Show Me Your Inter/Nationalisms – Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 2
Consider this a companion work to my response in Part 1 to some of the work from the Made in Scotland showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Part 2 looks at dance works from other inter/nationalist showcases, language choices, the cost of a press release and the idea of a cultural border force that helps establish a two-tier system where artists are financially supported to bring their work to Edinburgh in return for representing their flag. The Fringe describes these showcases as: “2024 National Showcases. There are a number of showcases from across the world that support exciting work from their regions at the Fringe. Some of them offer a curated selection, others offer official support to work already coming to the Fringe.”
PACK by Miller de Nobili (photo: Casten Beier)
In 1995 Michael Billig introduced the concept of Banal Nationalism which demonstrates how nationalism is constantly flagged in the media and habits of language. He examines how symbols such as flags, national songs, sporting events, divisions into ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ news become so effective — and almost subliminal — in their everyday representations of a nation.
Introducing House of Oz, which is, in their own words, “an award-winning philanthropic powerhouse with a mission to platform Australian creative arts for international cultural export. With a track record of producing 600+ performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and supporting Australian artists on international tours, House of Oz showcases the diversity and excellence of Australian arts talent on the global stage. House of Oz is returning to the Fringe for a third year, in a fresh partnership with Assembly Festival. A curated showcase of twelve shows will be presented as part of a diverse programme spanning genre and generations. Venues are carefully aligned with the shows’ unique requirements. Artists receive funding to enable travel and accommodation, plus marketing, strategic and hands-on support from the House of Oz artist liaison and technical team.”
In the embargoed press release from Assembly @ Dance Base sent out in June 2024, Triptych by Lewis Major was the first show mentioned under the Programme Highlights section: “Presented by House of Oz, rising star of Australian dance, choreographer-director Lewis Major, is set to bring two UK premieres to this year’s Fringe. In a unique collaboration between Lewis, his company, and his mentor “Britain’s leading modern dance creator” (The Daily Express), the legendary Russell Maliphant OBE, Triptych is a captivating evening of dance, of connection between internal and external worlds — of non-duality — all set within a whirling maelstrom of movement, sound and light.”
Add this to the separate press release from the team at Martha Oakes PR who were working on both Triptych and Major’s other work Lien: “Based between the deep south of Australia and Adelaide, Lewis Major is a dance artist with a background in sheep shearing and a foreground in contemporary dance theatre. He grew up on his family’s 11,000-acre farm (more than half the size of Brighton), attended bush school and didn’t set foot in a theatre until his teens. He took up gymnastics but when he saw Garry Stewart’s work for Australian Dance Theatre was driven to move into dance. In his early 20s, while studying ballet at New Zealand School of Dance, he broke his back and discovered a congenital condition which took him away from performance and into choreography. Lewis has worked with some of the biggest names in international contemporary dance including Akram Khan, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Russell Maliphant, Hofesh Shechter and Aakash Odedra. His company, Lewis Major Projects was in residence at the Centre National de la danse in Lyon until 2017 when he decided to move back to his home state of South Australia, feeling it was the right place to pursue his creation of unabashedly audience-driven work with a local focus and a global outlook.”
By commissioning an 8-minute amuse-bouche (the first work of the triple bill) — Two x Three — from his mentor Maliphant, complete with the classic square-within-a-square lighting design from Michael Hulls, this attempt to frame and associate Major in some sort of male, choreographic lineage, master/student relationship is one that worked very successfully for Aakash Odedra back in 2011 (where I programmed his quadruple bill, Rising, at Pavilion Dance in Bournemouth). Odedra commissioned works from Maliphant/Hulls, Akram Khan, and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui as well as creating a work of his own, bringing his name into alignment with these choreographers in subsequent discussions of their work. Who was the rehearsal director for three out of those four works? Lewis Major.
Lewis Major’s Unfolding, part of Tryptich (photo: Chris Herzfeld)
In Two x Three, however, Maliphant’s bleakly austere, classic 90s-esque choreography drawing invisible lines with pointy toes and cutting the air through a box of light is the kind of empty neo-classical technique that is anything but the palate cleanser I was looking for, but at least it offered a clarity and precision the dancers could execute. The next two works (Unfolding and Epilogue — Act 1 and Act 2), choreographed by Major, were terrible, both choreographically and in the way they were danced. What Lewis offered in his works was a Maliphant pastiche, a Poundland version of slowed-down limb extensions and faux-emo faces that was danced messily (some dancers were audibly out of breath) and had a jumble of projection, lighting effects and talcum powder in an attempt to mask what was going on. High production values and semi-dark stages can hide a lot of things, but it cannot mask distinctly average choreography and uneven technique from the dancers. By the end of the triple bill, I was almost pining for a little bit of Maliphant and that’s not a sentiment I admit to very often. I happened to be sitting next to a presenter from Australia and asked them why Major was being billed as a “choreographer to watch” and “the next big rising star from Australia”. What’s the perception in Australia? They said he hasn’t had a presentation or commission from any of the leading/national festivals in Australia.
Major was interviewed on ABC TV in Australia back in June and said: “We met our arts fairy godmother, an amazing patron and philanthropist Georgie Black who runs House of Oz, a Sydney and London based philanthropic organisation who for the last three years have been underwriting a lot of Australian acts to go to Edinburgh, paying travel, accommodation, technical, PR, venue management and all the registration. So really de-risking the process of performing at the Edinburgh Fringe. I think it will be life changing. To have all of this support, to know there’s no risk for us, hopefully this will be the kick that we need.”
The international narratives you tell back home can really enhance/skew/distort (delete as appropriate) reality. The “perceived” success of a sold-out run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe (when the venue has a small capacity) and splashy 5-star reviews from The Stage, The Scotsman and Broadway Baby definitely tell one story. I’m sure that both Black and Major will be happy with how his work has been catapulted over to Edinburgh and received at the world’s biggest arts festival. But perhaps success was already baked into the system.
There’s a quote from George Orwell on the Orwell Foundation website looking at the difference between nationalism and patriotism: “By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism…by ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Good afternoon to the Luxembourg Selection: “It is with great enthusiasm that we announce the first Luxembourg showcase at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024. The Luxembourg performing arts scene is rich in languages, influences and aesthetics, and has long been open to the international scene and prompt to meet new audiences. In the past years already some shows from Luxembourg were successfully presented at the Fringe. Then it came as a foregone conclusion that Edinburgh, hosting the world’s largest performing arts festival, was a stage for one of the smallest countries in the world, Luxembourg. Supported by Kultur | lx – Arts Council Luxembourg, and hosted by Summerhall, C Venues, Dance Base and Assembly, this first Luxembourg Selection at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe will put the dance and physical theatre scene in the spotlight. The three aesthetically various productions made by three diverse choreographers will properly showcase a range of the multiplicity of Luxembourg’s cultures and creations.”
