Here lies a reflection of some moments, performances and work that have settled in my 2019 memory bank. It was a year when we had the UK Dance Showcase — which I will come back to later — and when so many artists created work in response to institutional power and epistemic violence.
Wendy Houstoun’s Hell Hath No Fury at Wainsgate Chapel, Hebden Bridge (part of Wainsgate Dances in June) took us to her Sunday school pulpit of philosophy and rage whilst delivering us from evil in a ferociously hilarious 45 minutes of wordplay and image making. Aided by the servitude and deferential bell ringing of Charlie Morrissey, Houstoun was our High Priestess, our sermon giver offering hope, hula hoop skipping, and water to those in need; as she commanded the audience to sit, stand and listen in our pews to ripostes against the 2019 political landscape she was swift and rapier-like. With Hell Hath No Fury Houstoun has demonstrated (and built upon from her previous works 50 Acts and A Pact With Pointlessness) her gift for rhythm, distillation and an ability to hold attention; she captures a mood of how some people are feeling and lampoons it. Wainsgate Chapel as a site of performance and Houstoun as prophet is an immaculate combination; in the age of fracturing communities and the slow death of theatre buildings I imagine a world where Hell Hath No Fury is a 2020 version of a mystery play travelling to chapels, churches and cathedrals across the country, a liturgical drama serving to shame our morally unanchored institutions of power.
Bodyless, directed by Hsin-Chien Huang, is a single-person 31-minute VR experience I saw at the Phi Centre in Montreal (part of an exhibition of VR work from Laurie Anderson, Marina Abramovic, Paul McCarthy and Olafur Eliasson) in November. Bodyless is based on Huang’s memory and set during Taiwan’s martial law and colonial period of the 1970s. The repression and control of people through old (and new) technologies blended with pervasive digital surveillance to ensure this has a relevance now; what Bodyless achieves that no other VR art work I’ve encountered so far has done, is the technological holy trinity of embodied encounter, emotional narrative investment and graphical fidelity. As we move round a dark and oppressive system, we encounter multiple timeless episodes/scenes where we find bodies in differing states of control; polygon-twitching bodies in cells with rewilding plants growing through the bars, faded newspaper portraits of people who have been deliberately missing-ed or dozens of limp and floating bodies in a hospital or boarding school with limbs defying gravity. The intimacy of VR as a single-person experience heightens emotions as you glide, ooze, sink or float through landscapes; the fact that you have a level of agency, an ability to move, look at and focus where you want embodies this act of witnessing bodyless-ness in action. We see how people are erased from a society, and the emotional distancing that VR and screen-based work usually causes is dissolved by Hsin-Chien Huang in this fantastical response to the memory of trauma.
From the macro power portraits of Hell Hath No Fury and Bodyless to a micro power portrait of Black male mental health, Elephant In The Room by Lanre Malaolu at Camden People’s Theatre in April is proof that Malaolu (supported by dramaturg Season Butler) has created a work of total theatre. We meet man, a multi-charactered everyman in control of his external body, but this control does not extend to his internal mind. Malaolu has a Hip Hop dance technique and execution that sparkles in its clarity; his physicality is accompanied by a command of language and a dexterity in verbal delivery that would cast long shadows at the RSC. He is wav(er)ing and popping; the use of these Hip Hop dance vocabularies is a fine foil for the wider debate around mental health: scrambled muscles that erupt and contract, dispersing clotted brain fog and bringing forth windows of clarity only to close again. Stability and control are bywords for mental health, and if you’re experiencing low level depression GPs recommend activities and inhabiting the types of spaces that Malaolu offers up in multiple scenes: football (exercise), Nando’s (food), barbers (community) and gym (self-worth). From a frozen barber, moving only his eyes and wrist with an imaginary shaver to a magnetic slapping of limbs and his back onto and into the floor and wall to an almost motionless slouch in a chair talking about too chewy chicken…Malaolu has the smarts and this work could and should have an international life like Inua Ellams’ The Barbershop Chronicles. What Malaolu achieves is a transference of a heavy feeling and an internal spiralling which are sometimes impossible to give shape to; the 70-minute work whistles by and it is the monstrosity of his attack, physical commitment (which bordered on the painful), multiplicity of voices and choice of stillnesses and excesses of movement that made this a highly satisfying evening that has the ability to stimulate further discussions in this terrain.
