Jacky Lansley, About Us, Oxford House Theatre

Posted: April 2nd, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jacky Lansley, About Us, Oxford House Theatre

Jacky Lansley, About Us, Oxford House Theatre, March 21

About Us

Esther Huss and Jacky Lansley in About Us (photo: Sarah Covington)

There is a certain latitude in the definition of the two words Jacky Lansley uses for her new work: About Us. Who exactly is ‘us’ and, depending on the answer to that question, what is it ‘about us’ that is the subject of the work? On one level, ‘us’ refers to the eight performers (six in the theatre and two on film), whose personal stories form the initial structure of the work. As Lansley writes in the program about the research process, ‘…I invited each of the performing artists to bring a story to the studio that was joyful, distressing or mundane. These stories were then explored through a range of physical and vocal disciplines to create live performance material…’ The stories value the ordinary and the everyday that Lansley then interrogates with a ‘wide range of visual, choreographic and conceptual stimuli’ to reveal their deeper significance. At the heart of the process is her conviction that ‘the personal is political’ and she links the two by applying refractive filters to the stories that through suggestion, analogy, parody or juxtaposition generate a construction of underlying themes and observations that emerge as a layered image of what we might call contemporary British society. Thus, by way of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the singularity of the eight performers’ experiences becomes the plurality of ‘us’ not in the sense of a self-regulating, enclosed group but as an open and imaginative relation of the individual to others.

Entering the theatre — a large rectangular area with two parallel lines of chairs facing each other across the performance space and at either end — we notice some of the chairs are already occupied by the performers (you can guess they are performers because Fergus Early is sitting in cricket whites holding a bat and Esther Huss is wearing sunglasses). Projected on the wall on either side is a reminder of the work’s inclusive premise, the word ‘Us’.

The sound score by Sylvia Hallett is like a stave on which the performance is threaded, for she has taken the voices of the recorded oral stories as a starting point for her composition. When we see and hear Ingrid MacKinnon (and her son, Max) on film, her dialogue is a coherent whole but with performers Huss and Jreena Green, Hallett takes a single phrase and repeats it as a musical riff on which the choreography is based or, in the case of Tim Taylor, composes his thoughts into a song in the style of Noel Coward. And is it fanciful to hear in her electronic treatment of Early’s rhythmic tapping of a bat in its crease the extrapolation of cricket’s colonial legacy to the rattle of a machine gun?

Roswitha Chesher’s beautifully filmed sequences, like Hallett’s score, move from the straightforward (interviews) to the surreal (Fergus and Ursula Early hissing and growling) to the delightfully frivolous (portraits in stylish hats). She films a tennis match that is reminiscent of the mimed game in Antonioni’s Blow Up but here represents a cultural environment of rules, sportsmanship, cooperation and competition that in the context of the great current leveler, Brexit, seem to have lost their meaning — or are perhaps in the process of searching for a new one — which makes the very question of ‘us’ even more relevant.

In one sense, About Us coalesces around this country’s ongoing political and social unrest and how individual circumstances feed into it. The value of artistic means is that they can make ‘us’ (in Nancy’s sense) think deeply through the imagination, and Lansley shows us to what extent the personal is political. At the same time she suggests the role of choreography, as both a mirror of the tangled web of cause and effect and as a means to resolve it, is an appropriate metaphor for a way forward. As dramaturg Ramsay Burt asks, ‘Are we perhaps choreographing hope…?’ The final section, however, goes far beyond this current political quandary to embrace the very survival of the planet. The original stories give way to projected statistics and quotations that form a didactic panorama about endangered species — not least about our own. Even if it’s still ‘about us’, the very enormity of the scope dwarfs the original frame of the work; how can these personal stories connect to the impending extinction of the planet as we know it?

Although there is a connection — Lansley points out that Britain’s colonial legacy includes the recreational hunting for wildlife trophies that has escalated into trafficking for profit — it seems the creative archaeology of the personal experience has suddenly been appropriated by an intellectual endgame. It’s as if an umpire, instead of allowing the players to reach their own result, has imposed on the game a prearranged conclusion. How ironic that this sounds like the mandate for Brexit.

