Shobana Jeyasingh Dance: Strange Blooms & Configurations

Shobana Jeyasingh Dance, Strange Blooms & Configurations, Queen Elizabeth Hall, December 3

Noora Kela in Strange Blooms (photo: Chris Nash)

This review was commissioned by Pulse Magazine and first appeared online at www.pulseconnects.com. It was subsequently published in the Winter issue of the magazine. It is reproduced here with the kind permission of the editor. 

It is no coincidence that Shobana Jeyasingh chose the biology of plants to underpin the twenty-fifth anniversary of her choreographic debut and the birth of her company. The program at Queen Elizabeth Hall included her first work, Configurations, as well as the world première of Strange Blooms. If the latter is the flowering of her artistic development, her bold collaboration with Michael Nyman in 1988 that became Configurations illustrates the clarity of the process by which she achieved it. Dylan Thomas used the metaphor of a ‘force that through the green fuse drives the flower’, and there is a very real sense in both works of Jeyasingh’s rich, fertile imagination driving the creative process towards fulfillment. Her initial use of the traditional bharatanatyam dance form has broadened – she spoke candidly in the question and answer session following the performance about feeling ‘over-defined at the beginning by race and culture’ – but she remains focused on generating meaning in dance without recourse to stories. Her materials are space, time and the bodies of her dancers; her process is one of consummate design.

The members of the Benyounes Quartet sit patiently in the shadows before the start of Configurations. They will be playing Nyman’s String Quartet No. 2 which itself is based on a rhythmic score in six sections that Jeyasingh had prepared as a brief for the composer. Such close artistic collaboration is key to the unity of purpose in each work. Lucy Carter’s lighting design projects a series of rectangles on to the floor that change pattern in rhythm with the music and create pathways for the four arching, spiraling dancers whose steps are so precisely choreographed to the music that they are as much human instruments as they are indefatigable interpreters. Two years ago Jeyasingh reworked the choreography. ‘I wanted to say the same thing but find a simpler way to say it.’ It is this economy of means and her painterly use of space that give the music such a rich visual quality that is further enhanced by Ursula Bombshell’s costumes in reds and orange. The dancers never falter as they carry the lyrical forms, beauty, patterns and colour – even a moment of deadpan humour – through to the work’s conclusion.

A similar organic line is at work in Strange Blooms, not only as the basis of its design but in the subject matter itself. It is organized in four sections based on different aspects of plant biology: the first on the way tendrils curl and swirl in their frenzied search for support; the second on the algorithms of branching; the third on cellular instabilities within plants that help them to move, and the fourth about hybridity or cross breeding. From the very first moment these eight strange blooms unfold before our eyes as if we are looking through a microscope or at a time-lapse film, with Guy Hoare’s patterns of light reminiscent of Rothko in fauve colours suffusing the choreographic development. Graphic projections are not easy to get right in a dance context, but Jan Urbanowski’s laser-like etchings of plant forms play beautifully on the dancers’ bodies while Fabrice Serafino’s costumes subtly harmonise gender and reveal the dance. One can still see the low plié of bharatanatyam but the dance vocabulary belongs more with the urgency of natural forms than with any particular style.

If Strange Blooms reveals the hidden life of plants, Gabriel Prokofiev’s score simulates the process in music. By dissecting a recording by Jane Chapman of Louis Couperin’s harpsichord piece, Chaconne la Complaignante, Prokofiev lays bare its mysterious internal processes before putting it all back together again in pristine form. Like the design of Strange Blooms, it is a remarkable journey that reminds us of the richness hidden in the depths of life. As Jeyasingh says, ‘Choreography is a way of revealing what is already there.’

Sadhana Dance: Under My Skin

Sadhana Dance, Under My Skin, The Place, October 18

Archana Ballal, Gemma Bass-Williams and Carl Pattrick in Under My Skin (photo: Marc Pepperall)

What we wish for sometimes manifests in ways that are as unpredictable as they are inexorable. Choreographer Subathra Subramaniam wanted first to be a doctor but found her expression in the classical Indian dance tradition of Bharatanatyam. Her latest work, Under My Skin, returns to her first love, which gives the title a certain ambiguity: it refers not only to what happens to a patient undergoing surgery but also to an emotional attachment that is hard to shake off, as in the Cole Porter song, I’ve Got You Under My Skin. Subramaniam’s involvement is both: undoubtedly passionate in transforming surgery into choreographic form, she also demonstrates a vicarious curiosity in the operating theatre through a program of simulations, craft demonstrations and haptics that precedes the performance.