Cardiff Dance Festival hosted Montreal-based Daina Ashbee in residence during the festival in November and over the course of her stay in Wales Ashbee spent some time researching a new work, J’ai pleuré avec les chiens, which will be ready in 2020 as well as remounting and recasting her 2016 work When the ice melts, will we drink the water? We saw around 50 minutes of When the ice melts…performed by Lorena Ceraso in Chapter Arts Centre Studio. With Ceraso on the floor, back flatted and knees triangled, we understand early that her pelvis lies at the root of the work and at the centre of this bodily discourse on survival and endurance. Time is experienced slowly and there is a sparse choreographic landscape but one that is littered with violence, perceptions of the female body and sexuality. Slow quarter-turn rotations at 3, 6, 9 and 12 o’clock see Ceraso address all sides of the audience with her ascended and descended pelvis, flickering edges and glacial eyes, but as she presents each suite of movements four times we witness multiple angles, new and unseen details that were previously hidden from view. When the ice melts…was named the best dance piece of the year at Montreal’s 2016 Prix de la danse awards and in the intervening years it has only gathered relevance with the attention drawn towards violence against women from the #MeToo movement; what it does is build an atmosphere that is so charged and so unpleasant that silence blankets the audience — we barely breathe as we pay attention to every sound and movement emitted from Ceraso’s body. The feelings of anxiety created by the work echo the pressure and internal questioning of should/will/how do we speak of violence against women when we are unsure of what it is we need to say or do in response to it.
Violence towards women was consistently visible in a lot of the works I saw by female choreographer’s in 2019; another example (and a rare one because it is made for outdoor settings) was the 30-minute Scalped by Initiative.DKF. Created by Damilola DK Fashola and Wofai, with movement direction and writing by Fashola, Scalped was part of the opening night of Greenwich+Docklands International Festival in Woolwich in June. ‘For black women one of the most common shared experiences is a passive but ever-present scrutiny. From what you wear to the way you walk, and most especially hair. Whether permed, braided, or in locs, black hair is political.’ Scalped is a work that demands your attention, holds it and then brings you in, which is credit to the company in the context of outdoor presentation when there are dozens of other distractions to compete for your eyes. Patience James, Audrey Lobe, Bubsy Spence, DK and Bimpe Pacheco climb, frame, pose and move around their scaffold set and wheeled boxes telling stories of discrimination, can-I-touch-your-hair violence and desire for freedom. The choreography is big, the performances are huge and the company is rightfully taking up space and presenting politically and narratively strong work in public spaces; Scalped is relentless in its power and energy and forces audiences to at least think about the discrimination consistently faced by Black women in British society. Representation and visibility is crucial and Scalped is one of the very few outdoor works made and performed by Black artists in the UK; Fashola has written and directed a new work Fragments of a Complicated Mind which runs at Theatre 503 in London from January 21 to February 1, and this interrogation of race, religion, sex and cultural expectations is sure to see her star shine even brighter.
Creative responses to institutional power do not always have to be heavy or filled with activist sensibilities; they can achieve just as much from a position that sparks joy, refreshes perspectives and brings people together socially. The Box of Delights by 2Faced Dance Company is a fine example of that (full disclosure: I work with 2Faced Dance Company as Executive Director and had a small performance role in the work). Running for seven nights from December 17-23 as part of their 20th Anniversary programme, what co-directors Tamsin Fitzgerald and Tim Evans have created with The Box of Delights is something that I’ve not seen before from a company in the UK; with the first act of 50 minutes taking place outdoors at night at over 20 locations and performance interventions throughout the historic centre of Hereford, they guided an audience of 80 towards The Green Dragon Hotel for a second act which contained a meat or vegan three-course meal prepared by executive chef Simon Bolsover and the continuation of the narrative taking place over 1hour 45 minutes. The seamless shift of the narrative and audience experience from outdoor to indoor, altering perceptions of place alongside the inclusion of food, is an innovative model for presenting work and place-making which suits audiences, performers and companies alike.
