Normal Conditions/Nicola Conibere in Carareretetatakakers

Normal Conditions, Nicola Conibere, Carareretetatakakers, Lilian Baylis Studio, October 14

When a word is repeated faster and faster or fed through an electronic sampler, its sound can become dissociated from its original meaning through a process known as semantic satiation. It certainly happened to the title of Nicola Conibere’s new work, Carareretetatakakers, presented in her debut at the Lilian Baylis Studio on October 14. In a recorded section where the word ‘caretaker’ is repeated and sampled, the audible stretch covers a relatively anodyne ‘characters’ to what sounded like ‘kerry terriers’ and even ‘hairy dentist’. Just as the sampled sound of the word makes us wonder what we are hearing, the linear progression of Carareretetatakakers questions what we are seeing and, by extension, how we can understand the very notion of ‘taking care’. 

As we enter the triangular space with seating on its three sides, three performers — Helka Kaski, Annie Hanauer and Adrienne Ming — are already communing in a casual physical groove with Duncan MacLeod’s score of electronic bleeps. Lucille Acevedo-Jones’s costumes with large ruffled collars in shades of green, blue and lilac with matching smudges of lipstick have connotations of reptilian beings, where the calculated insouciance and concentrated immersion of the trio in their movement make our attendance feel superfluous. This technique of task-based choreography can have the effect of alienating an audience from the notion of performance, which may be its purpose; to place it at the beginning of a work is both a bold statement and a risky proposition. In the freesheet offered as we exit the theatre there is an example of a task called Multipoints that may well have been used to generate the opening sequence: ‘Find 3 points in your body, say one in your shoulder, one in your hip, and one in your knee. Let’s call them 1,2 & 3. Find 3 metronomes…set each to a contrasting rhythm, called a, b & c. Try to get point 1 to pulse to rhythm a. And point 2 to rhythm b. And point 3 to rhythm c. Try to do them all at the same time.’ 

Because Kaski, Hanauer and Ming are seasoned, charismatic artists, the effect of these shared circadian rhythms is hypnotic; there is neither self-consciousness nor pretension in their performance. Developing additional tasks that bring into play their musicality, idiosyncratic ways of moving and sense of humour, they lead us on through choreographic notions of support and care towards an expected apotheosis that will validate both the work and our presence. But Conibere has other ideas, ones that pull the theatrical mat from under our feet without ever letting on that this is her aim. As we can read in another section of the freesheet mystifyingly entitled “Meat/Yam juices on foil”, ‘How can we discover an inefficient movement vocabulary? How can we work with inefficient and wasteful choreographic structure? What would they mean, look like and do?’ And in response, ‘We discovered: multiple ways to deliberately disrupt, to frustrate to refuse flow. (We then noted how many very different forms of dance are nonetheless defined by flow). That expressions of stuttering and awkwardness and stalling offer forms for imagining relation differently.’

This last observation is significant, because it supports a gestural approach to communication that, while designed to be used performatively in a theatrical setting, is close to social life outside the theatre. The destabilization of Carareretetatakakers is that it undermines the notion of going to the theatre for entertainment (one audience member evidently realised this early on and walked out) and yet fulfils the notion of theatre as a mirror of the society in which we live. ‘Stuttering, awkwardness and stalling’ could be considered all the more relevant during the speculative opening up of society in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. Confidence and flow are in short supply. 

What the three performers nevertheless achieve — and offer as an effective antidote — is the cohesion of their relation; theirs is a conspiracy of collusion that leads them to encourage and support each other, the essence of taking care as performative ethics. The dance training of each — Hauer in ballet, Ming in jazz and Kaski in contemporary dance — is a metaphor for difference, but the inspiration they express through these forms, however deconstructed, becomes the way the three interact with, overlap and sustain each other.  

The structure of Carareretetatakakers, from its use of triangular space to MacLeod’s musical collage of classical and jazz quotes over a metronomic beat, to its choreographic stuttering, awkwardness and stalling, all indicate that Conibere has set out not to indulge the audience. And yet, in her choice of cast, she has harnessed her structure to human values that transcend it.  

