Mark Bruce Company in Return to Heaven at Wilton’s Music Hall

Mark Bruce Company, Return to Heaven, Wilton’s Music Hall, March 3

Mark Bruce’s latest work, Return to Heaven, presented at Wilton’s Music Hall, bridges a vast arc of cultural references from the Egyptian pyramids to space exploration within a framework of a macabre sci-fi expedition. Journeys into darkness have been the subject of previous works by Bruce like Macbeth, The Odyssey and Dracula, but in Return to Heaven he seems to be working towards a resolution, a transmutation of dance theatre into a psychology of personal development, where losing yourself in the forest and fighting your way out against dark forces is a way to slay your own demons. All the program note reveals is a story ‘of an obscure expedition into the darkness of a jungle led by two explorers seemingly pursuing only a feeling that something awaits them, something they need to uncover.’ It might be called an existential fable with ghostly visions, ruthless mercenaries and vampire clinicians that uses its theatrical effects to illustrate the hazardous road to inner resolution. The fable is further construed through the optic of a delirious mind that cuts up and reassembles its narrative elements through the cinematic techniques of flashback, fast forward and recall as a non-linear phantasmagoria of associations. The advantage of such a path is to turn a time-traveling fable into a dense, multi-layered myth; the danger is that the signification of the myth may be lost in the complex shuffling of layers. 

The visual aspect of Return to Heaven relies heavily on the collaboration between Phil Eddolls’ stage design, Guy Hoare’s lighting, Dorothee Brodrück’s costumes and Jyn San Tsang’s makeup, while Dean Sudron as stage manager has the unenviable task of coordinating all the complexities of the production in real time. As we enter the auditorium of Wilton’s Music Hall — itself a theatre whose atmosphere is redolent with mystery — the stage is engulfed in haze and tropical bird song. Within a sultry forest clearing against a backdrop of hanging creepers is the vague outline of a tent and a lectern in front of it that suggest the encampment of an archaeological expedition. Through the light we see Dane Hurst at the lectern writing in his journal, with a rifle at hand; Eleanor Duval as his expedition partner is lying on the ground suffering from a fever whose effects will manifest later. From this still point we enter into a fluid succession of images and visual explanations that Hoare’s lighting alternately reveals and hides, transforming time into a thick haze that holds within it the references that drive the fractured narrative. 

In trying not to tell a linear story, Bruce subverts his aim by using a number of narrative devices and theatrical effects; each scene is emphasised like a chapter in a book even if the order of the chapters is jumbled, and Eddolls’ props — a tent, a Triumph TR6, a sarcophagus and a crashed spaceship — identify the specific details of the story even if we cannot immediately grasp their significance. At the same time, the artifice of theatrical effects — a rocket ship crash, a bloody severed head, a man-eating insect, a beached shark, and gory entrails — transports our belief into comic strip territory. There’s a fine line between chilling horror and lurid sensation that Return to Heaven negotiates only with difficulty. 

Bruce enjoys an eclectic playlist, and he doesn’t disappoint; there are some 22 tracks in Return to Heaven collated from Krzysztof Penderecki, Akira Nishimura, Arvo Pärt, Irving Burgie, Mark Lanegan Band, PJ Harvey, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Harry Belafonte, and Bruce himself. He uses the tracks either as source music for choreography or incidental music for creating moods and emotions, but the diversity and frequency of different tracks nevertheless constitutes the aural equivalent of an additional narrative device. 

With such a strong focus on theatrical and aural effect, the dancing appears almost incidental. Carina Howard’s first solo, which is repeated later in the work, is full of upright, upbeat neoclassical steps that appear at odds with the prevailing mood, while Hurst’s range of virtuosic classical steps performed with characteristic intensity is so out of context in the battle scene that it is close to parody. Duval plays her ailments and obstacles to the edge of sanity and back, while Jordi Calpe Serrats, Christopher Thomas and Sharol Mackenzie all remain more attuned to the work’s expressive parameters. 

In a production that professes to ‘transcend narrative’, Return to Heaven is too heavily weighted by its narrative devices. Transcendence is an experience, and it’s the experience that is missing. 

