Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B, Sadler’s Wells

Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B, Sadler’s Wells, May 22, 2024

Maguy Marin’s May B, presented at Sadler’s Wells on May 21 and 22, is divided into three contrasting sections, each influenced by the works of Samuel Beckett. One doesn’t necessarily think of Beckett and dance in the same breath, but as Sue Jones explains in her article published by Dance Research, ‘Beckett’s Brush with Ballet’, the playwright became fascinated with the mimetic aspect of dance after seeing Léonide Massine as the puppet in Petrouchka in 1934. Beckett was later to work with the dancer Deryk Mendel, for whom he wrote the one act mime play Act Without Words in 1956. Other actors with whom he worked have described his directorial insistence on the rhythm and timing of gestures as ‘choreography’, so it is perhaps not so surprising that when Marin wrote to Beckett for permission to use his plays as a basis for her new work, she was not only invited to meet with him but received Beckett’s wholehearted endorsement for her project.

Marin’s May B borrows from Beckett’s stagecraft the almost claustrophobic enclosed space of the stage — similar to Petrouchka’s cell — and imbues it with elements of Beckett’s choreography as in the rhythmical, shuffling steps of the dancers in the opening section. The ten dancers move sometimes as one, each with their individuality but dependent on the group; squabbling, testiness and greed coexist with moments of friendship, love and lust. There is the bitter humour of the oppressed, the sense of the absurdity of life, and of endless entrances and departures. The stage design, the lighting (by Albin Chavignon), the costumes (by Louise Marin) and the exaggerated makeup are all integral to the choreography, and Marin’s use of music by Franz Schubert, the raunchy street music of Gilles de Binche and, in the third section, Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Love Never Failed Me Yet contributes to the layering of the work’s emotional power.

May B was first performed in 1981. Looking back at a filmed version from that year, it is apparent that the integrity of the work has not suffered over time and that the current performers have the maturity and sensibility to maintain the qualities of the original. What has changed, perhaps, is the context of the work in relation to the present time. May B is bleak in rendering the despair of helplessness and powerlessness, emotions that are currently evident in our environment, at home and abroad, but which are either sanitised by the media or muted to the point of silence by political deviance. The theatre is one of the few places where the perilous state of humanity can be depicted, albeit in notional form, but such a theatrical work has to meet its audience head on to provoke a response. There was a perceptible sense at Sadler’s Wells that the work was appreciated on a superficial level but that its understated savagery failed to break through the expectations of current commercial theatre.

Marin was brought up in a politically active family, and her political vision has always co-existed with her stage practice. At Sadler’s Wells this political activism came up against a cultural obstacle. Following recent performances in Europe of May B, Marin has read her statement on the aggression on Gaza by the State of Israel; she has done so without hindrance from the venues, but the director of Sadler’s Wells, Sir Alistair Spalding, prohibited her from reading it, saying an artist’s message should be expressed in the work and citing neutrality and audience concerns. According to Maguy Marin company president, Antoine Manologlou, Marin’s message included a specific reference to one of Sadler’s Wells’ sponsors, Barclays Bank, that among its investments supports the purchase of arms in Israel. When Marin and members of her company defiantly handed out her statement on printed flyers to the audience as they left the theatre on May 22, security staff intervened aggressively to prevent the action.

The irony is that the imagery of May B — the discarded shoes, the suitcases, the hunger, the despair — implicitly refers to the deprivations of refugees as well as victims of holocaust. There is no shortage of explicit support for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in museums, works of art, films and public memorials, but solidarity with other victims of oppression and genocide are less openly encouraged. One might argue, as Spalding evidently did, that the work should speak for itself, but that is to hide, in this particular instance, the complicity of the presenter. Marin’s activism extended logically from the work to bring its implicit message into the realm of contemporary politics. Her defiance came from the integrity of the artist, and its attempted repression represents the perversity of cultural authority.