Negare by Z Art — at the most difficult to find and unsignposted venue (C Aquila) — uses the majority of the same copy in the opening paragraph of their press release and fringe website description: “This choreographic solo immerses us in the quirky and poetic universe of a character who plays with his identity, transforming it to align with his wishes, fears, and dreams. Through the journey into the various aspects of identity transformation, Negare challenges the audience’s preconceptions, provokes thought about the impact of others’ perceptions, and delves deeply into the dynamics of denial and self-acceptance. It’s a thought-provoking work that encourages contemplation about the essence of individual and shared identity, showcased through the absurdity and authenticity of this character.”
Negare is a 30-minute interlude designed to make you double blink, furrow your brow and question the reality of what it is you’ve just seen. Broken up into three separate 10-minute, slightly absurdist character portraits, we’re presented with a manic office worker fraying at the edges stuffing reams of material into his shirt, a generous and coquettish carrot-munching critter squatting and burrowing all over the stage and finally some sort of faux religious icon draped in gold hovering slowly in an eternal consciousness.
Alexandre Lipaux in Z-Art’s Negare (photo: Marco Pavone)
Alexandre Lipaux is a silky shapeshifter and embodies the physical changes between the characters well, but I’m left wondering, yet again, what he has achieved. Negare is “part of acclaimed three-part series Le Triptyque” and I wonder if the other two parts might offer some contextual scaffold as to how this character emerges/resolves, because just encountering Negare in the middle of the Fringe feels difficult to place. If you think of Negare as an off-kilter video game character with whom you spend a little bit of time, maybe munch one of his carrots and tune out of the ferocity of the Fringe for a while then it might make a little more sense.
If these first two choreographic patriots are anything to go by, the future of Australian choreography is locked in a British 90s homage death spiral whilst Luxembourg makes quirky 1-act character portraits. Of course, both countries like to export and fund white male choreography, but this is one of the limits of showcases: you only get a slither of representation and no real idea of what else is going on in that country. There’s no nuance of national identity or interrogation of choreographic practice, and I question what it really means when a work is branded “from X country.” Is that optics? A representation of politics? Social status? Are these works choreographically identifiable as Australian or Luxembourgian?
How about some Performing Arts Made In Germany? “Performing Arts Made In Germany is Edinburgh Fringe Festival’s first-ever German Showcase, established in 2024. With a programme selected by an international jury, the showcase offers an overview on the German performing arts scene, with four shows featuring some of the best contemporary dance, circus, and theatre Germany has to offer. The four selected companies will present their shows in four of the main festival venues between 13th – 25th August 2024. Performing Arts Made In Germany supports the artists before, during and after the festival and aims to offer them a platform to present their work within the vibrant, international environment of Fringe. The showcase is managed and supported by Kreativ Transfer who are supported by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media to support stakeholders in the fields of the performing arts, visual arts and games in establishing and expanding their international networks to improve their visibility on the international market.”
PACK by Miller de Nobili at Assembly @ Dance Base was described in the aforementioned embargoed press release as: “In its Fringe debut, Miller de Nobili bring PACK to Dance Base. This energetic performance features five dancers performing hip-hop, breaking, contemporary and everything that fits in between. Presented as part of the Made in Germany Showcase, this dynamic show plays with group dynamics, exploring what rules and roles make up togetherness.” The public facing text at the Fringe box office adds a little more colour: “Five dancers, five guys, 40° in the studio. Hip-hop, breaking, contemporary and everything that fits in between. Colliding and rebounding. Hardening up and loosening up. Being alone or being part of it. One group, one PACK. We see a group testing the limits of their bodies. We hear their weight crashing on the dance floor and feel the breeze. Sometimes weightlessly whirling overhead, sometimes knotted up inside themselves. What connects them? What rules and roles make up their togetherness? How does a common place emerge?”
What is this language? “This energetic performance features five dancers performing hip-hop, breaking, contemporary and everything that fits in between.” Everything that fits in between? Fits in between what? Breaking and hip-hop? Breaking and contemporary? I find it frustrating when people who have little breaking or hip-hop knowledge describe something in lowest common denominator terms. It happens ALL THE TIME with hip-hop and it devalues and undermines the culture, demonstrates a lack of understanding of whoever wrote the copy and gives little credibility to the company it refers to.
PACK is a well danced, choreographically thin, overly long representation of some of the shallow, stereotypical concepts associated with b-boys, crews and masculinity. There’s a strong 15 minutes of material in there but it has been overworked with a dramaturgical aimlessness, Chat-GPT-generated phrases (I’m paraphrasing here but…If you want to join our pack, a turtle isn’t an animal) and a false emotional display from the dancers showing #anger #vulnerability and #angst.
Whilst the company, which started in 2020, has a good set of technically accomplished dancers who are able to sustain power moves and contact equally for the full 60 minutes, I think the stagecraft and nous shown by artistic directors and choreographers Chiara de’ Nobili and Alexander Miller actively reinforce negative misconceptions of what a breaking crew is or can be in 2024. They’re operating in a very narrow emotional range and have created an anonymous, edgeless b-boy boyband.
In the individual show press release put together by the PR specialist Sharon McHendry, the artistic directors and choreographers said: “PACK deals with the topic of group dynamics. The creation aims to break the stereotypes belonging to the breaking and hip hop environments through emotional depth, while enhancing the virtuous, pure movement repertoire belonging to both genres. We are taking the show to Edinburgh to expand the horizons and perceptions of hip hop culture in the theatre context.”
As this is their Fringe debut, I wonder how they can speak from a position of knowledge of what has been presented previously in a hip-hop theatre context. Whilst it is rare to see a good work that keeps hip-hop culture at its heart at the Fringe, the UK is blessed with dozens of artists and companies who are dealing in conceptually more interesting territories and changing the perception when it comes to the representation of hip-hop and masculinity.
Kreativ Transfer organised a scoping visit to the fringe in 2023 and a networking event at the Assembly Club Bar for the selected companies to offer an orientation and some contextual understanding of the fringe. “They received 120 applications and the advisory board consisted of representatives of the organisers Assembly, Dance Base, Summerhall and Underbelly as well as Nadja Dias (producer and consultant) and Wolfgang Hoffmann (Aurora Nova). After this initial screening, 54 applications were submitted to the Kreativ-Transfer jury. The final decision of the jury and the organisers was based not only on the artistic quality of each entry and its potential for successful participation in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe but also on the technical feasibility at the respective venues.” On top of this Performing Arts Made In Germany employed a UK producer for each show on top of staff from Kreative Transfer and the company’s own internal staff to ensure a full staff complement to support each of the four works at the fringe.
Whilst I didn’t see Sawdust Symphony (another show in the Performing Arts Made In Germany showcase) in Edinburgh, I saw it earlier in the year when it came to Bristol and spoke to the company afterwards as the precision and execution of this experimental woodworking circus show was exceptional. “How many weeks did it take to make and rehearse this show?” I asked. “44 weeks.” In a work that has already been performed over 100 times across nine countries, this translated to multiple 4-star and 5-star reviews for their near sell-out, two-week run in the large space at ZOO Southside. So if you do the maths, 12 shows x £15 (average ticket price) x 200 capacity = £36,000. Take 10-15% off for industry comps and not quite sold-out early sales and you’ll be getting close to £30,000 in box office receipts. Sometimes there is money to be made and Germany resourced their productions well.
