Images Ballet Company 2019 at Lilian Baylis Theatre

Images Ballet Company at Lilian Baylis Theatre, June 19

Finding a fresh end-of-year performance repertoire for students in the final year of London Studio Centre’s classical ballet strand is fraught with compromise. While classical ballet may be central to the curriculum, the classical form in contemporary performance is subject to various challenges, from inadvertent misunderstanding to intentional mishandling. With four new works to commission for her London Studio Centre students, Images Ballet Company artistic director Jennifer Jackson is well suited to navigating the hazardous paths to its realization. Having been a soloist in the Royal Ballet and subsequently experimented in choreographing the classical form and engaged in teaching its essentials ever since, she knows how to stand her ground and is not one to follow trends. She is careful to avoid, for example, the existential threat to the classical form at her former company arising from the dis-location of the body in the choreography of Wayne McGregor. Nevertheless, she faces two issues that this end-of-year performance aims to resolve. The number of choreographers working in the classical idiom is as limited as her budget so while she can at times access the talents of some of her more experienced colleagues, she must judge the input of less well-established choreographers to make up a program that will show off the quality of her dancers to their highest standards. That Jackson succeeds in balancing these competing demands is testimony to her skill in the artistic equivalent of realpolitik.  

One aspect of the performance Jackson has developed during her tenure at London Studio Centre is the musical through-line. This year composer and percussionist Martin Pyne provides not only a virtuosic composition for Mikaela Polley’s Interplay that he performs on stage, but a witty trio with himself on a mini-piano and two dancers that is performed during the intermission as an impromptu work in itself. Pyne begins Interplay seated behind his drum kit on an empty stage, giving us a foretaste of rhythmic patterns and percussive sounds for the choreography to follow. If Polley is conversant with classical technique, the forms and underlying rhythms she has chosen for the dancers are no match for Pyne’s virtuosic playfulness. Unlike the tradition in Indian classical dance, its western counterpart lacks the training of an integrated, percussive dynamic between musicians and dancers; although the interplay is present in the communication between Pyne and the dancers, the choreographic effect falls short of its promise. At the end, the gradual dismantling of the drum kit by the dancers while Pyne continues playing undaunted is a gem of musical and virtuosic wit.

Andrew McNicol’s Mirrors is a trio, a welcome relief from the habitual form of end-of-year performances where everyone appears in all the works. McNicol trained at The Royal Ballet School where he won the Kenneth MacMillan Choreographic Competition and clearly has an understanding of classical technique. Mirrors, to the third and fourth movements from Ravel’s Miroirs for solo piano, is an impressionistic portrait of three women that never quite frames them. As long as dance is the physical expression of emotions it cannot be abstract, but if the expression is not clear the choreography will be bewildering. Mirrors has no story but its spatial and gestural intent is dissipated in this lack of clarity. 

One of the misunderstandings about classical choreography is the over dependence on the signification of its shapes; just as music exists in between notes, dance happens in between shapes. Cameron McMillan’s On Lineage relies on classically trained dancers’ shapes in movement but leaves out the dance. The choreography is perhaps too influenced by Ezio Bosso’s saccharine music (from Six Breaths and Music for Weather Elements) that uses successions of chords in a similar way. It is the kind of work, however, that can bring individual presence into relief, as is the case with Daisy Bishop, whose transformation as a performer from last year is testament to the value of Jackson’s tenure at London Studio Centre. 

It is Ashley Page’s Meadowdown that finally sets the dancers free as if the previous works had been a preparation; with a strong sense of classical technique within a contemporary form, Meadowdown soaks up the selection of music from Benjamin Britten’s lively Diversions for Piano (Left Hand) and Orchestra and translates it into a dynamically rich choreography that sets the stage dancing. Page writes that the work has been created ‘to reveal the students as they discover themselves in performance’ and that’s exactly what it does.  

