Resolution 2017: Watts Dance, John Livingston Dance, Alice Webber and Ben Saffer

Resolution 2017: Watts Dance, John Livingston Dance, Alice Weber and Ben Saffer  

An original poster and Rosalie Bell in WLA No.657005 (photo: Cecilia Watts)

Inspired by Vita Sackville-West’s wartime book, The Women’s Land Army, Cecilia Watts’ WLA No. 657005 is a narrative work that ‘celebrates the significant role of young women working as agricultural labourers during the Second World War.’ As such it will have resonances with an audience who has either some recollection of the WLA or a relationship with someone who did. The specific identity in the title suggests the latter — perhaps a celebration of a family member — for Watts is far too young to remember the WLA herself. She has, however, done her research and found a physical and musical imagery that convincingly conjures up the era. In some of her groupings of the five women (Rosalie Bell, Rachel Elderkin, Zoe Moody, Caitlin Murray and Alice White) there is a sense of the wholesome, patriotic activity depicted in WLA posters, and their frequent peering up at the sky immediately suggests passing aircraft. In her choreography Watts effortlessly weaves dance and muscular gestures from the sowing and planting repertoire (not for her the Lumber Jills of the Women’s Timber Corps) with a strong suggestion of mutual support among the women. Watts also weaves a story into WLA No. 657005: a young hedonistic woman (White) prefers to party than to join the WLA until she receives word of the death of her lover; her friends support her in her mourning and she finally exchanges her polka dot dress for WLA working clothes. There are some hiccups in the narrative and nervousness in some of the performers that limits, especially in such a short work, the full spirit that inhabits it. Pianist Robin Porter, who also wrote and arranged some of the songs, is seated out of sight behind the upright piano as if we are listening to the radio, so when his spirited playing is enhanced by a couple of tracks by The Andrews Sisters the shift is seamless. He makes a brief appearance as the messenger of bad tidings and inexplicably walks off with the sheet music during his final playing of Boogie Woogie Bugle Girl, though it allows White to redeem herself, and to re-find herself, by continuing on the ivories to the end.

John Livingston is a fascinating performer for he brings to his dancing a vocabulary of disability that is both eloquent and powerful. With a provocative and savagely self-deprecatory title, Am I a waste of space?, Livingston challenges what we see by what he does, quoting Henry David Thoreau in the program notes, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ There are three emotionally laden tracks — When I am laid in earth, from Henry Purcell’s Dido & Aeneas, Bjork’s Black Lake, and Anna Calvi’s The Heart of You — to which Livingston improvises with a range of images from refined, heroic sweeps of the arms to raw, idiosyncratic gestures like tucking his chin into his tee-shirt while putting it back on, gestures that both uncover the process of his thinking and enhance its physical execution. His gestural vocabulary repeats enough for us to recognize his language, his tropes, rather than follow a choreographic path but what we see is a concentration on unearthing his own physical meaning from the music. Mesmerizing.

What a relief to see Alice Weber freed from the trauma of Pomodoro and displaying a relaxed, sassy double in the opening tryptich of Inter/action. Filmmaker (and erstwhile collaborator) Ben Saffer’s bright, even light and Weber’s off-white costume suggest something heavenly as we see her dancing the same sequences that are projected on the screen behind her. Is she following her filmed self or is the film following her? The breaks in sequence and Weber’s wry gestures soon suggest a bad rehearsal day, but between bouts of inner frustration or self-doubt her dancing has the relaxed flow of someone enjoying herself in eerie serenity. A second section begins with a track of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (Pieces Form the Whole), heralding Merritt Millman dressed in black with a facial smirk; the suggestion of Black Swan is inevitable. The duet becomes a tussle, a choreographed rugby scrum with two players, the creative facet of performance locked against the demonic or, as the program note suggests, ‘exploring the different relationships of the body and self in performance space.’ In the third section Weber is again dancing on her own accompanied by Saffer’s Music for Inter/action against his filmed collage of time-lapsed natural phenomena —scudding clouds and the reproductive systems of plants. Becoming one with her filmed environment, Weber evokes a healing presence, and when the flowers begin to close up she yields to their impulse and folds into herself.

