Ian Abbott on Duwane Taylor’s Conform to Rebel at Redbridge Drama Centre

Duwane Taylor: Conform to Rebel, Redbridge Drama Centre, October 26

Duwane Taylor in Conform to Rebel (photo: Simon Adrians – Tangle Photography)

“There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.” – Fernando Pessoa

Conform to Rebel is Duwane Taylor’s first mixed-bill performance at Redbridge Drama Centre, commissioned by Artists 4 Artists, the increasingly valuable collective of Lee Griffiths, Joseph Toonga and Emily Crouch that works as a vehicle for change in the hip hop dance community; it’s achieving a lot more than 99 per cent of other dance development/venues who are paid to do a similar job.

As a performer Taylor has a fine hip hop pedigree as one the UK’s leading exponents of krump. As well as creating work for his own krump crew, Buckness Personified, he has performed with ZooNation, Boy Blue Entertainment and a suite of others. As a choreographer he has made a number of shorter works including the seven-minute Candle in the Dark presented at British Dance Edition in 2014, Speak presented as part of Resolution 2018 at The Place and he was one of four choreographers to work with LIFT 2018 and East London Dance’s East Wall under the overall direction of Hofesh Shechter.

Advertised as a mixed bill, the evening consisted of three works but with a first half of two works with a total duration of less than 20 minutes Conform to Rebel offers more of a choreographic tasting of Taylor’s range rather than fully developed works. With Taylor presenting the mixed bill under his own name rather than that of his crew, he follows a trend of some artists like Tony Adigun (Avant Garde Dance) and Kate Prince (ZooNation) stepping out of their company to profile themselves first and their company second.

Project producer Emily Labhart offered an overview of Taylor’s choreographic offerings as an introduction. The first work, Anchored to The Beat, (6 minutes) had been made with three emerging dance artists and one member of Buckness Personified in little over a day. It is unfair to offer any critical judgment on their performance or on a work that has had so little time in the studio; while it is noble to offer a platform to the emerging artists, putting them in front of an audience with so little rehearsal time feels a little exposing.

“True rebels, after all, are as rare as true lovers, and in both cases, to mistake a fever for passion can destroy one’s life.” – James Baldwin

Letter to My… is a 10-minute solo that ‘explores the concept of absent fathers, which is often perceived as a recurrent reality within black communities’ with a score remixed by Jean-Pierre Nyamangunda and Taylor featuring Jay-Z and Will Smith’s spoken word. Taylor emerges with his face masked under an oversized rubbery hoodie which absorbs his arms and offers an interesting possibility of masking and swallowing his movement so that it becomes undefined and abstracted. Sitting facing an empty seat, Taylor plays the dual role of absent father and present son with a range of unsubtle reactions; he bursts out of his seat and hoodie to demonstrate the intensity of feeling while lip-syncing to some of the lyrics. It is well executed and technically proficient, but offers little choreographic, emotional or performative development from some of Taylor’s earlier works.

Seeing Conform To Rebel a week after Ffion Cambell-Davies’ evolving 20-minute solo Womb Paves Way offers an alternative perspective on how krump can be used in a hip hop dance theatre context. Womb Paves Way looks at gender violence and colonialism whilst using a number of theatrical techniques and styles of dance, including a short use of krump. Although it feels like the work is still evolving and not yet settled, Campbell-Davies uses that brief window of krump in such an intelligent, restrained and nuanced way that demonstrates an exceptional choreographic awareness and ability to shift the emotional plane of her audience.

“Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul.” – Virginia Woolf

With a voodoo and ritualistic frame, the third work, Conform To Rebel, Rebel To Conform, gives Taylor and Buckness Personified the space and time (twenty-five minutes) to demonstrate their krump technique alongside a wider hip hop dance theatre vocabulary. Claire Hough skulks with menace and krump erupts from her limbs and face with a controlled power and threat which is mesmerising to watch. Her eyes and facial delivery have an almost abinhaya-like quality amplifying what her body is conveying as she corrals the other dancers into conformity with her choreographic line.

There is a consistent debate and schism within hip hop between those who wish to preserve the foundation and codified movement vocabulary and those who wish to experiment, evolve and re-present those original forms in a choreographic and theatrical setting. Taylor clearly wants to evolve, and there are riveting moments when he brings Viviana Rocha on to his shoulder in an expression of double-decker krump and mixes the jab into a wider choreography. There is also a series of floor-based sequences with the performers on their backs; seeing krump on different planes, where the movement comes from within the body and projects into space is something I’ve not seen before.