Richard Alston At Home at The Place

Richard Alston Dance Company, Alston At Home at The Place, November 28

Richard Alston was one of the first dancers, along with Siobhan Davies, whom the dance enthusiast and philanthropist Robin Howard invited in 1968 to the building that would become The Place. Howard invited Robert Cohan to be the first artistic director of the school and to ‘form a dance company based on love’. Howard drew up a list of objectives for The Place, including ‘to use the universal language of dance to break down social, political, linguistic and other barriers’ and that ‘its standards should never, for any reason, be allowed to decline.’ It was left to Cohan to embody these objectives, both at the school and in London Contemporary Dance Company, and since the company’s demise in 1994 it has been the aim of Richard Alston’s resident company to maintain them. While keeping the school running, The Place has now seen the formation and dissolution of two resident companies, which is hardly an incentive to students in a performing art. Whatever the reason for closing Alston’s company, the cause is clearly not the company’s current form.

Alston At Home is a fifty-year perspective, from Alston’s very first choreography in 1969 — the solo and duet from Nowhere Slowly — to his latest, Bari, made for graduating students from London Contemporary Dance School. In between there is another early work, Blue Schubert Fragments (1972), something from the intermediate period, Red Run (1998), and two relatively recent works, Isthmus, made for Bob Lockyer’s birthday celebration in 2012, and Martin Lawrance’s Detour (2018). In addition, to mark the centenary of Alston’s mentor, Merce Cunningham, the evening includes two of the solos from the Cunningham Centennial Solos program presented earlier this year at the Barbican. The program is not only a retrospective but a clear mark of Alston’s appreciation to everything The Place has meant to him over the past 25 years. A visual artist of similar renown would be able to hold a retrospective in a single gallery over a period of time; as a choreographer, Alston’s retrospective extends over three programs in various venues, the last of which will be Sadler’s Wells on March 7 and 8 next year. 

What this program shows are Alston’s choreographic building blocks and their spatial development over time. The solo and duet from Nowhere Slowly has a simple structure with classically derived shapes and torsions and a clean sense of line. Set to Terry Riley’s music, there is a Cunningham influence in that what happens is what happens, no more no less. Two years later Alston approaches the adagio of Schubert’s quartet Death and the Maiden with more complexity; Blue Schubert Fragments is choreographed as if each of the six dancers is a solo instrument. Such emotional music can overpower a choreographic response to it, but here Alston extracts a spatial harmony from the integrated texture of the score.

In Bari, the folk-inspired music of South Italian pizzica has a buoyancy and energy — the traditional dance was conceived as an antidote to poisonous spider bites in the field — that the London Contemporary Dance School students relish. So does Alston, who smiles his way through the work with an infectious confidence. 

Alston contributed two works to Lockyer’s birthday bash in 2012, one of which was Isthmus, a quartet for two women and two men to Jo Kondo’s intimate, intricate score. The choreographic shapes are evocative of the earlier works but Alston’s adhesion to the musical rhythms creates a work with the rapid dynamics and sharp spatial patterns that define it. 

Martin Lawrance’s Detour moves up the program order of the evening due to a last-minute replacement of an injured Elly Braund by Hannah Kidd. As a former dancer in the company and the current associate choreographer, Lawrance is clearly an important influence on Alston, and vice versa. Detour, created to Akira Miyoshi’s percussive Ripple for solo marimba, uses elements of Alston’s vocabulary but submits it to an aggressive, virile energy that wrenches it apart. Calm returns after the intermission, with the Cunningham solos that revel in space and chance; Siobhan Davies is perfectly attuned to it in her mysterious dialogue with the air around her while Kidd’s more grounded contribution joins the physical to the aleatory. 

Red Run jolts us back to the energy levels of Lawrance but in responding to Heiner Goebbels’ Nine Songs for Eleven Instruments Alston employs a sense of luxuriant and fast-paced playfulness that challenges the musicality and technical proficiency of the six dancers. It finishes, ironically for this occasion, with a suggestion of death. 

Scottish Dance Theatre: Second Coming & Winter, Again

Scottish Dance Theatre, Double Bill, The Place, March 8.