Jacky Lansley: Choreographies

Posted: September 22nd, 2017 | Author: | Filed under: Book | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jacky Lansley: Choreographies

Jacky Lansley, Choreographies, published by Intellect Books (2017)

Jacky Lansley, Choreographies (cover photo: Hugo Glendinning, collage Emily Dann)

Jacky Lansley’s long career began as a dancer in the Royal Ballet before her fertile imagination and radical mind led her to enroll in what was then called the London School of Contemporary Dance in 1971. On the surface that transition sounds like a simple linear progression but consider it again in the light of what it involved. To become a dancer in the Royal Ballet requires a body that has the potential to master the classical form, extraordinary talent and years of strict discipline. Lansley would have danced there in the final years of Sir Frederick Ashton’s artistic directorship before Kenneth MacMillan was appointed to replace him in 1970. For Lansley to transfer from this rarified atmosphere of classical tradition to what she calls ‘a space for dance to explore and interact with…interdisciplinary influences’ must have taken a huge leap of faith and a willingness to embrace the unknown. She doesn’t touch on the reasons for this life-changing decision — Choreographies is about the motivations behind her work rather than behind the author — but she found at LSCD artists like Sally Potter, Diana Davies and Dennis Greenwood for whom she felt a close affinity. It was here she could begin to explore contemporary issues like feminism, racism and homophobia through a fresh, multi-disciplinary approach to choreography that could be expressed outside the traditional framework — as when she and Potter transposed a classical entrance from the wings to meet in the middle of a loch in full evening dress and flippers in Lochgilphead (1974). As I read about this and other early works like Park Cafeteria (1975), Death and the Maiden (1975), Rabies (1976) and Mounting (1977) with enticing photographs, I kept on wishing I had seen them.

The subtitle of Choreographies is ‘Tracing the Materials of an Ephemeral Art Form’. Lansley looks back on her vast material archive with the archaeologist’s eye but she is also the subject of their excavation. It’s a delicate place to put oneself but her focus is collective, on the people with whom she worked and on the creative inputs they derived from visual arts, performance art and, in the case of The Impersonators (1982), an interest in music hall. Her rational parsing of her works provides an insight into their layers of meaning and metaphor, and her deconstructions of classical ballets — Giselle in I Giselle (1980), Petrouchka in L’Autre (1997) and Firebird in Les Diables (1998-9) — in the light of contemporary cultural politics relates to Walter Benjamin’s ideas about literary translation. Wherever possible she has included interviews with her former collaborators, and the chapter notes are as far-reaching and informative as the text itself. These inside perspectives remind us of the important contribution of choreography to the realm of ideas and to an understanding of the body as a thinking instrument.

For Lansley choreography is the art form ‘which most profoundly links the mind and the body’ and for the last 40 years she has been guided by the clash of values that drove her away from the ‘narcissistic, virtuosic and dramatic view of performance’ to the ‘radical community’ at LSCD where she and her colleagues could, in differentiation to key dance makers in the US, nurture ‘artistic, conceptual and theatrical strategies’. Looking back, it is clear her intuition led her to being in the right place at the right time; she now makes her own place and time at her Dancer’s Research Studio in Haggerston which has provided the context for some of her more recent works like Holding Space (2004), View from the Shore (2007), Guests Research (2010) and Guest Suites (2012). Her working period between LSCD and today is a huge swathe of British dance history in which she has continually evolved as a choreographer: she was a founding member of Richard Alston’s first company, Strider; she formed Limited Dance Company with Sally Potter (joined later by Rose English), and co-founded X6 Dance Space with Mary Prestidge, Maedée Duprès, Emilyn Claid and Fergus Early. The key aim of X6 was ‘to view and explore dance within its wider social context’ and to be responsible ‘for encouraging cross art form collaboration and creating spaces for the development of interdisciplinary performance and somatic training.’ It is symbolic that the wooden floor in X6’s original studio space in Butler’s Wharf is now the underpinning of the performance studio at Chisenhale Dance Studios that Lansley also co-founded. But while Lansley’s narrative inevitably weaves through a history of dance in the UK, it is the history of her works in this 40-year period that is the true subject of her book.

Choreographies also reads as a theoretical underpinning or an approach to the art of choreography that is still relevant today; too much choreography is made and played rather than written and read. As an extension of this metaphor of the literature of choreography, Lansley has also been keen to foster a critical response to the work in which she participated, facilitating a dialogue between new dance and the public in the form of New Dance Review that X6 Dance Space launched and fostered for its eleven-year existence.

I have dipped into my dog-eared copy of Choreographies on numerous journeys; fortunately its variegated format of text, photographs (many by Hugo Glendinning), choreographic notes, scores and reviews supports this time-lapse form of perusal. It also suggests it is not a book to be read and left to brood on a shelf but should be consulted regularly like a chiropractor. Reminding us that there can be no critical engagement with an art form that does not provoke a critical dialogue, Lansley’s voice makes an eloquent case for a written choreography that can be expressed and read as a counterpoint to the readily accessible product of a gradual shift to social conservatism. Choreographies is a timely call to arms that recognises choreography, in the words of critic and dance historian Laurence Louppe, as one of the most important artistic phenomena of our time.

 

www.intellectbooks.co.uk