Resolution 2017: Orley Quick & the Hairy Heroines, Mater-Filia

Resolution 2017, January 31, Orley Quick & the Hairy Heroines, Mater-Filia

Elliot Minogue-Stone, Tyrrell Foreshaw and José Diogo Fernandes de Jesus in Orley Quick’s As We Like It (photo: Emmeline Cresswell)

Unfortunately due to the length of this evening’s program I had to leave to catch a train before seeing the final work. Apologies to Sketch Dance Company.

There’s a riotous imagination at play in Orley Quick & The Hairy Heroine’s As We Like It; while Quick throws a variety of feminine attributes at them (metaphorically and literally) the three (hairy) men — Tyrrell Foreshaw, José Diogo Fernandes de Jesus and Elliot Minogue-Stone — maintain their masculinity in a colourful exploration of gender such as Shakespeare himself might have liked.

The tone of the opening sequence is sublime: accompanied by the beautiful protest song, Los Hermanos (“the brothers”) by Atahualpa Yupanqui sung by Bia Krieger and Lhasa De Sela, the three men with eyes closed feel their way across the stage with arms outstretched as if on a religious pilgrimage until a sensual rhythm takes over their bodies. Their hands start to accent musical rhythms on their thighs but this transforms subtly into a hilarious competition of beats that goes downhill fast into an outright slapping fight. Quick thus takes us seamlessly from the height of sensibility to the depths of human foibles and what is refreshing is that the performers appear as surprised as we are by the deteriorating turn of events. It is their understated, deadpan performances that raise As We Like It to a high level of artistic achievement but it is Quick’s anarchic, earthy sense of humour that communicates to us throughout, destabilizing appearances to the point of absurdity. How else could you thread Minogue-Stone’s monologue about trousers, screw-drivers and big dogs, to the debonair de Jesus bellowing with rage, to the burly Foreshaw seducing the audience with his improbably supple pole dancing, to a skateboard ballet sequence, to a lip-synched trio fumbling for the correct name of a spirit level?

It is one of the longer works for Resolution — touching the maximum of 25 minutes — but the energy, sensuality and humour never pall. Quick is helped by dramaturg Karla Ptáček, costume designer Giulia Scrimieri (who clearly had fun finding the wigs, costumes and accessories kept in a wicker basket on stage until needed), costume maker Hania Kosewicz, lighting designer Joshua Gadsby and sound editor Alex Mitchell. But what makes As We Like It stand out is that Quick and the Hairy Heroines draw us unerringly through their irreverently fertile minds and light hearts to reveal a richness of observation played out with flamboyance, confidence and a fine sense of timing.

I had already interviewed Debbie Lee-Anthony and her daughter Lauren a couple of weeks before so I was aware of the emotional complexity behind Do Not Go Gentle and the high stakes mother and daughter (Materfilia) had placed in the work. It was the first time they were performing together and the inspiration was the life of Lee-Anthony’s late sister-in-law, Kath Posner. It was also the first time Posner’s husband, musician Hamilton Lee (aka Hamid Mantu), had composed a dance score and the first time he was seeing the work dedicated to his late wife. It is a tribute to the artistry of all three that their individual creativity contributes to the full realization of the whole without becoming emotionally fraught: the score arises as much from the poem of Dylan Thomas as it does from the choreographic input of the dancers, and the choreography flows inseparably from the score.

Time is very much the crucible of the poem, and time is what Do Not Go Gentle addresses; we see it in the relative ages of mother and daughter, in time as memories and time as absence, yet the work drills down into the present with stoical force. Lee-Anthony speeds up her movements and her daughter slows down hers in deference to each other’s time when they dance together but each explores their own vocabulary and pace in distinct and poignant soliloquies. Do Not Go Gentle is a meeting of lyrical expressionism and youthful optimism, a conversation in which both mother and daughter fully contribute their feelings and abilities with mutual respect and emotional warmth. Heard but not seen is the essential contribution of Hamilton Lee, the man and the musician, that links mother and daughter in a timeless paean to the enduring bonds of life itself.