Rahel Vonmoos, to find a place

Rahel Vonmoos, to find a place, Laban Theatre, November 7

The cast on the set of Rahel Vonmoos’ to find a place (photo: Antigone Avdi)

When the subject of a dance work in a theatre is something as disturbing and destabilizing as displacement, the context of the performance — from the lighting, the set and costumes, to the comfortable seats in a warm auditorium and the bar just outside the door — becomes a screen through which an audience experiences it. When this filter is accompanied by the choreographic device of gestural abstraction, the subject of the work finds itself even further removed from its source; a work on displacement itself becomes a displacement. This is the conundrum posed by Rahel Vonmoos’ to find a place, performed at the Laban Theatre on Tuesday and Wednesday night. Even if crisis is written into it in the form of the dis-ease of movement, the fragmented groupings, the dislocation of projected images and the collage of discordant sounds, the production values of to find a place are too refined and the choreography too beautifully performed by Helka Kaski, Luke Birch, Morrighan MacGillivray and Samuel Kennedy to allow an audience to get to grips with the emotional and psychological complexities of the humanitarian crisis it addresses.

Vonmoos’ use of filmed projections on sheets of stretched silicon works well with the danced action; the opening visual sequence shows a crowd of people walking to and fro like a flock of humanity, slowed down in close-up to aimlessness and indecision; displacement, they seem to say, is a wandering with no direction home. The silhouettes of the dancers merge with the projected figures like blank, anonymous shapes against a mediatized throng. Apart from this extended opening scene, subsequent images are of landscapes and abstracted architecture, powerful reminders of events and places that have passed into memory, that float like fragments across the staggered placement of screens. There is a sense of time passing in the way the projected images spill from the screens on to the performers in the present or run in the background like the past.

I begin looking for individual clues to what Vonmoos wants to convey, but I have to wait till the end and beyond to let the accumulated response to the moving images — both of the dancers and the projections — find their mark. In the short term there is certainly a sense of puzzlement and confusion, which are states that arise from the condition of displacement, but it would be too easy to confuse this with a response to the work. Vonmoos has transferred the effects of displacement on to a painterly stage and turned them into symbols and marks on an artist’s canvas, yet the audience does not have the luxury of sitting in front of dance in the same way one can look at a painting (or listen to a recording of music) over time. Without a narrative, to find a place has to rely on constant movement — the essence of displacement, physically and psychologically — to convey meaning. Vonmoos also has the dancers suspend and modify the silicon sheets, tying them up, crumpling them or holding up a corner as if to sweep something underneath. If the projected images are memories, they are constantly vulnerable to disruption. The sheets also take on the roles of temporary bed sheets, shrouds and clothing.

There is a dry heat in the atmosphere of the work, where heat is not the kind in which to luxuriate but where you stand still to avoid exhaustion, where you get frustrated, in which you toss and turn at night. In this way Vonmoos imagines dis-ease and its effect on the body. The approach reminds me of Israeli choreographer, Arkadi Zaides, who studied the movements of Israeli settlers attacking Palestinian farmers and their lands seen in images filmed by the Palestinians themselves; against the film footage he takes up these same stances and gestures on stage as a choreographic form to show the effects of cultural aggression on the body. Vonmoos avoids the specific political questions but in abstracting the dis-ease of movement in the face of displacement, she asks the audience to re-translate the affect of the choreographic images to sense their original intent. It is a lot to ask of an audience or perhaps, in our relatively sheltered society, too little.

I can’t help noticing (not for the first time) that in the auditorium of one of London’s most prestigious contemporary dance conservatories with high enrolment figures, the audience is sparse. A work of art is only able to speak to those who are willing to experience it and to find a place has plenty to say; if the students who file through Laban don’t engage with the works that are shown there, what does that say about their engagement with the art they are studying or about Laban’s engagement in presenting them?

Dan Canham & Theo Clinkard: Double Bill

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.

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.