There’s a definite Shechter influence in some of the travelling sequences and if the work is on a conformity-to-rebellion scale, it would sit in the light rebellion spectrum. However, there is something interesting in Taylor’s choreographic voice; Conform To Rebel, Rebel To Conform demonstrates that Taylor can create and integrate the use of krump and other hip hop dance forms into a powerful and resonant work.

Resolution! 2016, performances on January 19

Resolution! January 19: Lizzie J Klotz, Maria Fonseca, What is Written Dance Company

Alys North and Charlie Dearnley in To Suit (photo: Camilla Greenwell)

I first saw Lizzie J Klotz’s To Suit at The Galvanizer’s Union pub in London on the Kaleidoscopic Arts Platform. It was a well-formed miniature in an intimate setting. When Klotz talked of expanding it for Resolution! I wondered how something that was already complete could be lengthened without unbalancing it, but it has grown into a well-formed miniature in a larger setting, just as warm and just as rich. The lighting by Michael Morgan has helped keep the space intimate, but Klotz and her two performers (Charlie Dearnley and Alys North) have remained true to the spirit of the work and to the relationship between them; its warmth and sense of humour has Made in the North all over it. One of To Suit’s beauties is that it doesn’t have the self-conscious pose of a dance piece; Klotz writes that it was ‘developed through an investigation into human communication…[drawing] comparisons to animal courtship rituals, specifically exploring the behaviour of birds.’ The edges of the communication dissolve into dance and the dance dissolves into the communication. It helps that both Dearnley and North do not come across so much as dancers as two people who move (and speak and sing) their relationship. Dearnley at the beginning goes through a series of gestures in silence that suggest a human agency but when North arrives clutching a bundle of rich-coloured clothes the subsequent communication between them is expressed through an overlapping of text (by Dearnley), bird cries, social dance, over-dressing, cross-dressing and ecstatic jumps. We infer the relationship between the two from their actions in the same way we can feel Johann Sebastian Bach’s music (which Klotz uses to great effect) through its internal structure; the emotions come out of the music and the dance. All that remains is to end To Suit as simply and effectively as it starts.

IDADE in Maria Fonseca’s native Portugese means age, and is the name she has given to her work exploring the phenomenon of ageing through the relationship between herself and Anne Burgi. The rather dark, symbolic opening suggests a mother-daughter relationship as Burgi stands holding a length of coiled material that ends in a shaded pile on the floor. The pile unwinds into Fonseca who unravels the umbilical cord, winds it around her head like a tribal headdress (reminding me of Steve McCurry’s famous photograph of the Afghan girl) and dances with all the sinuous vitality of youth to a Claire Denis film score played by Tindersticks. Fonseca calls growing old ‘an infinite dance of transformation’ but with Burgi’s reading a text about ageing and a long interview in which Fonseca asks questions and Burgi answers, the transformation takes on a rather too dialogical aspect. IDADE thus has a double identity: a theatrical performance with imagination and symbolism, and a conversation that has neither. There is too little of the former and too much of the latter to make a coherent work.

What is Written Dance Company performed Dialect of War at Emerge with three dancers (Jean-Pierre Nyamangunda, Viviana Rocha and Sia Gbamoi). Here it is expanded to a fourth dancer (Daniele Sablone) but either the choreographic elements of expansion or the space has diluted some of the power I remember. Described as ‘the story of a warrior tribe whose lives are brutally disrupted’, the opening scene of four warriors at rest to a recording of battle sounds is too ingenuous, especially when they all raise their knees on cue. The four dancers can evince a powerful energy but too often they appear unable to get into gear. There is a slow, menacing beginning to a duet between Nyamangunda and Gbamoi but as soon as the music begins they suddenly speed up. We know this is a theatrical representation of conflict and violence, but such lapses of dramatic continuity make the artificiality apparent. As Roland Barthes wrote on the spectacle of street wrestling, ‘what matters is not what [the public] thinks but what it sees.’ We want to believe, and at Emerge the dancers convinced me of their state of mind but here, for the most part, it was not as evident. This is all the more essential as What is Written Dance Company is presenting a subject that is beyond our imagination; to make it work, they have to go beyond our imagination into the realms of both the human and the animal to convey the palette of emotions, and then some. I felt it before, but something too civilised has set in to dilute its expression.

Emerge Festival, Week 3

Emerge Festival, Week Three, The Space, November 17

Maëva Berthelot and Omar Gordon in Neus Gil Cortés’ Left (photo: Patricio Forrester)

This is the third program of the three-week Emerge Festival curated by C-12 Dance Theatre at the intimate venue, The Space, on the Isle of Dogs. These small-scale festivals, like Cloud Dance Festival and Kaleidoscopic Arts Platform, give opportunities to young choreographers without any hierarchic selection process: it is a raw mixture of work from around the country that is never less than interesting and can include some gems. There has been a lot of discussion recently about the absence of female choreographers, but in the two programs I saw at Emerge, the majority of choreographers are women.