Do not go gentle, an interview with Debbie Lee-Anthony and Lauren Anthony

Do Not Go Gentle, an interview with Debbie Lee-Anthony and Lauren Anthony

Debbie Lee-Anthony and Lauren Anthony (photo: Bailey HYT)

Dylan Thomas’s poem Do not go gentle into that good night was addressed to the poet’s father, encouraging him to ‘fight against the dying of the light.’ It is a poem that focuses intimately on family but at the same time serves as an affirmation of life. When Debbie Lee-Anthony wanted to create a work to celebrate the life of her sister-in-law, Kath Posner, whom she had recently lost to cancer, she discovered her favourite poem had been Thomas’s famous villanelle. Debbie and her daughter, Lauren Anthony, decided to work together to weave a choreographic response to Thomas’s words. Adding to the work’s emotional complexity, the score is by Debbie’s brother, Hamilton Lee, who as Hamid Mantu of Transglobal Underground is a percussionist and composer in his own right. The first time he will see the work dedicated to his late wife will be at The Place on January 31st as part of Resolution 2017.

Debbie graduated from The London School of Contemporary Dance in 1982 and made a career as a freelance dancer and teacher. After becoming Senior Lecturer in Choreography and Dance at the University of Winchester she has recently returned to life as a freelance dance artist while teaching part-time at the University. Lauren graduated from Middlesex University two years ago with a first class degree in dance studies, and is currently a member of a hip hop dance company, The Rebirth Network. It was when she saw her mother perform Threshold at GoLive in 2015 that she saw the possibilities of performing with her. Do Not Go Gentle is the first time mother and daughter have performed together under the company name Mater-Filia.

Having created mainly solo works for the last five years, Debbie began by creating her own material to the poem which she then showed to her daughter. Lauren learned the material and sampled it with her acquired blend of hip hop and contemporary technique. They developed material as they went along, inciting each other with their different approaches and abilities and using the infrequent rehearsal time to catch up and comfort each other as much as to push the boundaries of the work. While Debbie was inspired by the words and the spaces between them, Lauren focused on the rhythms of the verse, but what constantly brought them together was the spirit of the piece. Both have collaborated closely with Mantu in his creation of the score which contains a sampling of the poem read by Anthony Hopkins; if Lauren wanted a little grunge beat in there for her solo, or if Debbie needed an additional softness or a slowness, Mantu was able to oblige. The project has thus grown organically around the celebration of life, for while Do not go gentle is dedicated to Kath Posner’s memory, it is not expressly about her; like the poem it is an ever-present rage against time.

If the creative circumstances of this work are not rich enough, there is another aspect that is integral to it. As an academic, Debbie has for many years written about ageing and the mature dancer. In retrospect, her publications such as Age, Agility and Anxiety (2007), and Conflict, Content and Context in the ageing body (2008) serve as a theoretical underpinning of her current experience in Do Not Go Gentle, and a paper she wrote on Sharing the dance through the lived body (2010) perfectly describes what she brings to the stage. Apart from managing the physical challenges, her greatest fear is not remembering, but because of that she goes over and over the material in between rehearsals. Now the work is finished she is feeling happier; the structure is secure and she and Lauren can use the remaining rehearsals to inhabit it fully, constantly challenging time until the stage lights die at the end of the performance.

For tickets and information: Resolution 2017 website

Light, Ladd & Emberton: Caitlin

Light, Ladd & Emberton: Caitlin, Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff, August 5

Eddie Ladd wrapped around Gwyn Emberton in  Light, Ladd & Emberton’s Caitlin (photo: Warren Orchard)

“My husband was a very famous poet and I was going to be a very famous dancer,” says Caitlin wistfully at the beginning of her eponymous show as she revisits the ambitions and disappointments of her life with Dylan Thomas. It was a famously unfaithful, fractious yet inseparable relationship recorded in Caitlin’s Leftover Life to Kill and in numerous biographies of Dylan. In their recreation of the relationship, however, the team of Deborah Light (director), Eddie Ladd (Caitlin) and Gwyn Emberton (Dylan) decided not to follow the well-trodden textual paths but instead built a high energy, highly physical language to convey the passions of these two lives to the point of overflowing. It is not a pretty work of artistic-romance-turned-alcoholic-upheaval but a brutally subjective reconstruction that makes use of the dispassionate, mass-produced folding chair as an extension of the body to express the rage, subservience, servitude, consummation and consumption that infused, confused and ultimately broke apart these two lives for ever.