Yorke Dance Project in Twenty at Clore Studio

Yorke Dance Project, Twenty, Clore Studio at the Royal Opera House, May 16

Yorke Dance Project is celebrating its twentieth anniversary with a choreographic landscape that ranges from a revival of a work by Sir Kenneth MacMillan to new works by Robert Cohan, Sophia Stoller and company founder, Yolande Yorke-Edgell. This landscape contains within it other landscapes, for Cohan, as an early Martha Graham dancer, sees his ever-present mentor in the distance and quotes from an earlier work of his own, while Yorke-Edgell revisits some of the choreographers who have influenced and inspired her, notably Richard Alston, Bella Lewitsky and Cohan himself. 

MacMillan’s Playground from 1979 is very much in the foreground for its visual imagery, its rhythmic cohesion with the music of Gordon Crosse and the spatial richness of its groupings. From Gordon Anthony’s photographs in the program of the original set, Yolanda Sonnabend had created a sense of oppression through the suggestion of a wire mesh cage; for Yorke Dance in the Clore Studio, Charlotte MacMillan has reimagined a more portable industrial fencing that might surround a building site. Seeing Playground is to be reminded how uncompromising MacMillan was in portraying the seamy side of social and ethical questions that classical ballet rarely if ever treats. And although he uses the visual stimulus of costumes and set, he tells his story principally through a masterful handling of classical technique in the tortured image of a twentieth-century zeitgeist. The playground of the title comes from Crosse’s score, Play Ground, but it also refers to an enclosed, isolated world in which adults dressed as school children play out their noxious games of rivalry and jealousy under the watchful eye of two clinicians in white. The issues of madness, sanity and debilitating neurological disease — the principal girl, like MacMillan’s mother, has epilepsy — are close to the surface and unresolved, giving the work its unsettling character. There are two principal characters — The Girl with Makeup and The Youth — and a large supporting cast for which Yorke Dance invited a number of guests. Oxana Panchenko alternates with Romany Pajdak as the Girl while Jordi Calpe Serrats alternates with Jonathan Goddard as the Youth. The production is given added credibility by the assistance of Susie Crow and Stephen Wicks from the original cast and Jane Elliott as notator; the power of the choreography comes through even if the images of distress at its centre are not always fully realized. 

Coming at the beginning of the program, Playground overshadows the remaining works for different reasons. Stoller’s Between and Within is created on two couples (Edd Mitton, Freya Jeffs, Dane Hurst and Abigail Attard Montalto) whose all too familiar choreographic vocabulary fails to explore with any clarity the relationship between them while Justin Scheid’s composition accompanies the dancers without becoming involved in the choreography. It’s a well-crafted work but lacks the visual and emotional signals that give dance meaning. 

At the age of 94, it is perhaps not surprising that Robert Cohan’s new work, Communion, looks into the past for inspiration, but it’s a little too far for the current cast to fully comprehend. Communion’s aesthetic is a minimalist ritual celebration that Cohan’s old friend and lighting designer John B. Reid has lit superbly. Both the choreography and the lighting seem to take their inspiration from the heavenward aspirations of a gothic cathedral and could indeed be performed in one; there is a pull in the choreography between heaven and earth — as in Martha Graham’s work — in which the dancers are held back from ascending only by the force of their gravity. In the secular scale of the Clore Studio, however, the muscular presence of the dancers in shorts and sleeveless tops leads aspiration into a rather lackadaisical disenchantment, especially in the formal patterns of walking. The music was intended to be shared between MuOM, Barcelona Overtone Singing Choir and Nils Frahm, which might have provided a more spiritual aural space than the unexplained substitute of MuOM by an additional selection of Frahm’s rather saccharine piano mixes. 

Yorke-Edgell’s Imprint is a new work for her company’s anniversary celebration, created ‘from the imprint of a purely physical memory’ of the work of different choreographers over the course of her dance career. She uses the form of pastiche in choreography, music and recorded text to honour her mentors but channelling five composers and three choreographers through the bodies of fifteen dancers can only be sustained in a spirit of celebration. The imprint of her solo for Freya Jeffs, however, carries an element of truth that endures.

Hubert Essakow: IGNIS

Hubert Essakow, IGNIS, The Print Room, February 11

Lukasz Przytarski, Jordi Calpe Serrats and Sara Kestelman in IGNIS (photo: Zadoc Nara)

Fire is the theme of Print Room Associate Artist and Choreographer Hubert Essakow’s new work, IGNIS, the second in a planned elemental trilogy that began with Flow, based on water. Ignis is a Latin word for fire but here fire is a metaphor for memories that have burned their way into both heart and mind.

