SERAFINE1369, IV at The Yard

SERAFINE1369, IV, The Yard, April 27

It comes as no surprise that Jamila Johnson-Small, aka SERAFINE1369, sees dance as a philosophical undertaking. Their program note is redolent of a manifesto and the quartet they have created, known simply as IV, adheres to the manifesto with the intimacy of a translation. Or perhaps it’s the other way round: IV is a choreographic manifesto that the program note translates into a succinct philosophical treatise. Either way there’s an alchemical process at play that transforms words into movement and movement into words.

‘I want to invite you’, the program note begins, ‘into the ethics of this work. This is about finding space and trying to be free, trying to move towards ourselves and one another. To co-exist without the feeling of taking or giving away too much.’ How often is the audience invited into a performance as opposed to being told — often in terms of some parallel universe — what the performance is? Invitation is indeed at the heart of IV and once the details and qualities of the work come to rest in the mind, it becomes clear how it fleshes out this introductory invitation in its structure and in its movement.

Presented at The Yard as part of its NOW 23 Festival, IV is a quartet of dancers comprising Johnson-Small, Steph McMann, Darcy Wallace and Natifah White. There are two frameworks: time, measured by the disembodied voice of a speaking clock — on the minute, every minute for an hour — and the space, which includes the audience. Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design and the lighting conceived by Grigg and SERAFINE1369 create an aural and visual environment within that space.

The essence of the work is a ‘relational practice, one that does not presume, where we work to disentangle from and unsettle our assumptions, and also yours. Here, we encounter one another and ourselves.’ As part of the space in which IV is staged, we in the audience are an element, like the lighting and the sound, that informs the relational effect of the performance. As a result, over the four nights at The Yard there will be effectively four different performances: ‘We are re-imagining and creating this work anew each time.’  This is of course hypothetical from the perspective of observing only one of those performances, but it’s a proposition that informs the nature of the relation and it’s entirely tenable from the evidence of what we can see and feel.

What may be confrontational in viewing the work is that IV is presented in all the trappings of a conventional theatre setting, where performers are on one side of the fourth wall and the audience on the other expecting to see a show. It doesn’t need to be like that, and there is an intimation in IV of a much larger space that is not a theatre, where we are not seated and not watching, and yet somehow still involved. IV hollows out the expectation of a show, drawing the audience into its mystery, inviting us to share ‘just what it is, what we all come with, what we want to keep and what we choose to shed.’

The idea of breaking down duration into one-minute segments announced by a speaking clock immediately releases time of any extraneous trappings and allows it to fill with the interior space of the dancers which is, of course, as vast as the universe. Their breath, whether in movement or stillness, keeps expanding and as we watch these sixty minimal tableaux we can begin to let time expand within our own lives. The duration of the performance seems to shrink in proportion to this expansion. There is never too much movement to fill the time, nor too little; the dancers use their bodies to wrap time around them, which affects the space in which they perform. It is a vindication of IV’s integrity in breaking down the tension that exists between the nature of the performance and the convention of the theatre that there is only minimal applause at the end; there is no need as we have all by then become performers within IV’s framework. This is not a fortuitous conclusion; SERAFINE1369 works consciously ‘with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence.’ They conceive of dance as an antidote to the ‘hostile environment’ ‘by dissolving and unfixing our internal replication of [it], and attuning to our embodied experience in relationship.’

SERAFINE1369’s IV is a celebration of movement within stillness, of stillness within movement, and a choreographic breath of fresh air.

Project O, Voodoo at The Art School, Glasgow

Project O, Voodoo, The Art School, Glasgow, March 7

Jamila Johnson-Small and Alexandrina Hemsley in Voodoo (photo: Project O)

“You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.” – Sojourner Truth

We… wait. We are…wait. We are ready…wait. We are ready for…wait. We are ready for you… wait.
Voodoo has a staged and staccato arrival with entry permitted in groups of five at a time. We are paused in the lobby, paused again midway up a staircase, paused again at the door to deposit all our time-keeping devices in a sealed black envelope and only then allowed to enter the performance arena. This is an example of power; power to disrupt and power to alter experience.

Project O is a collaboration between Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small and this is some of the text they offer on their website about the work: ‘Two brown women dance a dance to dance themselves out of the desire for and expectation of an aesthetic assimilation that upholds a system of white supremacy that is at once subtle, blatant and all pervasive. A dance as cartography, Project O map the movement of their memories and the gaps in their knowledge of what went on before, those histories that are repeatedly erased by being unspoken. Training their bodies to fall through time, communing with ghosts, conjuring new futures and describing a misremembered past, this dance is an ode to the present…Voodoo asks you to pay your respects, make peace with your dead and ours, lay down your defences and dance.’

As the audience enter and take their places on the benches or the floor, what looks like the end titles of a film — a continual projection of scrolling text — cites historical and contemporary examples of racism, control and power: when cocaine was removed from Coca Cola (1901), when Rosa Parks refused to switch seats (1955), when the Henry Ford Foundation purchased that same bus #2857 (2001), alongside incidents that Hemsley and Johnson-Small have encountered too.

As we are faced towards the projection Hemsley and Johnson-Small are static, seated on a raised stage about 20 metres away at the back of the room each with a pair of reflective sunglasses facing us. They are glacial. We have to crane our necks to turn and see them up high under a double spot as they watch us, their subjects, motionless. I could watch them like this all night.