The aforementioned works are some of the great ones I saw across the year, but it wasn’t all as good as this. The first outing of Impermanence Dance Theatre’s dance adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s Baal at Bristol Old Vic in April was both under and over baked at the same time; their portrayal of excess felt muted and duller in comparison to their previous successive portraits of excess in SEXBOX and Da-Da Darling. Rosie Kay Dance Company premiered the scaled-up version of 5 Soldiers…10 Soldiers (complete with 10 dancers) on the main stage at Birmingham Hippodrome in May which saw a dull 30-minute prequel tacked on to the previously successful 60-minute 5 Soldiers. The first half was meant to show the time getting in the army, but emotionally, physically and tonally it mirrored the second half leaving me questioning its purpose. The work clearly resonated with people who had a personal connection to, and involvement with, the army, but as a work at this scale, when the company hasn’t presented in this size auditorium, why would we expect it to be good immediately? Maybe after three or four shows when they understand that the intimacy, nuance and detail that made 5 Soldiers so good needs to shift considerably for grander and less subtle inferences. However, the work I had most trouble with this year was Confessions of a Cockney Temple Dancer by Shane Shambhu at Gloucester Guildhall, part of Strike A Light’s festival in March. In a year when there have been so many works of dance, performance and theatre exploring the effects of immigration/race/displacement/othering like Demi Nandra’s Life is No Laughing Matter, Akeim Toussaint Buck’s Windows of Displacement, Claire Cunningham’s Thank You Very Much or Rachael Young’s Out, Shambhu’s Confessions is a lite and frothy idiot’s guide to bharatanatyam made for White people. Peppered with anecdotes about his relationship to Indian dance and performing his arangetrum, it asks little of you and there’s little empathy, emotional investment or calls to action. Shambhu is a likeable mimic, scatting between citizenship issues and the physicalities of his family members, and while the work is well constructed it plays into the self-exoticisation that so many contemporary bharatanatyam creators attempt to repel. There are short bursts of 10-15 seconds of classical movement, which are not the cleanest and he is sometimes out of breath when coming out of a movement sequence straight into speech. There’s a nice reveal towards the end, an emotional hit that shows a duality: that this is part of him and that he wants to reject it but is unable to because it has partially formed him and how he is in the world.
…and back to the UK Dance Showcase, phase two of the Surf The Wave project conceived by Deryck Newland before he left PDSW in February 2017. The UK Dance Showcase was curated by 11 people and of those there were no women on the committee who weren’t white, there was nobody who worked in an organisation north of Salford, there were no people with a disability, no female artists and no producers. Surf The Wave is ‘the major project led by PDSW, on behalf of the National Dance Network (NDN)’ but it is telling how the other 26 members of NDN have been very public in distancing themselves from the project and choose/chose not to publicly or privately acknowledge the reality, successes or failures of Surf The Wave.
Artists and producers are always in the position of least power, least resources and least privilege in their relationships with institutions, and what has been heartening in 2019 is see how they have spoken up, back to, and in solidarity with others while forging new alliances en route. The relevance of the majority of cultural institutions and how they behave in society and with their community demonstrate at best a wilful ostriching ignorance of how society is shifting and at worst a consistent and harmful contribution that perpetuates outmoded thinking, broken systems and systemic bias.
With the total funds raised at more than £1million — on top of the other public subsidy added to the total from the time spent by salaried organisations across the UK — the narrative presented back to NDN and to other funders has been that some of the artists who attended the event have achieved some positive outcomes, built tours and new relationships. While this is brilliant for those artists who presented/pitched work that appealed to small-scale, non-dance specialist arts centres across England, the active choice not to invite international programmers rendered the entire narrative as a sweet set of Tory Leadership/Brexit analogies (taking back control of our borders/exports), and conservative leadership breadcrumbs (Jeremy Hunt’s I’m an Artist as Entrepreneur) that beggars belief. What has not been reported is the anger, frustration, bitterness and experiences of unprofessionalism in the way artists who were ‘selected’ were engaged in the lead-up to the event. Delaying the timeline of announcing selected artists (ensuring artists missed funding windows to apply for support to enable their presence at the event), offering fees to present the work, reneging on that offer and then offering a lower one to the same artists or selecting work that is not in a touring window and expecting artists to absorb the costs of remounting it, were some of the examples (there were many more) of how artists were treated. While it is acknowledged that those who programme work congratulated the PDSW team on a well-organised showcase event, the structural debris of damaged and fractured relationships has mirrored our political situation. Those holding power are ever more desperate to preserve old models and thinking, whilst those in receipt of the email vacuum of silence are left to wonder how to engage in the future.