In 1990, Michael Porter wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review called The Competitive Advantage of Nations: “National prosperity is created, not inherited. It does not grow out of a country’s natural endowments, its labour pool, its interest rates, or its currency’s value, as classical economics insists. A nation’s competitiveness depends on the capacity of its industry to innovate and upgrade. Companies gain advantage against the world’s best competitors because of pressure and challenge. They benefit from having strong domestic rivals, aggressive home-based suppliers, and demanding local customers. In a world of increasingly global competition, nations have become more, not less, important. As the basis of competition has shifted more and more to the creation and assimilation of knowledge, the role of the nation has grown. Differences in national values, culture, economic structures, institutions, and histories all contribute to competitive success.
There are striking differences in the patterns of competitiveness in every country; no nation can or will be competitive in every or even most industries. Around the world, companies that have achieved international leadership employ strategies that differ from each other in every respect. But while every successful company will employ its own particular strategy, the underlying mode of operation is fundamentally the same. Companies achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation. They perceive a new basis for competing or find better means for competing in old ways. Much innovation is mundane and incremental, depending more on a cumulation of small insights and advances than on a single, major technological breakthrough. It always involves investments in skill and knowledge, as well as in physical assets and brand reputations.”
Time for the Korean Season: “Since 1999, AtoBiz and GCC (Global Cultural exchange Committee) have promoted Korean culture and arts worldwide. In collaboration with the esteemed Assembly Festival, we proudly established the Korean Season in 2015. This event meticulously selects and presents the best of Korean performances at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival. We are deeply honoured to invite you to a curated showcase of traditional and contemporary Korean performance, art, and literature, captivating an international audience in Edinburgh. We hope to keep surprising and delighting you as we strive to keep the Korean Season as fresh and unpredictable as in previous years.”
Sleeper by Jajack Movement at Assembly @ Dance Base was under the RESPONDING TO THE CLIMATE CRISIS header in the embargoed press release: “When the language of rational-centred social science and the words we use reach their limit, we turn to art for how it deals with the climate crisis. Your body is living through the climate crisis. The act of surviving is met with the appearance of destruction — this critical point is faced with duality, crisis and the reality of death. We face this challenge by tying and untying knots, a traditional act of Korean community spirit and praying for the restoration of life. Programmed by Dance Base in collaboration with Assembly.”
Led by the choreographer Kim Yu-mi, Sleeper was OK. A perfectly reasonable 40-minute contemporary dance work with four technically proficient performers which was “inspired by Paulo Coelho’s book The Fifth Mountain.” Whilst a dancer trapped in a cling film wardrobe struggling against the entire climate crisis was thrashing about for the first half of the show, he was eventually set free by the other dancers and calmed down a little. Supported by the PR specialist Wendy Niblock, an additional press release mentions “…the process began with many challenges including the absence of dancers and other constraints, the choreographer felt that she was starting alone in a vast, empty field. In Coelho’s book, the question arises: Why do you cling to such a short and pain-filled existence? What is the meaning of your struggle?”
The meaning of my struggle with Sleeper was their facsimile of emotions rather than enabling us as an audience to conjure up our own emotions. But rather than making us feel something of the rage-inducing hopelessness of our impending climate disaster, we were offered a manicured garden of emotion. We know that the world is literally being wiped out by fossil-fuel companies, billionaires and other self-serving industries, but the wincing faces and the furious arm work were quickly turned on and off and the bodies of the dancers left me thinking they didn’t really believe their own concept; it was stuck on rather than embedded into their bodies. I’m currently reading It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action To Transform The World by Mikaela Loach and the way it’s written has a much greater ability to mobilise and stimulate action than this work of contemporary dance from Korea, whose members will have flown over 11,000 miles for their return journey to Scotland to talk about the climate crisis.
In an end of festival press release from Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society, Shona McCarthy — who was appointed Chief Executive in 2016 and announced last month that she will be leaving her post in Spring 2025 — says: “As the most influential arts marketplace in the world, this year over 1,800 arts industry members accredited with the Fringe Society came to Edinburgh to seek new work for onward touring and broadcast opportunities. Over 2.6 million tickets were issued, 3,746 shows were registered and 60 countries were represented, including 13 country showcases. Almost 900 media professionals from 27 countries were accredited, the number of reviewers was up 6% on 2023 and 510 artists also attended the annual Meet the Media event, designed to support performers without professional PR support.”
Whilst Golem by Compagnie ABIS and Julien Carlier from the French-speaking part of Belgium wasn’t part of a “Belgium at the Fringe Showcase”, the company were financially supported by Wallonie-Bruxelles Théâtre Danse agency and Wallonie-Bruxelles International to present the work at Assembly @ Dance Base (after originally being programmed back in the COVID-disrupted season of 2020). Framed under the “Artists Of All Ages” section of the Dance Base press release, it offered this: “Weaving stories with dance and physical objects, Compagnie ABIS and Julien Carlier present Golem, an artistic dialogue between dancer and choreographer Julien Carlier and 75-year-old sculptor Mike Sprogis. This melting of two disciplines is an organic, sensitive and beautiful piece that speaks to us about the passage of time, our repeated gestures and their impact on body and mind.”
Of all the works under those inter/nationalist banners, Golem was the most interesting; it was formally experimental, proffered an original take on the ageing body, delivered some delicious imagery and it was almost an astonishing work. Almost, because whilst Carlier may have once been an active bboy, he hasn’t performed in one of his own works since 2021 and the breaking skills, freezes and floor work on display here — which attempts some sort of call and response to what Sprogis is doing — are rusty. Sprogis as the clay OG is so watchable; seeing how he lugs and pummels this 30kg of material around the stage and the effect it has on his body as he builds his golems, digging into the clay, gouging out the eyes, slowly crushing its face to death and transforming it in real time is a delight.
Add to this the live electronic hip-hop drum track and synth samples from the percussionist Tom Malmendier and it’s clear that Carlier needs to step out of the work for it to shine. As the work progresses in the second half we see Sprogis treat Carlier’s body as living clay, moving limbs, animating, stretching and rolling it before they engage in some simple release, contact and lift work. The precision, degradation and disintegration of the body, how strength leaves and skills plateau are all in there from Sprogis, but if there was a bgirl or bboy in their mid 40s who had the power, skills and gravitas to match Malmendier and Sprogis then the work would be exceptional.
