Joan Clevillé Dance, Plan B for Utopia

Joan Clevillé Dance, Plan B for Utopia, Battersea Arts Centre, June 2

John Kendall and Solène Weinachter in Plan B for Utopia (photo: Nicole Guarino)

The United Kingdom’s constitutional crisis triggered by the EU referendum gives Joan Clevillé’s Plan B for Utopia a timely relevance — and an unintended irony — especially when he writes in the program note that it concerns ‘the impact of our decisions on others and the environment around us, about what happens when things don’t go according to plan…’ The derivation of the term ‘utopia’ comes from the Greek for ‘nowhere’, which is, until Article 50 is (or isn’t) invoked, the political situation in which the UK currently finds itself, and since there was evidently no Plan A for Brexit, Plan B is being pieced together on an ad hoc basis while both sides machinate in a dystopian political environment with daggers drawn.

Although Clevillé’s research for Plan B for Utopia takes a serious look at socio-political concerns, designer Matthias Strahm’s setting of a clownish, colourful world of building blocks and a cardboard box full of props derives from the more popular vision of utopia as an ideal society in which the hopes and dreams of humanity are realised. The values underlying a utopian society — equality, liberty, and justice, among others — are predicated on a dissatisfaction with the present, as suggested in Solène Weinachter’s opening question: ‘Why is it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the world changing for the better? How do we start a conversation about changing the world?’ Her partner John Kendall replies, as he slowly cocks his head close to the microphone: ‘Good question.’ Weinachter is the voluble, adrenalized partner constantly taking the initiative while Kendall is calmer and more subdued; they form a vulnerable pair whose contrasting approaches to progress do not augur well for their own. Dressed alike in yellow checked shirts and black pants we first see them balancing building blocks on the upended cardboard box, an image of the fragility, if not the impossibility, of their world. Weinachter is desperate to affect the future while Kendall is content with the present. He sets off on a hedonistic display of disco dancing and mating, but she is not interested, her face neutral, questioning; she smiles to the audience, trying to extricate herself from Kendall’s pursuit, but he persists. Not one to be fazed, she upends him over her shoulder and takes the microphone. With Kendall immobilized she answers her own question by talking about the gap between rich and poor, the degradation of the environment, the dismantling of social policies, economic growth and progress, consumerism and the ease with which we are distracted and entertained. Only when she has finished does she ask Kendall how he is. (‘A little sick’). Getting his feet back on the ground, Kendall then lip-synchs Over the Rainbow while from behind the puppeteer Weinachter manipulates his arms with wire hangers from the cardboard box. The contrast between the rosy idealism of the song and the manipulation of the singer is stark but its symbolism is subverted by the comic pathos of the scene.

The problem is not one of performance but of perspective. In a subsequent scene Kendall sprays haze around Weinachter like insecticide as she begins the story of the man in the magic forest. It’s a tour de force with a battery of onomatopoeic sounds through which we glimpse the moral of the story somewhere in the background: Weinachter’s performance is so good in itself that it upstages the content. Again towards the end, when Weinachter implements Plan B (for Birthday) and magics a cake with a single candle and a paper crown with which she anoints King John, she breaks into a rollingly fast mix of French and English with exploding voice and gestures that leave Kendall dazed and confused. She unwraps his ‘cadeau’ of an electronic keyboard programmed to play Happy Birthday and then picks out the tune of Imagine which she sings two octaves too low and out of tune. No matter, Plan B is too desperate to fail. She even gets the audience to sing along. Kendall, whose distress increases with Weinachter’s every effort, collapses in tears. She sits in the cardboard box frantically miming a campervan, a boat, an aeroplane — anything, even Marat dying in his bath — until she succeeds in reviving his spirits.

It’s a spectacular climax of performance, but the final scene descends from pathos to bathos — an inherent danger in a work where the dialectic forces are insufficiently balanced. Kendall and Weinachter play a game of wooden blocks to Louis Armstrong singing What a Wonderful World, gently lowering their symbolic wooden house from mouth to elbow to fingers to the floor so as not to disturb the illusion of a happy ending.

Despite the imbalance of perspective, Plan B for Utopia is not a weak work; its structure is tight, its performance is powerful but most importantly its sincerity is unquestionable. Clevillé himself has both an engagingly serious side and a keen sense of humour that together reveal a passionate, imaginative voice. With his strong desire to set up a dialogue with his audience, the more he can harmonise these strengths of character in his work, the greater the balance and the impact it will have.

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.