I wrote a whole other piece (unpublished) about my experience at one of the Artist as Entrepreneur events but it follows a similar vein. Artists and producers are often encouraged by organisations and institutions of power to acknowledge their failures and mistakes in the creation and presentation of work — a growing focus and thematic consideration of a number of dance works including Epic Failure by Cultured Mongrel and The Unwanted by Shaper Caper. These and other works in development offer a personal, interesting and critical perspective on human fallibility, but until our organisations and institutions of power begin to acknowledge their own failure, or offer a public narrative about things which went well or not so well, then things will never change, and the power imbalance shall remain.
Probe Project, Running on Empty, The Place, November 5
Greig Cooke and Antonia Grove in Running on Empty (photo: Matthew Andrews)
The printed program doesn’t give much away about the nature of the piece, but it’s immediately apparent that Running on Empty has a full tank of collaborators: apart from the three performers (Antonia Grove, Scott Smith and Greig Cooke) there is a director (Jo McInnes), writer (Brad Birch), choreographer (Charlie Morrissey), songwriter (Lee Ross), composer (Smith), set and costume designer (Fabrice Serafino) and lighting designer (Beky Stoddart) — an array of creative inputs that begs the question of who exactly has a handle on the direction. The marketing material features an enigmatic image of Cooke and Grove running together across a landscape as if escaping from a party: intense, focused, out of breath. That snapshot is replaced on stage by another indeterminate place but without a specific flight path. The set suggests a no man’s land where paths meet, an intriguing dreamland with a detrital heap of old furniture on one side with a tree of lights behind and a low wall delineating the unknown beyond. The set and lighting together create a sense of expectation as Smith takes his place behind a keyboard amongst the furniture as if sitting at a bar. He plays some doleful minor chords on the guitar as a prelude to a song remembering a relationship that Grove sings in a voice that is out on a husky limb, aching and velvety especially in its higher register: “Are we too close or too far apart?” with a bluesy harmonica accompaniment from Smith.
Cooke can just be made out lounging on the wall at the back, listening to Grove’s words: “I’d dive into the abyss if I thought I’d save your life”, she continues, glancing at Smith. Cooke stands, his hands and face caught in the narrow pane of light, and responds in dance, swishing and swirling in an intense solo in which he manifests his force and self-doubt in equal measure. Grove looks over at him for the first time. Smith, who plays both confidant and analyst to Grove, asks her: “What do you remember?” She shines a light underneath her chin, then at something unknown beyond her. Death? “What colour are its eyes?” asks Cooke. Grove is bathed in a subtle, fragile light, her arms raised and slightly behind her as if she had just been shot, and launches into a solo that is based on that arching back, wild and abandoned. With tenderness in his eyes Cooke comes to her rescue. “What are you doing?” “Bang, bang, arms, fuck,” is what I hear. The diction is rather muffled, perhaps a function of the portable mikes. “I’m building a boat,” she adds, kneeling, “to get you out of here. Just trying to build you a boat.” Evidently the running idea has been subsumed by metaphors of the sea, of boats and rafts.
The sound of breakers colours the clashing duet that follows, both Groves and Cooke forcing their limits (running towards empty) yet never touching; blowing each other away, shouting and screaming over the sound of sea. Smith pulls out a wooden pallet that serves as a raft on to which Groves and Cooke clamber. They look at each other. Is it over? Cooke leans out over the edge of the raft, hanging from Grove; she pulls him in; he takes her head as they fit into each other’s forms, but are they strangling or comforting? The Stevie Smith poem comes to mind,
‘…I was much too far out all my life And not waving but drowning.’