2018 Ignition Dance Festival, Rose Theatre, Kingston

Ignition Dance Festival, Rose Theatre, Kingston, June 15

Tina Omotosho, Stafan A Addaie and Danal Guy in MAN UP (photo: Gigi Gianella)

Rosie Whitney-Fish has taken a vision for dance and made it manifest. In an environment of financial scarcity where dance makers spend an inordinate amount of time writing applications for support from various cultural institutions, Whitney-Fish has grown DanceWest in four years from a seed of £1,000 of her own money into an organization that carries out a raft of community programs and projects centred around Lyric Hammersmith and co-founded Ignition Dance Festival with Kathryn Woodvine of Kingston Council. For the fifth festival DanceWest has been able to co-commission five mid-career choreographers — two solos, one duet, one trio and a quartet — whose works were seen for the first time recently at Kingston’s Rose Theatre.

As its name suggests, the festival is about igniting individual opportunities; each choreographer’s work can be seen for itself and while there is a curatorial hand in creating a viable program the interest of the festival is in the five singular approaches to creative expression. One of the parameters is that the commissions can only realistically cover a creation period of three weeks and while this may seem disadvantageous (though not unusual) to the creative process, some of the works have been in gestation for much longer: in the case of Jennifer Irons, for 20 years or more. With this much mental preparation, it was perhaps no surprise that her work, Yukon Ho!, arrived fully formed and bursting with life. Irons distills her formative years spent in the Yukon Territory in Northern Canada into a performative solo that integrates colourful anecdotes that are (almost) all true with her experience of dancing the can-can in the bars of Whitehorse. With assistance from writer Robert Churchill, Irons’ performance is as rich in texture as her delivery is timed to perfection and while she maintains a high voltage of humour there is a darker side not far behind it that comes with the Territory. In its present succinct form Yukon Ho! is a theatrical gem that holds light and dark in an unfathomable equilibrium.

Another work that has been forming over time is Kloe Dean’s MAN UP, an ambitious trio that honours the memory of her father, Raymond, while addressing the issue of his depression and suicide. As Dean writes in the program, her work is ‘a chance to break the silence of a stigmatized subject which does not get enough attention…It’s time to MAN UP!’ Using texts her father left behind and working the dark duality of a rope as both a recreational cord and an instrument of self-destruction, Dean plays hope against despair in a series of intense tableaux between Stefano A. Addae and Danal Guy. Weaving her irrepressible way through these scenes is Tina Omotosho who remains unaware of the tragedy about to unfold but is the one left to mourn. While Dean’s imagery is powerful and eloquent, the construction of MAN UP needs only to find a theatrical and choreographic ‘way through’ to allow the whole to be far more than the sum of its parts.

Avatȃra Ayuso’s angel is inspired by both the invisible, vengeful presence in Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel and the sport of fencing, but in its translation to the stage it is the latter that overshadows the former. One would imagine an avenging angel, foil in hand, dispensing altogether with full fencing gear for something more alluring to her dark and erotic play; her powers, after all, need no protection as her adversaries cannot see her. Alas, we cannot see her either; the obstruction of her face by the mask removes a vital element of her mimetic drama. In the latter part of angel Ayuso begins to contort her fencing postures into images that are more devilishly menacing as if she is warming to her motif, but it is too late to offset her literal preoccupation with the sport.

Paying tribute, by way of Federico Garcia Lorca’s elegy, to the dancer Antonia Mercé, ‘La Argentina’, Sam Quy’s La Lengua Flamenca points to the distinctly Spanish notion of duende, which, in Lorca’s words, ‘sears the blood like powdered glass, exhausts, rejects all sweet learned geometry, breaks with styles and relies on human suffering without solace…’ Perhaps Quy has erred on the side of historical appreciation rather than re-creation, for while the legacy of flamenco she and guitarist El Fernan de Tottenham bring to La Lengua Flamenca is rich, her performance is lacking the essential agonistic quality on which it depends for its conviction.

Cameron McMillan’s The Chimera Construct is a quartet for Jonathon Baker, George Baan, Nicholas Tredrea and Jade Brider that uses the Chimera of Greek mythology — ‘a multi-faceted beast, composed of parts of different wild creatures’ — as a construct of contemporary identity. Initially using animal masks to suggest differentiation, McMillan’s subsequent concern with the shapes and extensions of his hyper-flexible and hyper-extended dancers invokes instead a tame homogeneity. Perhaps applying a concept to a form can impart a meaning but The Chimera Construct needs to explore its physical vocabulary more convincingly to approach its notional concept.