The seating at The Print Room is intimate, arranged on three sides of the stage as if around a fireplace and Lee Newby’s polished steel back wall tilting slightly forward reflects the human forms on the shiny black stage as flickering embers. Within this heated landscape Essakow — with the help of dramaturg Laura Farnworth — succeeds in getting his cast to embody in those embers all the longing, desire and regret of a passionate life. It is a tall order, and something that dance alone is only partially equipped to handle but Essakow’s coup is to integrate the expressive power of actor Sara Kestelman (whose training in classical ballet still informs her quality of movement) with his three accomplished dancers (Noora Kela, Jordi Calpe Serrats and Lukasz Przytarski). She plays the older woman reflecting on her younger self (Kela) and her conflicted passions, sometimes watching the sporting of the youthful trio and sometimes participating; she sees everything, she notes everything and, more importantly, we read everything through her. Interestingly she doesn’t dominate the stage but like an alchemist transforms it.

Newby is also something of an alchemist because part of his polished steel wall transforms magically into a transparent screen with the help of Matthew Eagland’s lighting. IGNIS begins with the recumbent figure of Kela in light grey loose-fitting clothes reflected on both the floor and the back wall. Like someone licked by flames, she turns and twists the shimmering line of Jon Opstad’s score until she rises to a sitting position and stands looking at her image in the polished mirror. As she walks towards it Kestelman’s image appears through the screen gazing back at her fondly as if at a photograph. Kestelman fades to return seconds later with two young men at her side. Time dissolves in this mirage, and as Kela retreats from our focus Kestelman materialises on stage on the arms of her two youthful companions. In this way both cast and creative team unite in their evocation of time revisited, of remembered pleasure and pain. The four characters weave memories and past events in contrapuntal choreographic sequences in which the men have one phrase and the women another, followed by unison sections and phrases in canon that suggest the hesitation of selective memory (sitting, getting up, sitting again) and the sudden punctum when Kestelman claps her hands and the flood of memories comes to an abrupt end. “Here it almost ended…” she begins, a sculptural figure eloquently recalling a decisive moment in her life as the three dancers draw their arms slowly across their chests like the stretching of a bow. But the memories continue to play, small accelerating gestures of look and touch and rebuff that Essakow painstakingly builds into an intense physical argument. Kestelman watches raptly until the triangle resolves with the departure of Przytarski. Kela snaps at Serrats in a combative duet that finishes with the lovers lying together on the floor but Kestelman recalls the return of Przytarski and we see the tantalizing pull and push of her heart.

The two boys duel in solos and duets that Kestelman sees in reflection on the wall: reflections on reflections. “I know the scene can never be the same.” Her voice adds a further emotional element to the performance. Dancers are not used to flexing their vocal chords in the same way as the rest of their muscles and Kestelman’s voice has all the power of an athletic body. She also adapted or transposed her own poetry for IGNIS so there is a unity between mind and body whenever her voice emerges.

It is now the turn of the youthful trio to manipulate Kestelman as if she is no longer in control of her past: selective memory, or history re-writing itself. A touch sends a shiver through her; she tells Kela she failed to see the anguish to come. “Now I see him everywhere.” Serrats joins Przytarski in dancing with Kela; she moves from one to the other. Kestelman remains on the sidelines as they switch and battle, watching Kela in particular, but despite the passionate uncertainty of the time — or perhaps because of it — she has no regrets: “Charred and changed”, she affirms, “Burnt out embers flicker into life, a lick of flame, leaping from the ashes, sudden burst of fire, white hot, brilliant, bright, beautiful, alive. I am alive.”

She sits, then lies like Kela at the beginning, dancing with her arms, rolling gently one way then another, and arches her back to sit up. Przytarski lights a fire in a grill along the back of the stage, transforming the stage into line of flame. Bathed in the light, Kestelman conjures up the three youths who dance in response to the heat: her passion in all its complexity. The two boys help her to her feet but Kela remains on the ground looking up at her. There is a transferal of understanding from the one to the other as the fire burns low. Kestelman’s eyes brim with the clarity of memory but the eyes of the others are as if blinded for they cannot see into the future. Kela circles and leaves Kestelman forming a heart with her hands, potent symbol of her journey. As she stands reflected in the wall, the ghostlike trio appears briefly behind it and vanishes.