The danger games persist. Who will fall off first? They kneel on the front of the raft and step with their hands and knees into the water. Smith reels in the raft, casting them away on the beach. Cooke and Grove embrace roughly then he chases her round the island, catching her, lifting and releasing her in a fury of entanglement and abandon. The sound of a storm whips up the action until it finally abates in an attempt at reconciliation: “Please forgive me” and “Where are we going?” but it’s impossible for Cooke to brake and he ends up — as I noted detachedly in my notebook — ripping her head off. It happens quickly, and its violence is unexpected. Grove crawls away; Smith brings her a glass of water and returns with the raft, dropping it with a bang as if offering a means of exit. “It’s not your fault,” he says, adding something about chance. She is in no mood for philosophical argument, so Smith goes back to his microphone and begins a song about an otter and a trout. It begins in surreal fashion with a pinwheel blast on his mechanical whistle, and prompts a series of surreal crustacean images: Cooke conjures up a lobster on its back as he crawls upside down towards Grove who scuttles in sympathy, or perhaps in fear. He crawls on to the raft, blowing out his cheeks like a conch shell, eyes popping, sounding like an angry elephant. Their duet develops into a tour de force of fragments of dialogue and screeching fitting into behavioural tics: snorting, itching, scratching, spitting, leaping, At the end, Smith as analyst or agony uncle, brings Grove a beer: “You’re having problems.” She denies it. “Maybe that’s your first problem.” She counters: “Do you understand what it is to be me?” He mimics her itching, tentacle-like fingers that he then extrudes into the shape of a gun, the trigger caught in the light. Cooke is back on the sea wall. There’s text about illness and disease, the problems and insecurities of old age — all highly relevant but I’m not sure how it fits in here. “Will I recover, is it too late?” asks Grove. Smith smiles. It’s clearly too late for rhetorical questions. He rubs his hands and pushes away the microphone with his hip.
Grove and Cooke in smiling mood embrace and explore each other. After they have been through so much, the question arises of where this is going. The mood is playful, producing a natural, infectious laugh from Grove before she appears to confront her present. “Do you drink?” asks Cooke, followed by a question about dreams. “This is where my dreams are set,” she responds. Her final words to Cooke are, “Can you do me a favour? Stay away from the cliffs.” It is the first time the cliffs are mentioned, the landscape described beyond the rear wall, and in this place above the sea she starts to dance, scooping, twisting and turning to Smith’s guitar accompaniment that is somewhere between flamenco and hillbilly banjo. She throws herself into her moves, repeating phrases with a mix of courage, abandon and hopelessness and finishes by running around the stage, running out of steam. She prompts Smith into a last song (which repeats the melody of the opening song), dragging the microphone to centre stage, pouring all her emotional exhaustion into the lyrics: “So slowly now you bow into eternity… How long can you keep running?” with that gutsy, velvety voice running full on empty.
At the close, we are left elevated by the visual and aural imagery but there’s a disconcerting sense of gaps in the narrative cohesion. We learn later that Cooke has fallen off the cliffs to his death, but this loss fails to register. Does it matter? Death offstage seems a uniquely theatrical concept that dance can’t do by itself, which leads me to think that the narrative and the dance in Running on Empty are like oil and water; they are not blending. Grove suggests in the program that the work moves ‘from the dark and surreal world of dreams to the intricate and sometimes absurd nature of our daily human interactions.’ This is something that dance can do really well, and Grove is particularly adept at drawing the drama out of dance. Perhaps Running on Empty simply suffers from too many creative inputs; dreams inevitably have a consistency because all their fragmented elements can be traced back to the individual psyche. Running on Empty needs to forge a unity of its own creative psyche before its dream will ring true.
Dan Canham: 30 Cecil Street and Theo Clinkard: Ordinary Courage, Pavilion Dance, February 21
Watching Pavilion Dance’s inspired double bill of Dan Canham’s 30 Cecil Street and Theo Clinkard’s Ordinary Courage I had the stimulating if somewhat unnerving experience of sitting with a playwright (Nell Leyshon) and a theatre director (Jessica Swale). Where dance merges with theatre, these are the kinds of eyes and ears and intelligence — attuned to what makes theatre alive and sensitive to any dramatic inconsistency or to anything remotely artificial — that choreographers need to work with if their creations are to effectively merge the two disciplines. Canham’s 30 Cecil Street triumphs because all its elements hang together within an intelligently delineated frame which leaves abundant room for his sometimes haunting, sometimes comic and always heartfelt response to the life once lived in the theatre whose walls he traces in white tape on the stage floor like an architectural drawing. Clinkard’s Ordinary Courage, however, divides along the fault lines of dance and theatre. The six performers each have a solo that is very much the property and personality of the individual dancers, but the framework of the piece, even though it is much tighter than when I first saw it, does not hold together. It is for the most part a loose assembly of loosely disguised rehearsal exercises that are decidedly un-dramatic, which leaves the individual solos unsupported by a context. When I first saw Ordinary Courage at Laban, I felt the overall tone was muted, and even though I was happy this time to return to each solo like returning to a favourite painting in a gallery, the integrity of the work still fails to coalesce. It is Clinkard’s first work, and one in which he himself performs. As he ruefully admits in the Q&A afterwards, it was only after he saw a filmed version of the work that he saw for the first time what he had created. He has made changes that have improved the work, but I don’t imagine he will repeat the dual role for his next creation.