“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” – Toni Morrison

Voodoo is a durational event in either three or four 2-hour performance cycles for which you purchase a ticket for a single two-hour timed entry; my slot is the second wave of the evening which has BSL interpretation from Amy Cheskin. With the haze mounting a seated Cheskin starts interpreting the lyrics to Nina Simone’s Feeling Good (and later to Whitney Houstoun) with gumption and delicious emotional flourishes as Hemsley and Johnson-Small begin their first journey — to a pair of white cotton body bags in which they encase themselves and return to a motionless state; until their bodies are dragged into the centre of the space by a number of assistants who were responsible for our initial entrances. When we deposited our time-keeping devices we were being asked to erase our own time and enter into Project O’s rulespace where they enforce gaps, pauses, instructions and make us wait — an exercise in play and power.

Dragging and slamming bin bags of bones as they scatter across the runway, my memories of their movement is a language that belongs in the social dance and party scene; responsive limbs echoing the intricacies of the hip hop and bashment lines on the soundtrack. Remnants of bones are everywhere (designed by Naomi Kuyck-Cohen and Charley Fone), threaded on thin wires overhead like an oversized guitar neck and running the length of the 15-metre space alongside singular panels at floor level; we are dancing in a sea of bones. Hemsley and Johnson-Small howl into the bodies of some audience members, uninvited but gentle touches with their mouths breathing and moaning into the bodies of others. The transference of energies begin.

“It’s not about supplication, it’s about power. It’s not about asking, it’s about demanding. It’s not about convincing those who are currently in power, it’s about changing the very face of power itself.” – Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

For me the focus of Voodoo isn’t so much about what Hemsley and Johnson-Small do, what they present, how they dance and what they offer; it is about the audience and how we react to their provocation, to their power and to the aggregation of own experience. With pre-recorded instructions they control us as a mass, herding us around the space like sheep; “take off your shoes”, “lie down” “let it rise”. There is a clear delineation between solo/collective audience and performer; there are no instructions to build energies between us. We are focussed on our own bodies and on those of Hemsley and Johnson-Small; we are building a relationship between them and us. The second half of the cycle shifts the focus inward even further as it morphs into a club night where we can dance for ourselves, no longer watching others, and begin to “let it rise” in our bodies. There is an unresolved tension between the instructions, the control and our release. The patterned beats and the predictability of the music choices offers a crutch for the audience as we exist on a participatory spectrum from internalised sonic ecstasy to self-removed wallflower awkwardness to average floppy-limbed wedding dance as ankles tap side to side not knowing how to control and let the body respond to the possibilities that the music provides. We are left amongst the tension and power crackles throughout. We begin to see a consistency of invitation, but are we here for complicity or confrontation?

Jamila Johnson-Small, i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere

Jamila Johnson-Small, i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere, Rich Mix, October 9

Jamila Johnson-Small in i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere (photo: Foteini Christofilopoulou)

“We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards.” – Helen Keller

What happens when an edge is invited to the centre?

Jamila Johnson-Small premiered her new solo work i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere at this year’s Dance Umbrella. Prior to the festival she was the subject of an in-depth portrait by Lyndsey Winship where Johnson-Small said: “I guess I still have my fantasies about not selling out.” Having encountered some of her other collaborative performance guises (Project O and immigrants and animals) I was curious to see the distillation of a solo voice and how it would manifest.

There’s a tension when an edge meets a centre. Nearly a month after I left Johnson-Small’s performance at Rich Mix I’m still carrying it, unable to shift it; there’s something inside this work that will not settle. It’s a work of resistance. One thing that tingles is the still image of Johnson-Small’s back as she is lying on the floor, head nestled in her arms, facing the same way as the projected images we’re watching. Her choice to stay on the stage, to be still and not remove herself from our gaze stays with me. This is her domain and we are guests who are fleetingly present and then disappear; she will remain. The projected film is full of deconstructed limbs twitching, rotating and removed from the baby-pink hooded torso of the architect of our experience. The edge and centre are in play again.

“The need for change bulldozed a road down the centre of my mind.” – Maya Angelou

The lighting design by Jackie Shemesh tightly frames Johnson-Small for the first 25 minutes, isolating her body and framing legs and torso with hands bobbing amongst the shards of sidelight. Existing in a one-metre radius of space Johnson-Small is a groove finder and beat rider with a muted knee bounce despite encouragement from the score emanating from the towering sound system like a stage left shadow. With an 8-foot space rock fixed and glinting stage right the scenography and performance slowly suffocate the space.

What do you do when you meet a wall? How do you navigate it? This is what I’ve been wrestling with and I’m left in a void of emotion; I’m unsure which way my response faces. A resistance and tension were present and there’s the smell of a bristling Beckett character who is here yet not here, who acknowledges us but doesn’t necessarily want us to be here. However, something keeps whirring. i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere is hard to define. It’s not full of virtuosic or pre-supposed ideas of beautiful dancing; it’s numbed, reflecting different emotional states and different ways of being in this world.

“The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps.” – Bob Black

Although it may feel like a stand-off with neither of us yielding attention, I think what I’ve encountered is an archive of the self. How does Johnson-Small not let her edge be pulled to the centre but still accept the offer and associated profile that comes with a premiere at Dance Umbrella? How do I let i ride in colour and soft focus, no longer anywhere enter my own archive? It’s currently resisting the established classification, so maybe I need to build a new space for it — closer to the edge.