There was an article in The Guardian from 2023 which shared the real costs of what it took to bring three British companies (£12,000, £7,750 and £22,000) to the fringe and in two of those shows the costs of a PR representative was £3,900 and £4,000. Some of the financial support received for some of the works mentioned above include:
1) a €20,000 grant and having to find an additional €5,000 as their total fringe cost was €25,000 2) having all travel, accommodation, fringe registration, venue hire, technical and fees paid for the entire team 3) the full cost of bringing their show, but sharing some localised costs with others in their inter/nationalist showcase
So, who really makes the decisions about what we see at the Fringe? Are the likes of Georgie Black from the House of Oz, Wolfgang Hoffman and others who run/select the inter/nationalist showcases and deem certain artists worthy flag bearers in Edinburgh the real Cultural Border Force? Banal nationalism will only continue to grow at the Fringe and I’m reminded of The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first international exhibition of manufactured products. Having grown out of a series of modest, industrial design exhibitions staged in London by the Royal Society of Arts, leading figures — including the RSA president, Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, and the design reformer, Henry Cole — hoped to stage something much more ambitious. After attending the Paris Expo of 1849, like the unbridled colonialists they were, they wanted an even larger event, international in scope, as a place where Britain’s engineering and manufactured goods could be compared with those of its international competitors. The cash profits (£186,000 in 1851 or around £31,000,000 today) from the exhibition were spent on establishing a new cultural quarter in South Kensington, London, which featured the Victoria and Albert Museum, Science Museum, Imperial College, the Royal Albert Hall and other cultural institutions.
Can you imagine if the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society were to invest some of the money it t(m)akes from its rage-inducing booking fee of “£1.25 per ticket up to a maximum of £5 per transaction” after the rebate is given back to venues and invests it into the performing arts infrastructure in Scotland and not just use it as another income stream? 2.6 million tickets x £1.25 = £3,250,000 and that’s before the commission of 4% + VAT they take on every ticket sold as well. Who would have thought that the Edinburgh Festival Fringe would become the living embodiment of what Orwell forecast many decades ago: “The abiding purpose of every nationalist [showcase] is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”
Co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, the UK’s arts program celebrating the First World War centenary, XENOS is billed as a commemoration of an Indian soldier in the trenches representing the more than a million mobilized from what was then a colony of the British Empire. But it is also billed as the final full-length solo Akram Khan will choreograph on himself. So what, or who, is XENOS actually commemorating? Sarah Crompton titles her program article, ‘A new myth’ in which she discusses with Khan the making of XENOS, its creative components and the summation of his career. She concludes that the new myth is ‘to help everyone remember.’ Remember what? Both Khan’s role and the production itself are equivocal in their response.
Even though Khan was born in a south London borough to Bangladeshi parents, his dancing roots are in his classical kathak training, which makes his portrayal of ‘X’ — who dramaturg Ruth Little describes as ‘no man and everyman, the unknown and the eternal soldier, alone in a foreign land…’ — unquestionably poignant. The opening of XENOS(meaning ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’) is a masterful depiction of ‘X’ at the convergence of dance and conflict. As we arrive in the auditorium of Sadler’s Wells, vocalist Aditya Prakash and percussionist BC Manjunath are seated on stage performing a classical concert unperturbed by our lack of attention. Mirella Weingarten’s set is a study in absence: empty, dusty chairs, an abandoned swing and a low table covered in a fine layer of earth below a string of bare light bulbs and an array of ropes leading up an incline towards the back. It is a deserted interior scene that anticipates the passing of the present into a bleak future. It is only with an amplified electrical short circuit and a temporary blackout that the audience becomes attentive and subsides into silence; the concert continues and Khan enters as if discharged violently from a traumatic past. The music serves to revive him and he begins a haltingly remembered kathak dance; at times Manjunath has to prompt him with the chanted rhythms and the three men build up a haunting image of life interrupted and changed forever. Khan is in a sense playing himself, remembering past glories from a conflicted present, his mature body reliving what it could once do so effortlessly. More electrical short circuits and an extended black out lead us to a plangent space and time where the snake-like ropes draw Khan and all the furniture inexorably up the slope as if by an outside force — the original tug of war — and over the top.
The parapet remains throughout XENOSas the locus of the trenches and of Khan’s place in this desolate world; he connects a rope like a field cable to what appears to be a gramophone to hear a crackly recording of the names of fallen Indian soldiers, one of whom died laying cables in the mud. The horn of the gramophone later becomes a searchlight, but with these surreal allusions the connection to the First World War begins to veer off into the discursive themes of myth and evolution. Khan invokes Prometheus, the Greek Titan who is credited with the creation of man from clay and who stole fire from Zeus to facilitate the development of civilization — and its unintended consequence, war. Khan’s depiction of evolution seems to cover the period from Mowgli to the Mahabharata, subtly shifting the focus of XENOSfrom the representation of colonial ‘X’ into the current myth of Khan himself. It’s as if ‘X’ has offloaded his ‘otherness’ and has returned home, which is now in Wimbledon.
In the Crompton interview, Khan acknowledges an Indian academic who had thought remembrance was ‘a white thing’. This notion had spurred Khan to delve into the archives of Indian involvement in the First World War, which in turn imbued his empathetic memorialization of ‘X’ at the beginning of XENOS. However, any further attempt at excavating the memory of these forgotten soldiers from oblivion is lost in the meandering rhetoric and the ‘whiteness’ of this lavish monument of a production.
By the time lighting designer Michael Hulls, composer Vincenzo Lamagna and sound engineer Julien Deloison introduce that glorious go-to expression of sorrowful beauty, Mozart’s Lacrimosa from his Requiem mass, blasted from a Schechtian gallery of musicians suspended in light above the stage, the commemoration has turned fully on Kahn: the end of the war has become conflated with the end of his solo career.
Russell Maliphant Company, maliphantworks2, Coronet Print Room, March 13
Russell Maliphant and Dana Fouras in Duet (photo: Tom Bowles)
Russell Maliphant’s week at the Coronet Print Room in Notting Hill is a very intimate affair, to which the chic délabré intimacy of the former Coronet theatre is ideally suited. It is one of those theatres whose atmosphere critic Cyril Beaumont described as having a ‘warmth and friendliness that gives the spectator the feeling of being a member of a pleasant club’ and there is a sense of the membership of this particular club coming to pay homage to one of their own. It is not exactly a full evening — the first intermission is longer than the first two works — and it’s a performance of re-immersion into a body of work that has a very recognizable form of craftsmanship in which the influence of sculpture is evident in the plasticity of the dance movement. There is no indication in the program when these works were created, but it doesn’t really matter; however new Maliphant’s works may be there is always an element of the retrospective in their presentation. His synonymous association with the lighting designer Michael Hulls serves to reinforce this familiarity; it is a given that all four stage works are choreographed and directed by Maliphant and all lighting designs are by Hulls.