Resolution! 2014: Vais, Burn, Clark

Resolution! 2014, The Place, January 29

Rachel Burn, Threshold (photo: Ben Hopper)

Culture Device Dance Project: I can’t explain and I won’t even try

An arm extends from the wings, a waking arm stretching out in the morning light, followed by the rest of John Livingston. He seems to be in close and intimate conversation with the light around him (provided by Maria Klochkova), his gestures close and passionate, catching the air in his fist and pulling it down, unrolling his arm and slowly revealing his face in his ‘circle of public solitude’. He revels in being upside down, his head as anchor and his leg pointing up in the air like an exclamation mark. As he gets up, Sarah Gordy enters with an altogether more dynamic phrase, gyrating like a gentle hoola-hoop. Livingston searches, pushes back, grasps at questions and twists his body as if squeezing out the answers. Gordy is already grounded, her legs bent deeply to the floor and her body freely laid out above, her arms circling as if to test the limits of her senses, making a wide sweep around Livingston. He expresses each gesture with timeless concentration, acting and reacting in a moving dialogue. When something doesn’t quite succeed, one can sense his determination to follow it through to its logical conclusion, like one straining to express his words and meaning clearly. At the end of this first section he falls and rises again while Gordy continues to orbit like a planet circling the internal combustion of its star.

The dreamlike drone of Stars of the Lid changes to a slow-drilling techno pulse by Emptyset. Both Livingston and Gordy are rooted to the ground, their gestures becoming more forceful. Livingston throws off his t-shirt while Gordy pushes and pulls at an imaginary boundary. The drama in Livingston’s dialogue notches up in intensity as if he’s turning the screw tighter; Gordy watches him with concern as she continues to orbit, picking up on the repetitive, mechanical nature of the music. There are magical moments when their two independent worlds unite for an instant in a complementary movement that jumps out of the soundscape like a spark but finally the symbiosis fails, their energy is depleted and they both collapse to the ground — only, one imagines, for the time it takes to gather up the resources to start again.

Culture Device Dance Project is a professional company for dancers with Down’s Syndrome using improvisation techniques and experimental electronic sounds to push boundaries. I can’t explain and I won’t even try was developed by artistic director Daniel Vais in collaboration with the dancers.

Rachel Burn, Threshold

I first saw Rachel Burn’s work at a Cloud Dance Sunday. It was Pull Through, Flick, which had a monastic, spiritual underpinning that is still present in Threshold but here Burn is inspired by Walt Whitman’s free-ranging lines in Leaves of Grass — particularly Song of Myself. When you travel from Pull Through, Flick to Threshold you realise how much the ‘self’ that Whitman writes about has imbued Burn’s ‘self’ to create a more confident and poetic universe as if she had developed his ‘loosen’d tongue’. Given that she created the work on the same three dancers — Lauren Bridle, Laura Erwin and Anna Pearce — the work also reflects their emotional and physical stretching. (Only three days before the Resolution! performance, Erwin broke three bones in her foot during rehearsal and was unable to perform, so we saw a stunningly composed — and sleepless — Burn herself as both muse and interpreter. Whitman’s line of the poem that is chalked on the floor could have been dedicated to Erwin: ‘Be of good cheer, we will not desert you’).

The work is episodic in the same way Whitman weaves one image or story into another, each linked to the others by his understanding of the essential unity of person and environment. Renu Hossain’s lovely score seems to be inspired by the same humanist spirituality, supporting the key elements of the sea, the earth and the air. In each of her performers, Burn brings out individual strengths to match: Pearce turns herself inside out in her solo, arriving at a oneness with her material that is timeless and it is lovely once again to watch Bridle whose ability to transcend form is ever present; she is like water to Pearce’s earth. As for Burn herself, when not joining in the trios she seems quite at home as the statuesque, white-robed goddess with the delicately supplicating arms.

There is so much to enjoy in this sculptural work that it deserves a more sensitive treatment in terms of light and shade. Verse is read while choreography is essentially a visual art and paintings may be an appropriate inspiration for this further refinement. Perhaps by the time Erwin’s foot is healed there will be time (and funding) to explore.

Rag Days: Scratch

Choreographer Timothy Clark and designer Emma Robinson close the evening with Scratch, a burlesque loosely fashioned on the antics of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their companion April O’Neil.  In the opening scene, the four comrades (Ben Jones, Hannah Rotchell, Henry Curtis and João Cidade) are drilled by O’Neil (Patricia Zafra) as overbearing, over-the-top martial arts instructor. They have names that sound like The Whip, Morphine, Blue Mix and Red Lance and together they form the intrepid band of Dance Rangers battling evil — in the form of a manic, radio-controlled model car in satanic colours that races around the stage causing havoc — for the good of humanity. Off duty, they tend to talk all at once, or riff a cappella on their names. Clark is never at a loss for comic invention and keeps the audience entertained (i.e. laughing) throughout. According to Rag Days’ facebook page, Clark formed his company with the noble purpose of ‘making accessible dance works for the purpose of entertainment’, so Scratch certainly succeeds even if there is very little dance — accessible or otherwise — in it. Dramatic confrontation with Evil is finally averted by an enterprising Dance Ranger switching off the car to a rousing round of congratulations and a lot of energetic posing and fists in the air. The audience can’t help but respond in kind.