Enter Dr. Roger Kneebone, professor of surgical education at Imperial College London, whose mission to disseminate a greater understanding of surgical procedures dovetailed seamlessly with Subramaniam’s research into Under My Skin and gives it a rich context. There is evidently no pain in Subramaniam’s work, nor the emotion of dealing with the balance of life and death — something that even the surgical simulations bring affectingly to the surface. Her skill is in extracting the beauty of the movement from the operating theatre and in interpreting the essential trust that is a perquisite for any surgical procedure. In doing so, she not only expands the boundaries of Bharatanatyam but provides Professor Kneebone with an expressive medium to further his own research.

Through the surgical simulations (staged at The Place as part of the Bloomsbury Festival) we begin to understand the critical importance of close and accurate communication within a team of specialists providing an acute level of care for a patient undergoing surgery. This will involve the surgeon, at least one assistant surgeon, a scrub nurse, an anaesthetist, and an OTP (operating theatre practitioner). Sometimes the team will meet each other for the first time around the operating table, but they must work meticulously and intimately on matters of vital importance to the patient. In the course of her research for Under My Skin, Subramaniam witnessed this teamwork as an observer, and although there are only three dancers in her work, their relationship to one another is as tightly choreographed as that of the operating theatre team.

As in other works of Subramaniam there is text, here a poem about the nature of blood by Allen Fisher, whom Professor Kneebone commissioned. Its clinically precise language takes on a sense of mystery in the recording of  Chris Fogg’s sonorous voice emanating from the dark. The reading of the opening lines is superimposed on a single red light like a drop of blood under a microscope to the sound of baffles, plungers and artificial breathing apparatus, the beginning of a parallel collaboration between lighting designer Aideen Malone and sound artists Kathy Hinde and Matthew Olden.

Malone also observed the operating theatre environment (and as a consequence has been asked to propose improvements to the lighting system). Her three rectangular corridors of light form distinct environments for the three medical personnel (Gemma Bass-Williams, Archana Ballal and Carl Pattrick) in blue surgical scrubs (assimilated by Kate Rigby) who adjust imaginary controls and instruments with minute accuracy and concentration: three routines that develop freely and beautifully into extended dance movement. Ballal is clearly at home with the flow of Bharatanatyam that underlies the choreography — especially in her solo to the violin of Preetha Narayanan — and adapts the gestures of the operating theatre as if putting on a pair of latex gloves. Bass-Williams and Pattrick, while clearly immersed in the style, work towards the flow of Bharatanatyam from the task-based material. What unites the three dancers is the clarity and precision of their gestures.

As the trio merges into the central corridor of light, Malone expands it into one large theatre in which the trio breathes with the breath of an imaginary patient preparing for an operation. Taking the weight of, supporting and balancing each other’s body are all metaphors for the mutual dependency of the team.

Bass-Williams and Pattrick abstract the meticulous washing of hands and the precise order of gowning into a ritual dance. Malone’s lighting moves like a film from one scene to another; in the light at one moment is Ballal in a dynamic dance while in the semi-darkness the surgeons continue their preparation, a solo of life superimposed on a duet of support. The dance vocabulary immerses itself increasingly in the current of Bharatanatyam; Bass-Williams and Pattrick join Ballal in a trio of rhythmic turning steps accented with the deep plié and completed by the rich arm and hand mudras.

The focus is narrowed to a circle of yellow light in which we see — as if we are in the team — just the hands the colour of latex taking and placing instruments, sharing actions, cutting, stitching, checking, swabbing, and cleaning in a silent, concentrated rhythm. Subramaniam once again transforms these gestures away from the operating theatre into the performing theatre, adapting the ability of Bharatanatyam to tell stories through gesture and dance. One aspect that is less developed here is the traditional use of the face as an expressive instrument, especially the eyes. The dancers look at each other, but their eyes are not always eloquent.

An acceleration in the music returns us to Bharatanatyam’s rapid, rhythmic footwork; the influence of Indian classical dance is strongest here and the dancers are stripped down to their essential natures. This is the pleasure of movement where flow is everything; it feels like a coda of growing complexity and technical achievement, but Subramaniam returns us once again to the routine operating theatre where poetry is supplanted by the sounds of the machines, the broad wash of light by a circle of yellow light and dancing by a silent concentration on gestures of intimacy and healing. Pattrick finishes his task and leaves. Bass-Williams and Ballal stay on to accompany the patient’s recovery, then Bass-Williams hands over to Ballal whose head is bathed in the opening blood-red circle of light. She withdraws her head as Fogg’s voice intones the final lines, ending neatly with, “This is blood clotting that will help to save your life.”

Laïla Diallo: Hold everything dear

Hold everything dear, Laïla Diallo, ICIA Bath, May 26

The ability of the theatre to transport us somewhere else, the footloose, peripatetic lifestyle of artists, ideas of migration and dislocation, and the state of arts funding are all present in Laïla Diallo’s Hold everything dear, although it is not about any one of them: it is only framed by them, like a play within a play. The richness of the meaning is in the unity of the complete work.