Maliphant creates material forms with the body that Hulls transforms in light. Their opus is at its best an exquisite aesthetic experience — as those who saw their collaboration on Afterlight with Daniel Proietto as Nijinsky might attest — but too often lacks the inspiration to rise above precious familiarity. Of the four works on the program this evening, the visual and emotional gauge is more aligned with familiarity than with the exquisite. In the duet with Dana Fouras and Grace Jabbari, Two Times Two, the sculptural forms are reminiscent of Maliphant’s Rodin Project: classical marble figures moving in a kinetic dream. Andy Cowton’s score and Hulls’ lighting subject the forms to a process of dematerialization until the final slicing arm gestures diminish to beautiful swathes of light. Critical Mass performed by Maliphant and Mbi is a meditation on balance and posture as they are redefined by tension and suspension. There is dexterity of movement as the centres of the dancers’ and that of the composition shift and hold still, building a critical mass through repetition. Hulls’ lighting here is subtle, but in Dickson Mbi’s solo section of his duet with Jabbari, Still, he is trapped in Jan Urbanowski’s animation that with Hulls’ lighting covers him in a moving barcode on a gloomy ground. When Mbi dances it is worth watching; to superimpose a light project that all but obscures his movement and reduces it to a mere plastic aesthetic is to take advantage of the choreography, and to do it in a way that is unsettling on the eyes is tiresomely self-indulgent.
The final work, Duet, is a world premiere in which Maliphant dances with his wife and collaborator, Fouras; it is the first time in fifteen years that London audiences have the opportunity to see them dance together and it is a moment worth celebrating. There is a genuine sentimentality here that is in the vein of a recording of Caruso singing Una Furtiva Lagrima that emerges from Fouras’s sound score. Interestingly, Hulls keeps a respectful distance in lighting Duet which allows a very personal narrative of two lovers to emanate from the choreography. It is a polished performance of natural elegance and carries an emotional implication that is not lost on the audience.
What to make of the fifth work on the program, Other? It is a ten-minute video installation that is played on a loop in the theatre’s smaller studio that shows Maliphant and Fouras, on their respective sides of a split screen, embroiled in the turbulent surf off the Atlantic coast of West Cork, gesturing wildly and powerlessly in their evening dress against its incoming force. It is not clear if the installation was made specifically for this week’s program or was edited from original material to bolster the length of the evening. It is ‘made from footage originally conceived, directed and shot by Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning’, with a sound score by Fouras. Other could well illustrate the condition of the artist flailing against the forces of contemporary society in which impotence becomes the subject of a work of art, except that without a context the very artfulness of its solipsistic concept turns the work in on itself and robs it of any wider significance.
Natalia Osipova, Three commissions, Sadler’s Wells, October 1
Natalia Osipova and Sergei Polunin in Arthur Pita’s Run Mary Run (photo: Tristram Kenton)
Natalia Osipova is a dancer I could happily watch in any performance. Brought up in the Russian classical tradition, a supreme technician and dramatic presence, she is at home in the classical repertoire but itching to broaden her scope as an artist. Without retracting that opening statement, this evening of contemporary work for Osipova at Sadler’s Wells falls somewhere short of my anticipation. The issue is who commissioned this triple bill — first seen here in June — and why. Sadler’s Wells’ chief executive and artistic director, Alistair Spalding, suggests in the program’s welcome note that Sadler’s Wells commissioned the works, which happen to include two by Sadler’s Wells associate artists: Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Russell Maliphant. In Sarah Crompton’s overview of the evening in the same program she makes it appear that Osipova commissioned the works. But if she did, why so early in her drive to broaden her horizons would she commission new works from choreographers she has already worked with (Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Arthur Pita) so recently? And is Russell Maliphant’s choreographic process likely to expand Osipova’s artistic range? I don’t think so. No, it is unlikely Osipova commissioned these works but has instead lent her name and talent — along with those of her partner Sergei Polunin — to the evening in return for the creation of three works brokered for her by Sadler’s Wells. It’s a compromise in which neither party comes off particularly well artistically; Osipova is not challenged enough because the works fall short of providing her with a vehicle for her scope. Cherkaoui’s Qutb thinks about it in philosophical terms but delivers a trio in which Osipova’s desire for flight is constantly grounded and smothered by the overpowering physique of Jason Kittelberger and in which the only (rather uninteresting) solo is given to James O’Hara. Qutb is Arabic for ‘axis’ but the axis of the work is Kittelberger not Osipova. Some commission.
Maliphant’s Silent Echo without the lighting would be like watching Osipova and Polunin consummately messing around in the studio. Maliphant’s choreography is so totally dependent on the lighting of Michael Hulls (a dependence that has become derivative) that any artistic development for the dancers is merely subordinate to the Maliphant/Hulls formula; the greatest hurdle for them is to dance on the edges of darkness.
Pita’s Run Mary Run is the only work in which Osipova and Polunin have roles to explore; Pita puts them centre stage in a musical narrative of love, sex, drugs and death to the songs of the 60’s girl group, The Shangri-Las. Known for their ‘splatter platters’ with lyrics about failed teenage relationships, Pita invests Run Mary Run with a theme of love from beyond the grave that he can’t resist associating — in the opening scene of two arms intertwining as they emerge from a grave — with Giselle. But Osipova’s persona is closer to Amy Winehouse (whose album Back to Black was inspired by The Shangri-Las and whose life Pita cites as the major influence for the work), and Polunin in his jeans, white tee shirt, black leather jacket and dark glasses is more like bad-boy Marlon Brando than a remorseful duke. While Pita’s narrative mirrors the destructive relationships in Winehouse’s life, the romantic elements of raunchy duets, flirtatious advances and feral solos feed off the partnership of the two dancers. Pita is pulling out of them elements of their own lives and putting the audience in the privileged position of voyeurs; we are living their emotions in the moment. This gives the work its edge and inevitable attraction. The colourful lightness of Run Mary Run — thanks to costumes and sets by Luis F. Carvalho and lighting by Jackie Shemesh — thus reveals a genuine heart that saves the work from its dark parody. But such is the nature of the heart that Run Mary Run may only succeed with these two protagonists.
Pita’s work is a step in the right direction for Osipova, as is the idea of her performing works outside her comfort zone. But if she really wants to find works that allow her more than an opportunity to dance a different vocabulary, she needs to find choreographers able and sensitive enough to fulfill her full potential by creating enduring works that are irrevocably stamped with her technical ability and personality.
Made at Sadler’s Wells, Sadler’s Sampled Festival, Sadler’s Wells, June 22
The Sadler’s Sampled festival is a welcome initiative by Sadler’s Wells to popularize dance that brings the concept of the BBC Proms to the theatre and adds a raft of programmed events in and around the foyer that ‘will provide a way in for audiences who many not be familiar with dance of any kind.’ There are four separate programs of dance over the two-week festival (ending July 7) beginning with Made at Sadler’s Wells that highlights three works the theatre has produced since 2005.
Russell Maliphant’s Afterlight (Part One) is all about the play between the dynamism of form in the choreography and the deconstruction of mass in the lighting and it takes a dancer who has the plasticity and precision to carve lines and shapes in space. I had the pleasure of seeing Daniel Proietto dance Afterlight (Part One) in 2010 and it was an extraordinary performance (his photograph appears in the program although Thomasin Gulgeç is on stage). For Made at Sadler’s Wells it is essentially the same work but it doesn’t quite match the unequivocal memory of something breathtakingly beautiful.