There is also an illuminating difference in the initial inspiration for the two works. With Canham it is direct and physical: he had come across the near-derelict Theatre Royal in Limerick after finishing a tour with DV8, looking to replenish his inspiration. He was immediately attracted to the place and began to explore his feelings about it in movement in the street at night or in the early morning when nobody else was around. He then filmed some of his choreography in the building itself before creating the stage version. The soundtrack, played on a reel-to-reel tape deck, is a collage of interviews with people associated with the theatre, snatches of music, bingo calling, glass harmonica, music hall and opera that had once been heard there. John McCormack singing Down by the Sally Gardens is particularly poignant. Canham’s movement seems to originate as much from the dank walls and drunken conversations as from the foot shuffling music hall routines and there is a section where his hands tune in to the invisible waves of past performances that crackle into being on the tape and disappear again as he moves around the stage. Although it is only Canham we see, it is the theatre that is the subject of the piece, the heart of the piece and out of respect he removes himself from the stage at the end (by the steps and the door he has marked), leaving us to hear the resigned tones of a conversation about the end of the theatre.
The inspiration for Ordinary Courage is more spiritual and indirect. As he explains himself, Clinkard felt he was ready to choreograph but was searching for a theme. While teaching in Chile, he saw an illustration of a heart with the words Without Fear inscribed inside and took this at his theme for the new work. The theme is recognizable — specifically the courage to face loss — but the message is internalized, inward looking. Clinkard had lost a friend, the choreographer Tanja Liedtke, and his mother Robin (to both of whom Ordinary Courage is dedicated), which may explain his almost private response. Canham draws us in — indeed he wants to draw us in — but Clinkard seems more focused on the crafting of the dance, as if our eyes never quite meet. The lighting (by Zerlina Hughes), based on photographic soft boxes suspended from the lighting bars, also tends to flatten the dance, though there are moments when the colours and textures of the costumes benefit beautifully. The central series of six solos is linked to keyboard partitas and sonatas by Bach and Scarlatti — played live by Clíodna Shanahan — which sit elegantly within an elemental sound design by Alan Stones that conjures up a rising squall at the beginning that gradually overpowers a Bach partita and against which the group tries in vain to advance. Helka Kaski’s beautifully nuanced dance of helplessness and Charlie Morrissey’s wild despair succeed best in capturing a state of grief in movement; I enjoy watching Clinkard’s solo for its intimacy and lyricism, though I wonder to what extent his expression of loss is coloured by the inherited vocabulary of previous work. Maho Ihara’s sensitivity is a joy to watch, her mime — a mother’s memories of nurturing a child — a delight, and her singing to calm the enigmatic bear an inspired addition. Margarita Zafrilla Olayo’s solo is an attempt to break free of the ‘family’, to grieve alone, while Adam Blanch’s solo, which he heralds by leaving the stage and returning in black shoes, is danced with bravado, but feels more technically formal and less integrated into the theme than the others. We are also expecting it, as he is by now the only one not to have danced a solo (the element of surprise is quite low in Ordinary Courage).
This is Clinkard’s first ensemble work, and he will be relieved to have given it birth. But if he wants to hone his dramatic skills on the next piece, I know just the people to give him feedback.
Usually one receives presents on one’s birthday, but legendary BBC dance producer, Bob Lockyer, decided to celebrate his 70th birthday by asking his dance friends to commission a work or select one of their own to present at an evening of dance at The Place. There was a private showing on April 12th, and an opportunity for the public to see the works the following evening. Bob stipulated that the proceeds from the two evenings would benefit one of two charities: the Royal Philharmonic Society Drummond Fund and The Place’s Pioneering Fund. Among the Lockyer luminaries who contributed to the program were Dame Monica Mason, Robert Cohan, Mark Baldwin, Richard Alston, Siobhan Davies and Wayne McGregor.