Since March, when the initial work was presented at the Linbury Studio Theatre as a new dance commission, Diallo has been planning to extend the work into a full-length work but she and the dancers have only two weeks together at Bath University’s ICIA to stage those ideas and shape them. Why only two weeks? The tight schedule is partly to do with money – Diallo is stretching the grant money for the project as far as it can go – and partly to do with developments in the creative process that were not conceived at the time the initial grant was submitted. Nevertheless, Guy Hoare has been revising the lighting for the last four days, dramaturge Chris Fogg has been involved on and off for the last two weeks and the musicians arrive just the day before. Time may be condensed but there is clearly an experienced and brilliantly creative team on hand to deliver.

Diallo has said that she only choreographs what is close to her life, and Hold everything dear draws from her experiences of traveling as part of a dance company and in her own right as a dancer/choreographer and her learning about the effects of war zones on refugees and hearing stories of displacement. Given this background, it is no surprise that Diallo cites as a primary inspiration John Berger’s book of dispatches on survival and resistance, Hold Everything Dear – primarily its Ten Dispatches About Place. It gives the work a political undertone that is not evident in the performance, but has clearly influenced Diallo’s conception of the work:

Every day people follow signs pointing to some place that is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others for business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose. [1]

As people come into the theatre, they see the cast on stage in relaxed freeze frame: standing, sitting, or lying down, staring at the floor or into the distance, as if they finished in these positions at the end of the last show and are recharging for the next one. The heartbeat is a single note on an accordion, breathing in and out. The place is indeterminate, many places superimposed on each other:

I imagined, Diallo writes, a stage that could become the end of a pier for a moment, then a station, a void or a home – a stage that might suggest all those places at once maybe, a space where solitudes would find a heightened resonance and where individuals, their stories and emotional worlds might collide expressively.

At a given moment, everyone except for the figure that remains covered with a raincoat on the floor changes into active state to prepare for the performance: Jules Maxwell pushes the piano into place and tunes it, Helka Kaski sweeps up the pile of polystyrene snow from the stage and scoops it into an old-fashioned suitcase; Seke Chimutengwende picks up his cards and puts them back in order. Theo Clinkard unwinds the string of lights from the porter’s trolley and stretches it across the front of the stage. Chimutengwende puts his suitcase on the empty trolley and wheels it away. Gabi Froden (of Foreign Slippers’ fame) is limping towards a chair in one high heel shoe to put on the other one, while Diallo takes the raincoat off the figure on the floor and puts it on herself. Chimutengwende begins a sales pitch about the benefits of a holiday in the sun, standing on his soapbox of a trolley, but his voice is in competition with an increasing volume of recorded music and we only see his mouth and gestures continue as Wu wheels him off. Finally the figure on the floor wakes up to find she is bound up in luggage tape, herself a piece of luggage. Letty Mitchell struggles out of the tape and stands up, but her knees give way and she falls to the floor. She tries to stand again but faints; Kaski is nurse, supporting her, wiping her brow, trying to keep her upright. This disparate group of people, joined by outer circumstance as much as by inner connection, is at once the performer and the performed. Over the course of the evening they reveal their individual selves in their dances and gestures, in their music, and in their relations with each other, but their presence here is dictated by forces beyond their control. As John Berger writes of the former Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte near Calais and the Channel Tunnel:

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear, and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof. [2]

Froden sings the first line of a song in her rich folksy voice, and the dancers begin to cross and re-cross the stage together like a broom, always leaving someone or something behind in their wake, to be swept up in the next time across. Through such images of displacement, temporary residence and the detritus it leaves behind, Diallo portrays her ideas, not to be read as in a book, but to be sensed: frailty, insecurity, a search for home. As she writes, ‘It is an attempt to convey something about leaving, arriving, letting go, holding dear – an attempt to say something about being forever in transit or in a state of waiting.’

Everything moves, in and out of the light, which also moves. People drop in and drop out of the group, form pairs and remain for a time in each other’s arms, then walk away. There are also moments of solitude and calm reflection, as when Diallo walks to the end of a makeshift pier carrying her shoes; you can almost feel the breeze in her face and hear the gulls. She breathes deeply and looks into the distance as Chimutengwende sings a hauntingly beautiful acapella version of I get along without you very well and Clinkard dances an intimate, introspective, inside out solo. Across the stage, four dancers offer their hands in a mutually supportive group; they lean on each other, pull, and counterbalance:

the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking
the map of the palm held
in a knot
but given as a torch [3]