Afterlight premiered in October 2009 as part of the Spirit of Diaghilev program at Sadler’s Wells. Proietto brought to life the spirit of Nijinsky (which you can sense in the pages of Lincoln Kirstein’s superb collection of photographs, Nijinsky Dancing): introspective, sensitive, exotic. It was Maliphant’s inspired idea to marry the movement with music of similar qualities — the first four of Erik Satie’s Gnossiennes — and with Michael Hulls’ alchemy of light: choreography, music and lighting that compose a deeply satisfying unity.
Gulgeç appears with his back to us in carmine tunic and skullcap, spiraling his arms around his turning torso as if he is pressed against the glass that Hulls’ tube of light suggests. Gulgeç has the muscular ability to draw out the unctuous quality of the movement, but without quite the poetic, otherworldly element that I remember in Proietto’s performance. At the end of the second movement, he flings off his jacket in an uncharacteristically prosaic gesture and is now all in white for the third movement, which has a tone of pain or ecstasy whose ambivalence Gulgeç matches. Maliphant builds up the range of movement, exploring the air for the first time while keeping the spiraling, cutting, fluid turns that scythe through space so beautifully. The dappled lighting shrinks in the fourth movement while the dance continues to grow in elevation and expanse at the outer reaches of the solo piano, but the lighting gradually hauls Gulgeç back in to the jar until he disappears altogether.
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Faun continues in the spirit of Nijinsky, delving into and reinventing his 1912 ballet, L’après-midi d’un faune. Cherkaoui’s choreography lays aside Egyptian fresco for free form, but he keeps the lithe, muscled and animal quality that James O’Hara embodies beautifully in his opening solo. The way he first appears, tightly rolled up under Adam Carré’s lighting, gives the impression he is still coiled around another’s body. To Debussy’s evocative score he unfurls, as if waking up on a lazy morning, shaking out the orgy of the previous night and imagining the next. Nittin Sawhney seamlessly interweaves his own score into that of Debussy to introduce the new object of the faun’s desire, Daisy Phillips. Where O’Hara is sinuous, Phillips is so flexible that her articulation verges on contortion; her facility undermines the feral sense of muscle and tendons and has the odd effect of leaving the partnership emotionless: muscular articulation, it would appear, is part of the language of dance and conveys emotional sense. However, the sheer invention of the interlocking choreography is not lost, nor is the sense of mysticism overlaid with the erotic in both choreography and music. Sometimes it is difficult to tell whose leg is whose in the intricate embraces and there are animal images of a mother cradling her young and a playfulness between the couple that is a pleasure to watch. At the end, Carré focuses a very bright spot on O’Hara as he reaches down to pick up Phillips from their feral sporting, but she recedes between his legs while he remains standing, suddenly imbued with moral sense, unsure what they had just experienced.
The link to Nijinsky in the first two works abruptly disappears in the third. Wayne McGregor’s UNDANCE, as its capital letters shrilly proclaim, is an elaborate conceit: some Muybridge-inspired exercises performed between Mark Wallinger’s two side boards with large painted letters ‘UN’ equals UNDANCE. Ha. Despite the conceit (though I did at first wonder what the political overtones could be), the opening is visually promising — a feature of McGregor’s collaborative works and of Lucy Carter’s lighting — but the promise fails to deliver and the end deceives: the restlessness of the audience as the performance progresses is palpable. Wallinger’s set design, including the UN boards, consists of a screen at the back of the stage on which the dancers are projected deliberately out of synch with the choreography on stage, either a step or two ahead or a step or two behind. As a statement in itself it is visually arresting, but in the context of UNDANCE, it simply multiplies what is essentially uninteresting. I don’t think Mark Anthony Turnage’s music helps the attention span, either. We are told that his score was inspired by a text written by Wallinger, which was in turn inspired by American sculptor Richard Serra’s Compilation of Verbs and the work of photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge. McGregor picked up on the Muybridge but his choreography is inconsequential in the company of his two mutually inspired artistic collaborators who appear to be doing their own thing in their own time.
BalletBoyz, the Talent 2013, Arts Depot, February 18, 2013
When I was living in Montreal there was I restaurant I enjoyed every now and then whose attraction was its single menu. If you wanted a lettuce and walnut salad to start, steak and chips as a main course and profiteroles for dessert, this was the place to go. The food was always good, the surroundings elegant, and you always had to book a table. It was called L’entrecôte Saint-Jean, it was centrally located on Peel Street and it’s probably still there and thriving.
Co-founders and artistic directors William Trevitt and Michael Nunn have adopted the same strategy for BalletBoyz: you know what is on the menu, the meat is fresh, the service is good, and it’s best to book in advance. I saw the company in 2011 when it was just The Talent and Russell Maliphant had reworked Torsion for the company with lighting by Michael Hulls. What has changed this year is the commissioning of a piece by Liam Scarlett, recently appointed Artist in Residence at the Royal Ballet and arguably ‘a hot ticket’. BalletBoyz has an unequivocal finger on the zeitgeist.
The short film projected before the show is at once an introduction to the brand and an ad for the product. The filming (by Nunn and Trevitt) is excellent at capturing a lively, smiling camaraderie among the dancers; youth, strength and beauty are the message. Also innovative is a filmed interview with each of the choreographers that screens before their respective works. Scarlett says that in his choreography for the Royal Ballet it is the women who drive the work. What will he make of the men? Can he teach them to drive? He seems unsure. As Serpent proceeds from languid, swan-like arm work and rippling backs through a series of duets, quartets and solos, male sinuousness and strength have by default taken the wheel, but the snake seems satiated and ends up going to sleep in the position in which it started. Scarlett seems satiated, too, seduced perhaps by the hypnotic sameness of the BalletBoyz physique into creating a homo-erotic conflation of the myths of Icarus and Narcissus that raises the display of male bodies to a level of advertising but never stays far off the ground. Neither does the pastiche of Max Richter’s saccharine tracks from Memoryhouse and neither, surprisingly, does the lighting of Michael Hulls, which seems a little uninspired here (there was a delay of 30 minutes in the start of the show due to ‘technical problems’, so perhaps he was not able to deliver what he had intended). Choreographically, it is not so much what Scarlett has been able to do with BalletBoyz, but what they have been able to do with him.
Maliphant has worked with Nunn and Trevitt and BalletBoyz for 11 years, so he knows what’s expected. His choice of music by Armand Amar makes sure Fallen starts on a stronger beat than Serpent, and the boyz are put through their paces on the floor (where it is always difficult to see them) and in the air as they climb and spring up on each other but there is still a sense of not letting too much hang out, keeping the body beautiful in its sculpture form (more of Rodin’s influence, perhaps) with a circular, inward-focused choreographic development. No single dancer stands out; the ten men are unsurprisingly uniform in appeal, dressed in t-shirts and combat pants in battle green, echoing the palpable element of chic violence. Michael Hulls’ lighting design has more punch here than in Serpent, and has reminders, if not enough evidence, of how effective his lighting can be.
