Shobana Jeyasingh, Material Men

Shobana Jeyasingh, Material Men, Queen Elizabeth Hall, September 16

Sooraj Subramanian and Shailesh Bahoran in Shobana Jeyasingh’s Material Men (photo: Chris Nash)

I saw Shobana Jeyasingh’s double bill of Material Men and Strange Blooms with a friend who has contributed the following review. I had seen Strange Blooms before and although it is a different cast with some changes to the production I have not written about it again. 

In a time when borders are closed and fences built, Shobana Jeyasingh’s Material Men feels both poignant and topical. In the note to the performance, Jeyasingh reminds us that the abolition of slavery in 1833 caused a wave of migration from the Indian subcontinent as European colonies sought cheap labour. Inspired by such a long history of migrant displacement, Material Men is a reflection on the ways in which cultural memories transmigrate across places and generations and how individuals mediate, absorb, long for or reject them; how memories — whether integrated or suppressed — contribute to forge individual identities. How the past, which is both historical and mnemonic, roots and haunts us at the same time. Choreographed for two male dancers on an original score by Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin (played on stage by the Smith Quartet) with sound design by Leafcutter John, the piece opens with Sooraj Subramaniam and Shailesh Bahoran slowly entering the stage wrapped together in an orange silk sari. The account of their own family stories of migration can be heard in the background. The sari that ties the dancers together is like the fabric of histories and memories that weave shared pasts across times and places. It is the fabric that binds cultural, social and individual identities, the material with which each of us has to deal. It is ‘the continuous thread’ — as Marcel Proust writes — ‘through which selfhood is sewn into the fabric of a lifetime’s experience’.

As they unwrap themselves from the sari and release it, Subramaniam and Bahoran display their different bodies and responses to the fabric of the past that links them. Tall and elegant, Subramaniam is trained in the classical bharatanatyam tradition. He is bare foot, and wears traditional make-up and jewelry. Shorter and slighter, wearing shoes and knee pads, Bahoran exudes tense physicality: he is a hip-hop dancer. These differences are indicative of the distinct styles of dance and modes of performing that Material Men bring together. Bharatanatyam is a highly formal dance that has been transmitted and refined across the centuries; hip-hop comes from street performance and a subversive mixing of influences from rock to Afro-American dance. Jeyasingh’s choreography seamlessly weaves these two types of dance into a complex tapestry of patterns that seems to follow an intersecting of symmetries and asymmetries as she elaborates the quintessentially distilled and minutely precise movements of bharatanatyam with the hybrid dynamics of hip-hop. Hence, hands and feet positions are mirrored and at the same time fractured, extended and taken in new directions as one dancer responds to the other in a physical dialogue that constantly draws upon a canopy of contrasting movements from which transpire no less conflicting feelings and emotions. Joy, tenderness, antagonism and suppressed rage intersect as limbs and gestural patterns crisscross. Subramaniam and Bahoran may be said to encounter in each other the stranger that according to Julia Kristeva we all carry within us and which forms us from histories of psychic, cultural and historical migration. The dancers variously accommodate and contend with each other, and with the ‘stranger’ that each of them reflects back to the other.

From this encounter, visual and figurative forms emerge and disappear and in-between, in the interstices between sequences, moments of stillness are perceptible, as if they were ‘formless’ spaces, gaps saturated with possibilities and contradictions. It is in such dynamic flow of movement and stillness, of tension between form and formlessness that the transcultural features of the piece become palpable. Like the pleats with which Subramaniam carefully folds the sari, the layers are many and complex. Labels such as classical and pop, traditional and contemporary are reductive for what is a reconfiguration of the significance of dance movement as a medium that conveys the deeply embodied affect of cultural trajectories, backgrounds and individual histories. The work and the quest within it, however, are never nostalgic. The cultural allusions proper to bharatanatyam and hip-hop are conducive to the present, to the highly individualized interpretation that the dancers and choreographer confer on them by generating new synergies, overlapping rhythms and gestures. The piece concludes in a slow sequence in which Subramaniam and Bahoran move sideways off stage, one next to other, the arms parallel to the floor, half squatting. The movement feels endless as if melting into infinity, as if harmony and balance between pasts and presents, histories and memories were possible. As if continuity and reciprocity were not estranged by inner or outer boundaries.

Jeyasingh’s Material Men is a thought-provoking work. And Subramaniam and Bahoran are both superb performers.

c.a.

Vuong 10

Vuong 10, JW3, January 14

Kenny Wing Tao Ho and Maren Fidje Bjørneseth in Vuong 10 (photo ©Carole Edrich – ceimages.co.uk)

Vuong 10 is the creation of a core of choreographers and dancers who came together at King’s Place in 2013 on the occasion of the first evening of Randomworks curated by Wayne McGregor: Catarina Carvalho, Michael John Harper (both dancers with Wayne McGregor|Random Dance) and Nina Kov. They presented a short piece to music composed by Leafcutter John and violist Max Baillie called Vuong 10 and what we see this evening at JV3 is a development of that auspicious beginning with dancers Kenny Wing Tao Ho and Maren Fidje Bjørneseth. Of course in hindsight one could say that from this particular group something fascinating would surely evolve, but the process was probably not so clear (neither, if we discount the role of God, was the creation of the world). Seeing Vuong 10 on only its second outing (it premiered at Rich Mix in December) it is now evident that something rather remarkable did emerge from this collaboration, a kind of spark-made-flesh that thrills the imagination and challenges the ephemeral nature of dance. Given the primeval — rather than the proposed futuristic — content I feel the costumes by Bella Gonshorovitz are a little fussy; costumes that aim for a naked look can sometimes distract more than nakedness itself. The stage also appears too clean and the lighting by Karl Oskar Sørdall is constrained by this neutral staging, but there is no doubt about the movement language as interpreted by Bjørneseth and Wing Tao Ho: it has a visceral sense of entanglement and intrusion that is enthralling.

Vuong 10 is an intimate work both in subject matter — an exploration of the sense of touch at a time when it has been lost — and in its details: malleable facial gestures and frail, tendril-like fingernails like Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter. If you’re not up close you miss it. It is a work that is nevertheless complex in form, the overall arch of experience torn into fragments of intense physical exploration that may be movement or sound or both. As the publicity states, Vuong 10 is a contemporary music concert as well as a contemporary dance piece.

It is also a disquieting work, perhaps intentionally. From the very first image of the two dancers facing each other across the stage in silent, animated communication, we are not clear what relation they have. They could be Adam and Eve arguing or the last two beings left alive coming across one another by chance, trying to grapple with the unaccustomed act of meeting. Their physical vocabulary evolves in part from this contorted attempt at speech and in part from the windswept landscape of the score that acts as the exegetic soundtrack of their minds. Not knowing exactly how the task of creation was shared between the three choreographers, it is remarkable they found a coherent physical language to embody the score. Their courage to explore the musical language and the uncompromising presentation of their findings combine to make Vuong 10 an intoxicating, at times erotic experience, not least because Bjørneseth and Wing Tao Ho remove their own boundaries and inhibitions to express the rawness of the choreography. Wing Tao Ho’s solo, in particular, is the spark that lights the entire production. The conflagration from that spark would be, to put it mildly, mind-blowing. It doesn’t quite happen here, but Vuong 10 is pointing in a very exciting direction.