The only exception this evening is Dialect of War by Jean-Pierre Nyamangunda and Viviana Rocha of What Is Written Dance Company who join Sia Gbamoi to make a trio that starts off quite innocuously but grows in menace. Described as ‘the story of a warrior tribe whose lives are brutally disrupted’, the energy of disruption is carried in the choreography but the narrative of violence is carried in the presence of the dancers, most completely in Nyamangunda whose eyes convey both terror and pain. In Don McCullin’s war photographs it is the eyes of both victims and perpetrators that convey the ultimate darkness of the soul; the use of the face as an integral part of choreographic intent is no different.

Gemma Prangle’s Dance I made on my Bathroom Floor is about as far away from Dialect of War as a programmer could manage. Prangle starts behind a shower curtain in silhouette to the sound of running water and when she raises her arms above the curtain for a stylised soap dance the sound of lathering pervades the room. When she reaches outside the curtain for her towel we can see it is not there; it is a moment of expectation, a simple but effective piece of theatre. Prangle conceived the piece when she noticed how much time she spent dancing in her bathroom compared to the studio, but the attraction of such an idea is that she should be unaware of anyone watching. Who dances in their bathroom to an audience? By emerging from the shower (bone dry) and shielding her naked body with her arms, she acknowledges our presence. She then compounds the artifice by apologizing for leaving her towel in the audience and asking for the person sitting on it to throw it down before continuing her ablutions in all propriety. We are now effectively sitting in her bathroom and the inherent humour and absurdity of the idea has been flushed away.

Co_Motion Dance (choreographers Catherine Ibbotson and Amy Lovelock) present a quartet of women in FORCE, a highly energetic battle for power that relies on the strength and spatial precision of the performers. Some of the jumps also rely on split-second lighting cues for that are too demanding for the limited technical resources available and too much of a gimmick for the level of choreographic sophistication. The force of the work comes from the force of the performers: why contrive this brute physicality? Presumably to make it more interesting to watch, but I would argue that the construction and theatrical intent of the work have to be more interesting first.

The title of Tamsin Griffiths’ work, Duvet Cover, appears to follow a similarly domestic theme as Dance I made on my Bathroom Floor, but the duvet in question is a metaphor. It is the place of comfort, ‘an emotional home’ in a work that expresses the volatility of depression and bi-polar disorder. The piece begins with a film clip projected on to a white sheet showing Griffiths climbing into a giant duvet and relishing its warmth and comfort; the fuzziness of the image makes it look like an ultrasound image of a baby in a womb. At the moment the film ends Griffiths pushes from underneath the screen to lie supine on the stage. Her initial movements remain close to herself as she goes through the motions of adjusting drowsily to vertical and following the path of a hand that seems to have an agency of its own to a score that is dreamy if not hallucinatory. Griffiths’ entire body explodes into action as she follows a volatile narrative; there is no ‘why’ in these shifts of mood, these ‘phases of depression’ as they progress in a certain direction and then suddenly change course. Duvet Cover is a work that can be read on two distinct levels: one that doesn’t make sense and one that does. Griffiths is perhaps playing unconsciously on the ‘invisibility’ of depression and how that plays into misunderstanding about the nature of the disease. She controls her performance even when it seems most chaotic: she displays an effortless virtuosity in her ability to throw herself to the limits of her balance and return to equilibrium. Although she takes emotional risks, Griffiths is not challenged sufficiently in Duvet Cover to extend her range. Perhaps it is one of the challenges of working alone but one of the rewards is to see that raw honesty in a dynamic physical form.

The most complete work of the evening is Neus Gil Cortés’ Left, a duet for Maëva Berthelot and Omar Gordon (Cortés shares the role with Berthelot on subsequent evenings). It has a simple starting point: ‘When we are alone, all we have left is our thoughts…’ ‘All’ is the operative word, for in this fifteen-minute duet there is a great deal to inhabit our imagination and Cortés leaves open that vital gap between choreographic intent and audience reaction. Gordon, who has the dark lines of a character in an El Greco painting, is the manifestation of a relentless, demonic aspect of Berthelot’s psyche. Despite herself, Berthelot circles around him like a moth around a candle and when he finally dissolves into the darkness she is left eerily reliving his gestures. They are two but they are not two, and their partnership is mesmerisingly intense. As a choreographer, Cortés handles the frailty and domination with a freedom and depth of detail that anchor the work in a youthful maturity. She also proves her intuition as director in creating an enveloping sound score around the music of Philip Samartzis and Mica Levi, costumes that enhance the narrative and in managing to create magic from the available lighting resources.