The printed program handed out to the public contains good publicity images, headshots of the 10 boyz on a first name basis, a list of tour dates and some wicked hyperbole like ‘This is dance at its most riveting and fearless. Talent? I should say so” from the Independent on Sunday. It is more like a flyer than a program. Perhaps it is the flyer. If you want to know what works are being danced, however, you have to buy a glossy program but surprisingly there is nothing in it about the works — apart from the credits for choreography, music and lighting — but lots about the company and the dancers: BalletBoyz seems to be all about image over content. The glossy program is prefaced by a high-pitched message to ‘Dear Audience’ signed, ‘love Michael and Billy’. So what is the message? ‘Welcome to our latest show…which sees us carry on from where we left off last season…’ The menu hasn’t changed, but looking at the 29-date tour, BalletBoyz, like L’entrecôte, have clearly got a winning formula.
Before Aakash Odedra performs the three contemporary works on the program, he demonstrates his dance roots in Kathak. Nritta, meaning pure dance, is a variation he created for himself and for which he arranged the classical Indian music. In my previous post, I mentioned that dance is expressed in the intellectual, the physical and the emotional bodies. Here in Nritta, Odedra manifests them all in perfect harmony within the complex rhythm of the music. As he writes in the program notes, ‘Here the movements of the body do not convey any mood or meaning and its purpose is just creating beauty by making various patterns and lines in space and time.’ It is pure dance.
Just perceptible in the smoky apse of light is a figure with his back to us, dressed in loose, grey cotton kurta and pants, his body still but for his arms and hands rising slowly, palms and gaze turned upwards as if offering a libation to the gods. The dance develops with dizzying, virtuosic turns – there is something of a Dervish in Odedra – and his lightning movements of the torso and arms make those statues of Shiva with multiple limbs make sense. How else can you capture this kind of movement in a statue? I had always thought of Kathak as grounded, with upward movement expressed in the body as an opposition to the energy directed into the floor, but the name Aakash means sky, and upward for Odedra means airborne: it is part of his personality, a trait his teacher in India recognized and encouraged. He has a slight frame, taut and elongated, so there seems to be no apparent force in his dance; what comes across is his love and thrill of movement and his freedom to jump and turn effortlessly around a still point. It is the physical expression of being in the moment.
Odedra does not come to contemporary dance through training in contemporary dance. He comes to contemporary dance through his training in Kathak. This makes his collaborations with Akram Khan, Russell Maliphant and Sid Larbi Cherkaoui a unique occasion. Khan has already developed a remarkable body of work from the same dance roots, so creating a solo on Odedra is a fast track process to a place way beyond the beginning. In the Shadow of Man is indeed a work that challenges Odedra in ways he may never have imagined, but his sensibility and integrity, not to mention his innate virtuosity, rise to the challenge. In the program notes, Khan muses on their shared Kathak tradition: ‘I have always felt a strong connection to the ‘animal’ embedded within the Indian dance tradition. Kathak masters have so often used animals as forms of inspiration, even to the point of creating a whole repertoire based on the qualities, movements, and rhythms of certain animals. So, in this journey with Aakash, I was fascinated to discover if there was an animal residing deep within the shadow of his own body.’ I don’t think there is any doubt that he found it, and the way Odedra reveals it is remarkable.
The opening image is difficult to make out, a shell or shield of an insect that is alive in that expressionless way insects busy themselves with the act of living: a movement of the eye, a leg, an antenna. But as the lighting of Michael Hulls gradually reveals this shield, we see it is Odedra’s crouched, naked back, and the insect eyes are his scapula rippling under his skin and the antennae his elbows. Jocelyn Pook’s score is suddenly riven by a piercing shriek from Odedra taken on the inbreath, scorching the lungs. He comes alive, unfolding like a wild man and stretching out his angular arms and legs like an emaciated saint stretching. The lighting picks out these body shapes, following the tearing movements of this hunter-gatherer, mouth gaping and blind eyes engaged. As in Nritta, we see the velocity of the turns, the arms whipped into the form of a double helix, and then the stillness. The insect develops into a loping monkey, to which the hissing and shrieks now belong, as do the whirling arms at the limits of Odedra’s circling torso, and the arching backbends that put his wild eyes upside down staring at us: traits of the atavistic figure consumed by the animal Khan has embedded – or revealed – in him. Pook’s score adds a sense of calm and order, rounding off the corners without disturbing the angular, feral nature of the beast. What gives this performance an otherworldly quality is the lack of any ego; Odedra has given himself over to the dance, and his bow at the end is one of genuine humility.
In Russell Maliphant’s Cut, Maliphant doesn’t so much create movement for Odedra as structure it. We see Odedra’s undulating, double-helix arms, his ability to rise from the ground as if pulled up by an invisible thread, his lightning dynamics, his ability to spin and his generosity of spirit. What distinguishes Cut – and gives it its name – is that Maliphant has Odedra dance with the light patterns of Michael Hulls which cut his body into zones of light. Hulls is a visual magician, creating a virtual scrim of light and smoke through which Maliphant thrusts and weaves Odedra’s movements, first his hands and arms and later his full, whirling body. The lighting also supports Odedra’s gestures, as when he pushes down magisterially on two columns of black light that are the vertical shadows underneath his own hands. A third element is Andy Cowton’s score, which is as intimately related to the choreography as the lighting. When Hulls’ triangle of light takes on three dimensions, opening up a vista of latticed blinds on the floor, there is a suggestion in the music of the blinds opening and closing as Maliphant contrasts Odedra’s crawling motif with the horizontal bars of light. Hulls rolls up the blinds leaving Odedra in silhouette in open space, and then raises the lighting level so only his skin is visible as his clothing blends into the smoky light. The final sequence is pure Odedra, whirling fiercely downstage across the blinds and arriving at a stillness in which he grasps the shadows of his hands and pushes them down once again, keeping his dark gaze on us, as he turns up his palms and closes his fingers slowly into a fist.
The order of the program is decided more by the technical aspects of the lighting than by a considered approach to the choreographic content: a little bit too much of the lighting tail wagging the choreographic dog. The last work, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Constellation, is the most mystical of the three, and belongs more in the middle than at the end, except for its lighting demands. It is also the work in which there is less of Odedra’s own movement vocabulary and more of Cherkaoui’s conceptual framework: a constellation made up of patterns of sound and light with Odedra as the locus, an ‘astral body generating its own rhythms and luminosity.’ The rhythms are provided by the lovely score of Olga Wojciechowska, and the luminosity by Willy Cessa’s suspended light bulbs of differing intensities that provide the only illumination for Odedra’s motion. He is more a presence in Constellation than a performer of Cherkaoui’s movement phrases. At one point Odedra swings a single bulb in front of his head that illuminates the alternate sides of his face as it rotates, like two phases of the moon. Constellation is a meditation on space and spirituality, and Odedra provides a performance of mystical serenity. Towards the end he sits in meditation and instead of Cessa’s lights fading to black at the final moment, they all increase to full illumination. How appropriate.