The folding chair is in itself emotionally neutral but something happened during rehearsals for Caitlin to make the folding chair a central metaphor for the entire story. Upturned and backwards, it becomes a low highchair on which Emberton turns quietly reading Agatha Christie and stuffing sweets; it is used on different occasions as a straightjacket, a noose, a yoke, even Dylan’s penitential cross. Folded, stacked and loaded on Ladd’s back or balancing on her head it is her intractable burden; laid on her supine figure it becomes a self-imposed grave and tombstone on which Emberton lays his manuscript in hommage. It is a token bed, a dais for Dylan’s recitals and unfolded and precariously stacked, a fêted throne from which he topples and crashes. The chairs are also thrown, scattered, refolded and stacked like pieces of a desperate game in tune with the narrative tide.

As we arrive in the studio at Chapter, however, the red or grey chairs form a harmonious circle in the centre, a stasis. We occupy only the twenty grey chairs; on some of the red ones are assorted plastic cups, sweets/pills and a rumpled manuscript. The circle takes its inspiration from the form of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting with which Caitlin became familiar some 20 years after Dylan’s death in 1953. “My name is Caitlin and I’m an alcoholic,” says Ladd at the end, but the end is a lifetime away from the beginning.

Emberton is sitting in the circle as we enter to take our seats. He is dressed casually, inconspicuously, and looks as if he is waiting, like us, for the performance to begin. Ladd walks in with an almost imperceptible flounce in a red tartan skirt and an embroidered velvet top the colour of blood (costumes by the subtly imaginative Neil Davies) and sits on her hands to deliver her matter-of-fact opening line. She engages her audience directly, looking around at us as if we are all complicit in her situation, knowing we know what she knows but determined to refresh her side of it with grim familiarity. Emberton is immediately drawn to her as if he is seeing her for the first time and runs to plant his face in her lap. This is the connection that sets their fate; he will return to this place as often as he needs absolution, forgiveness, reassurance, sex. ‘It was going to be a truce between his brain and my body’ she says as she wraps herself around his head like a scarf, his mouth filled with her thighs. They collapse, not for the last time, under the weight of each other’s passion.

This is Caitlin’s story, her circle of chairs and we are her guests; Dylan is merely the argument, the flashback, the colour and flame in her story. Emberton’s focus is fixed on Ladd; his eyes are dead to all but her. She is the one who engages us directly with her eyes and irony: “He wrote three poems that year; I gave birth to our third child,” she bristles, her motherly activities contrasting with the famous husband standing on a chair silently intoning his immortal words. “We were supposed to be equal”, she adds, withdrawing a chair rudely from the circle while Emberton pushes his to the centre. The harmony of the chairs is broken and the domestic tension breaks with it as they both bounce off the walls in inebriated, screaming abandon and crawl on all fours with the empty plastic cups held tightly in their teeth. The soundscore of Thighpaulsandra manipulated by Sion Orgon punctuate the action with unnerving accuracy.

After more drinking and pills and vomiting the chairs go flying; ours are the only ones left in the circle. “That year he went to America for the first time” Ladd informs us, rocking a chair like a cradle, while Emberton spins dizzyingly outside the circle. In between building his throne of chairs on the other side of the Atlantic (from the wreckage of chairs in the family circle) he returns to Caitlin to be ‘tickled by the rub of love’ which inevitably turns into a brutal battle, reconciliation, head rubbing and departure on yet another North American tour. At four chairs high Dylan’s throne finally topples and Emberton crashes to the ground; Ladd in a circle that has suddenly lost its tension falls to the floor in shock.

The difference between Dylan and Caitlin is that Dylan was able to transform his desires into words that gained him immortality while Caitlin remained unfulfilled outside her family circle. All she knows is that without her Dylan would not have succeeded. Resigned to this and proud, she thanks us for listening. What she cannot see is that Light, Ladd & Emberton have made her a gift of her chosen art in providing her with a rich body of language she was unable to develop during her life with Dylan.

Caitlin was commissioned by National Library of Wales and funded by Arts Council Wales. It is supported by Volcano, Chapter, Aberystwyth Arts Centre and Borough Theatre Abergavenny. It will be at the Edinburgh Fringe from August 21-30 at DanceBase.