whose patient efforts and wisdom keep the group alive. It is the interplay of these five characters that makes up the psychological drama in Gravity of Center.

Quijada likes to play with theatrical conventions. At the beginning it is the audience that is bathed in a blue light while the stage remains dark (lighting design and technical direction by Yan Lee Chan). Even the exit lights in the Purcell Room seem dimmed. The only indication of something happening on stage is the sound of squeaking shoes on the rubber floor to Jasper Gahunia’s desolate soundscape that seems to grow out of the Russian steppes and evolves into an eclectic sampling of musical forms from Stravinsky to Chopin to Piazzola. When the lights allow us a first glimpse of the figures rising from the floor, they look like a band of giant marauders but it is not long before the band splinters into micro conflicts. Quijada’s dancers take risks; although we know they are not going to walk off the stage and hurt themselves, they come perilously close to disabusing us of our certainty. It means split-second timing, and it keeps our attention (and the dancers’ attention) on the edge. It is a quality that infuses everything Quijada does and it heightens the sense of animality in Gravity of Center: the prowling, pushing, elbowing, and kicking out at the air; the cartwheeling backwards over each other, the scorpion kicks and the writhing around each other like serpents; the bullying, cajoling, and the constant searching for dominance and survival. At one point, as the dynamics of the group get out of hand once again, a voice behind me whispers, ”God, this is not going well.” Plamondon’s lyrical qualities are the antidote, the balm to the wounded souls, the compassion to the blind outbursts of rage. If there is any narrative within this volatile scenario, it is that Mayo’s character, the runt of the group, is ready to prove himself. Plamondon senses he is better off alone (or he comes to the same conclusion), and with her blessing and a little pushing, he disappears over the edge of the stage for a period of time only to be ‘found’ later by Plamondon’s maternal, sensory instincts. The core of the work is a series of tactical exits and menacing entrances, solos, duets, trios (notably between Höglund, LêPhan and Quijada), quartets and unison quintets focusing on the constantly looping dynamics of the group. Quijada’s challenge here is to find a conclusion. There are a couple of blackouts and an edging toward a point of no arrival, but in a sense these are five characters in search of an ending; it arrives by the theatrical convention of the lights going down (for the third time) rather than by any sense of finality. In fact there is a very real sense that the action continues through the night and into the following morning.

As such, Gravity of Center constitutes less a narrative than an essay. Second Coming coalesced into a spark; this one bubbles in the background, waiting to draw those gestures and signs and symbols into a coherence that has a life of its own rather than describing how it is going to get there. It is a style in search of its true form.