The Place Prize semi-final 4 (Eva Recacha, Robbie Synge, Goddard Nixon, Seke Chimutengwende), The Place, September 22
Martha Pasakopoulou stomps around the stage in a yellow dress proclaiming in a language I don’t understand, fist clenched in the air as if she is leading a demonstration of one. She has a clear, strident voice that is not afraid to climb into the higher registers, and there is something of the gamine in her unselfconsciously ebullient performance; she is evidently unaware anyone is watching. When she finishes her song there is a ringing silence in the theatre, and then laughter as she walks to the back, and steps carefully into the corner like a gymnast ready to begin a diagonal routine. With these two opening sequences, juxtaposed with disarming innocence, Pasakopoulou has captured our full attention; like an ingenuous child she can now lead us wherever she wants. This is Eva Recacha’s The Wishing Well, in which ‘a woman creates her own particular ritual to obtain her wish in order to get a direct line with the gods.’ It is full of observations and insights into the nature of hope and faith on the one hand, and of the superstitions and tricks we use to subvert them on the other. Recacha acts as storyteller and observer, commenting on the (at times) recalcitrant, (always) whimsical Pasakopoulou in her devout double-dealing, and demonstrating, in the poignant, final moments, the futility of her self-deception. Pasakopoulou’s character is called Martha, who begins by making three wishes, in lyrical, animated mime. It doesn’t matter what they are but rather what strategies she uses to achieve them, and the beauty of the work is in the imaginative mime Recacha devises for all these strategies that she incorporates into a body language Pasakopoulou so hearteningly delivers.
The stage is lit by Gareth Green like a game board, edged with a white band of light that forms the limit of Martha’s world; she never steps out of it. Martha has spent so much of her life in an unwinnable competition with God that she arrives at old age without ever having achieved her wishes. As an old crone, legs bent, she shuffles off to the corner of her world, as if to cross the road; only then does the white band recede, and after some hesitation Martha crosses; the band of light closes behind her.
The Wishing Well has been chosen for The Place Prize Final.
Robbie Synge’s Settlement is a piece for two performers and three sheets of chipboard, with a score by James Alaska. At the beginning the three sheets are centre stage, leaning tentatively against each other, lit by Brian Gorman as an architectural form. Settlement develops as a game between Erik Nevin and Robin Dingemans in which one creates an equilibrium of sheets, and the other knocks it down; one proposes, the other disposes. Settlement can apply both to the built elements of a community and to an agreement between two entities in a dispute. Synge’s work covers both meanings in a seamless structure, as he explores the effect of the everyday built environment on our physical and mental states. It would be easy to see the rivalry between Nevin and Dingemans as a personal narrative, but if one understands the chipboard sheets to be a metaphor for the built environment, then both characters are reacting to it in their respective ways, which in turn affects them individually, like neighbours arguing over a fence or, on a much larger scale, townspeople suffering from an ill-thought planning scheme: one person’s order is another person’s chaos. There are also elements of cooperation: Nevin and Dingemans stand side by side, each holding a sheet upright on the ground. They let go of their respective sheets and change places. Moving the sheets further and further apart they repeat the game, with surprising and unpredictable results. Later, the sheets become islands and the two performers help each other move from one to the other. In the end, Synge reflects on the sense of loss: one might rejoice in the destruction of a house, for example, while the other may be lost without it. After Nevin kicks down a final chipboard structure, Dingemans leans against the back wall as if wounded.
The title of Goddard Nixon’s Third, is taken from a line in the T.S. Eliot poem The Waste Land: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” Eliot apparently included this line after hearing of a mysterious encounter experienced by the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his men on his famous 1916 expedition. It is now known as ‘the third man factor’, a psychological phenomenon also linked to guardian angels or divine intervention. Michael Hulls’ extraordinary lighting and set design place the context of Third quite literally, on a blue-white, ice-bound floe that Lawren Harris might have painted. He even brings on a snowstorm at the end that envelops the dancers and the space around them. But the weather conditions Hulls so brilliantly evokes are inimical to the nature of the duet, to the loose-fitting, urban, hooded costumes (by Alice Walking) and to the often floor-bound choreography. Jonathan Goddard and Gemma Nixon are not dressed for this level of cold, their duet does not belong in the Antarctic – even if the subject matter derives from an expedition there – where lying on an icy floe would be unthinkable. Hulls has taken his inspiration and run with it, but he has outrun the duet on which it is focused.
The duet itself is intimate and warm, the flow of movement soft and pulsing; Goddard and Nixon are two dancers who move with extraordinary agility, speed and precision but who also possess a lyrical quality that appears effortless; their performance is anything but cold, and in this context, the pulling on and off the hoods becomes an unnecessary distraction. However, their artistry is just a pleasure to watch, radiating enough heat to melt even the most inhospitable conditions.
The evening ends on a warmer note with a smile of a work from Seke Chimutengwende, The Time Travel Piece. This one is too tongue-in-cheek to make it to the finals, but sends us home feeling that much better for having felt its infectious irreverence. The stage is lined with banners that are reminiscent of the recent Olympics, and Chimutengwende is our amiable dance commentator. He has been fortunate enough to travel forwards in time to see dance performances at three different but not consecutive periods, 2085, 2501 and 2042. He is thus in a position to comment on, and illustrate, the styles of dance in those respective eras for our benefit. He has a troupe of the ‘best available’ contemporary dancers on whom he has restaged the dances from memory; it proved impossible for him to record what he saw as our technology doesn’t work in the future. Due to the huge financial costs of his government-sponsored time travel, he could only spend an hour at each performance.
By 2085, scientists are probing smaller and smaller objects – far smaller than atoms – and choreographers are similarly interested in smaller and smaller movements. Fortunately the audience’s powers of perception have increased dramatically. Chimutengwende introduces a trumpeter and five dancers who start performing. If nothing seems to be happening, it is all to do with our reduced powers of perception, though it is clear that the dancers have a remarkable control of their movement vocabulary and one can see in the choreography an evocative blend of influences from the early part of this century. The score is rich in tonality, and beautifully played on the trumpet by its composer, Michael Picknett.
By 2501, everyone has access to time travel; it’s as easy as texting today, which makes the idea of a rehearsal period obsolete; you can rehearse one day and return to it the following day, which means that choreographers can spend unlimited time on making work. Another trend, and one that was realized in the performance Chimutengwende saw, is the development by each dancer (over an unlimited period of rehearsal) of a movement sequence that perfectly expresses their essential nature, which is then the only movement they need to perform. This is what Chimutengwende presents, though due to limited rehearsal time the essential nature of each dancer is only approximate. The same goes for the trumpet accompaniment by the time-traveling Picknett.
2042 is an extrapolation of only thirty years from our current situation, when the pace of life has accelerated to such an extent that there is barely any time to make work, and what work is made is made very quickly because the dancers and choreographers need to move on to the next thing. At the performance Chimutengwende attended, the choreographer was teaching the performance on stage, as he had no time to rehearse. This is clearly a cause for concern, as the performance demonstrated.
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