Something disrupts the group; Diallo is the first to walk away. Mitchell and Chimutengwende follow her, leaving Clinkard by himself. Diallo dances a beautiful solo in two opposite directions not knowing which way to go and as she backs up into the piano, Maxwell plays a children’s tune. Everyone is drawn in to the music, accompanying with their own instruments: a band of traveling musicians. Even the piano is traveling. Dancers and musicians pair up, beginning a slow, intimate waltz. Chimutengwende breaks away; he is claiming his travel points and is on his way to Hawaii. Mitchell gives him a pair of sunglasses, places a lei lei around his neck and wheels him around the stage to the piano that doubles as a bar. He is relaxed and downs a cocktail, happy to have escaped his humdrum job and to be close to the beach: the illusion of a holiday when all that we wish to escape is still in our baggage. Mitchell, Diallo and Clinkard carry three muslin clouds suspended from fishing rods over Chimutengwende’s head and follow him around until he exits, we imagine, to the beach. The three forecasters sit down with their back to us, gently wafting their clouds up and down until the storm passes. On the other side of the stage, Kaski is nurse once again, trying to support and encourage a constantly shifting group, but she can’t manage to keep up their spirits or their bodies.  She herself succumbs as they fall one by one, leaving only Mitchell standing alone.

Meanwhile (and there is a lot of meanwhile in this environment), Froden begins to haul in the lights along the front of the stage until they are now wound round her arms, making her face radiant. Kaski’s group has recovered, puts on shoes and begins to dance a conversation, huddling together, clasping arms and hands, dispersing and then running into each other’s embrace. They all break off to sing their songs of homeland, and to reminisce. Kaski lays down polystyrene stones on an imaginary path so she can find her way back;

Our poems
like milestones
must line the road. [4]

Chimutengwende takes a plant from his suitcase and places earth around its roots, while Mitchell sits with her battered suitcase, lost in thought. In a beautiful light, Kaski launches into a precariously off-balance dance like a willow in the wind. We see her hands, her face and blonde hair as accents in the dance, as she sinks and rises up, retiring gently into a dimming light to sit on the floor with a bench behind her, staring into the distance. Diallo is the first to step up on the bench and open a suitcase of polystyrene snow on Kaski’s head, a blinding white light falling on her. Mitchell follows with another, then Clinkard with a third, as Kaski lies in the white pile of snow, yearning for the light of home.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance that separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience. [5]

The lights dim and a last waltz begins. Everyone dances the same movement sequences but at their own pace. Froden captures in her voice both the transience and the wistfulness of the moment: Hold everything dear till the sky is clear. The song disintegrates and the dancers disperse to the back of the stage. Clinkard walks to the front and passes Diallo circling in the opposite direction. In a flash of recognition they clasp hands and cling to each other, dancing a tango as their comrades approach and clap in accompaniment. The couple breaks apart and comes back together, pushing and shoving as if in the middle of an argument. Chimutengwende and Mitchell begin to dance a slow waltz together but the tensions between Diallo and Clinkard overpower their fragility. Clinkard leaves her on the bench, and immediately falls apart. He turns to Kaski and Mitchell who offer him faltering support. Chimutengwende reads his set of cards, one at a time: “For fear, for hope, for love…” answering the question of why we move around so constantly and what we hope to find. Mitchell is falling again, and as she rolls on the floor she becomes entangled in more tape, watched impassively by all the others. Wrapped up and waiting to be shipped off again…or preparing for the next performance?

the yearning to begin again together
animals keen inside the parliament of the world
the people in the room the people in the street the people
hold everything dear [6]

Diallo spent eight years in Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance, so you might expect her style of movement to have been influenced by his, but this is not immediately evident. What Diallo seems to have picked up from McGregor is more the creative approach to which she contributes her own issues and sense of movement. One might also expect each person in Hold everything dear to be quite distinctly delineated in such a diverse assembly, but there is a homogeneity in the choreographic language that suggests the hand of one person, Diallo herself, although the unity of the group is also a factor. The way Clinkard moves and Kaski moves is not dissimilar to the way Diallo moves, so their body language naturally forms a cohesive whole. I could imagine Mitchell having a different voice if left to her own devices, but her nature fits easily into this group, forming a unity in diversity. Chimutengwende is the extrovert declaimer of the crowd, a versatile performer and striking presence who can sing acapella sublimely with a minimum of vocal chords, and Froden’s rich voice provides in the songs much of the poignancy of the music, though she is backed up by a trio of expressive players: Grigory Tsyganov (violin), Semay Wu (cello) and Jules Maxwell (piano), who made all the musical arrangements. Clinkard contributed the subtle earthen colours of the set and costumes, which form another unifying element. The lighting of Guy Hoare is superb, telling the story as evocatively as the music and the choreographic images and Chris Fogg has had a decisive if unseen hand in shaping the finished work.

I like to think of dance,Diallo has said, as a way of communicating something of what it is to be human (Berger might well say the same about his writing)…The pleasure of being a choreographer is meeting people and discovering the route with them. What we see in Diallo’s Hold everything dear is the particular route she has taken with her fellow artists, and what emerges is a poetic celebration of the human spirit.