The public evening gets underway with Drone, danced by two students from the London Contemporary Dance School, Drew Hawkins and the choreographer, Andy Macleman, to music of The Haxan Cloak. The costumes have the elegance of Quaker simplicity, and the movement itself alternates quiet austerity with bursts of energy. The two dancers set up an intense but sympathetic dynamic between them in both spirit and touch. It is a work of surprising maturity.
It is not often that pointe shoes and classical ballet steps grace the stage at The Place, but Dame Monica Mason’s commission, Papillon, by Royal Ballet School dancer and choreographer, Sebastian Goffin, reminds us just how far the language of dance has developed since the 1830s. Using Dvorak’s Silent Woods, played on stage by Rebecca Herman and Andrew Saunders, Goffin creates a romantic picture of young love and abandoned scholarship in rustic Kensington Gardens with the delightful Mayara Magri and Skyler Martin, both dancers at the Royal Ballet School.
Mark Baldwin’s contribution is Prayer, for four girls from the Rambert Dance Company, each revealing their respective lyrical qualities in a series of solos and forming a remarkably harmonious ensemble. Hannah Rudd’s solo would make any heart melt and the fiddler, Stephen Upshaw, plays a solo within a solo during a section of Julian Anderson’s score, while the dancers look on. His movements are unchoreographed and utterly true to form. A revelation.
Richard Alston is clearly an esteemed colleague of Bob Lockyer because he is responsible for two offerings of the evening. Jo Kondo’s music, Isthmus, sets the tone for the first little gem. And it is little, although the dancers – all from the Richard Alston Dance Company – make it seem so much bigger.
The Way it Works is This… could have been the beginning of Eddie Nixon’s opening discourse, but Orlando Gough uses it as a starting point to frame a series of isolated phrases in a soundscape for Charlie Morrissey’s consummate dance of the same name. Brilliant. Siobahn Davies commissioned this, and chose the projected images from the work of Étienne-Jules Maray representing some of the earliest attempts to record movement photographically (I’m reading from the notes). Morissey’s thoughtful work, like Gough’s soundscape, is a lot of fun and its roots go way back to the minimalist contemporary dance of New York’s Judson Dance Theatre, something Bob would appreciate.
Robert Cohan’s choice is significant for both Bobs. These two go back a long way, which may be why In Memory is chosen, but it also clearly holds memories for Cohan, and there is a passion in the work that is life size. Set to a gorgeous score by Hindemith, his Sonata for unaccompanied viola (played beautifully on stage by Alistair Scahill), this extract of the work sees four men from Alston’s company dancing together until a girl in red with Cleopatra eyes, Nancy Nerantzi, arrives, which is where the passion really begins.
Wayne McGregor offers one of the most beautiful commissions of the evening, Lake Maligne, by Royal Ballet choreographic apprentice, Robert Binet. It is inspired by the paintings of Lawren Harris, one of Canada’s iconic Group of Seven and known for his luminous paintings of the Great White North. Well, the luminosity comes through in the dancing of Daniela Neugebauer of Random Dance. Binet’s choreography is fluid and suits Neugebauer’s qualities beautifully. Her hands and arms turn and reach and then come to perfect rest, articulating shapes that stay in the imagination, while the sonorous voice of Bill Callahan is like dark clouds on a summer day. Neugebauer is totally convincing, her eyes know exactly where and how to focus. Everything is just right, and the audience senses it.
Richard Alston’s big, final present is Shuffle It Right, to the irrepressible music of Hoagy Carmichael. Performed by eight of Alston’s dancers, everyone enters into the swing of the music, on stage and in the audience. This is a great way to end a memorable evening.
This is the kind of performance that could and should be shown on the BBC. It would be a fitting tribute to the man who devised it, but since there has been an evident change in thinking about what public broadcasting can present since Bob Lockyer’s pioneering days, what is familiarly known as Bob’s Bash will have to wait in the wings for a reappraisal of the value of dance production on public television.
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