Lewis Wilkins and Eve Ganneau in Second Coming. Photo Maria Falconer

Joan Clevillé draws me so convincingly into his subterfuge that I can forgive Victor Quijada for the beginning of his Second Coming; I had checked the running time of the show and had booked a train that would give me just enough time between the end of the performance and the departure from Victoria station. When Clevillé, who is rehearsal director of the company as well as a dancer, announces that there will be a delay to the start of the show — he has an excellent command of English but his searching for a word and his roving accentuation underlines the hesitation and insecurity of his explanations — I feel my comfort zone shrink rapidly. Luckily I am sitting next to Chantal Guevara who surreptitiously checks online and reassured me that this is in fact the beginning of the show (but don’t tell anyone). It’s a forewarning that we will be kept in a constant state of unpreparedness throughout the evening as there is no clear demarcation between true and false, belief and non-belief. Even the score by Jasper Gahunia erases boundaries, seamlessly interpolating turntable riffs into classical music and vice versa. Quijada and Gahunia are clearly on the same wavelength.

Twenty minutes into the show, Clevillé admits to the dramatic subterfuge, and starts another, but we are now attuned: the choreographer has been fired. It is a harmless, self-deprecating put-down of choreographers as macho control freaks with anger management issues, but, as Clevillé states modestly, there is still some amazing dancing to come and he saves the best for last: his own solo. What follows is much more, for although it starts (after a false start) with his slow, deliberate, finger-tracing solo to a phrase of a Bach prelude, it develops with Mozartian richness into a confrontational duet with Jori Kerremans on a spirited phrase of Paganini, and then into a trio with Nicole Guarino on a phrase from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 13 (Emma Jones’ must have been dancing along to get the cues so perfectly). It is as if Quijada has arranged an epic breaking battle for these three composers who then join forces to play variations on their respective themes and by the end we are all laughing and cheering so loudly because Quijada, Gahunia, the three dancers and Jones have it all down so perfectly.

Matthew Robinson cuts through the applause (he has to wait a while) to deliver his critique of this ‘performance-non-performance thing’ as ‘overworked pseudo-intellectual rubbish’, but he has to continue his defiant monologue in defense of dancers while being dragged slowly by his collar around the stage.

Quijada has reached the summit but there is no lessening of quality as the ensemble descends the mountainside climbing through and under each other in a grouping that leaves behind the opening images of birds and street gangs, flocks and individuals, suspicion and tension as it slips freely to the point of dispersal. Only Eve Ganneau and Lewis Wilkins are left to deliver a duet that is as magical as it is off balance, as heartfelt as it is artfully constructed and which ends on a mysterious note of inversion.

It is rare to find a company with such a diverse range of qualities and a delight to see choreography that brings out those qualities to perfection. We are doubly fortunate this evening for it happens twice.

Lewis Wilkins, Giulia Montalbano, Julian Juárez, Jori Kerremans, Joan Clevillé, Nicole Guarino and Eve Ganneau in Jo Stromgren’s Winter, Again.

Jo Strømgren is as much a theatre director as a choreographer; in his Winter, Again he brings together both drama and dance in a fluent form that integrates visual imagery and choreography so well that the dancers could well be speaking. Strømgren’s text is the cold and bitter emotion of a selection of songs from Schubert’s Winterreise (played by fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes and sung by Ian Bostridge) though he can never take quite seriously the high romanticism of Wilhelm Müller’s verse. Instead he mischievously juxtaposes Schubert’s music with the bloodthirsty, churlish actions of an isolated hunting community dressed in shades of ghostly white (by Bregje van Balen) that lives its daily fight for survival with as little emotion as the winter itself. Echoes of Ibsen and Chekhov abound in the chilling screams, pistol shots, dead birds and other furry carcasses but Strømgren has us laughing helplessly from the beginning with his brand of dark, irreverent humour. Not even the fate of a young girl (Natalie Trewinnard) who spends the entire performance searching for her eyeballs that the pigtailed beauty Maria Hayday finds in a tin and mindlessly drops in the snow can prompt a sense of sympathy. Trewinnard finally finds her eyes and pops them back in, but her focal adjustment is so masterfully funny — and Strømgren’s dramatic sense so seasoned — that her subsequent suicide by pistol shot that brings the performance to an end is less of an emotional charge than a dramatic full stop.

This program is the parting gift of former artistic director Janet Smith. Fleur Darkin is in the seat now. In the evening’s program she writes that ‘contemporary dance is a form that lives by destroying its past’ and yet both of this evening’s remarkable works make creative use of the past to find new forms rather than destroying it. Scottish Dance Theatre is, in its present form, a gifted company and while it has such a rich repertoire may the only kind of destruction under discussion be creative destruction. And long may it last.