Dan Canham/Still House, Of Riders and Running Horses

Dan Canham/Still House, Of Riders and Running Horses, NCP Car Park Farringdon, October 16

The setting of Dan Canham’s Of Riders and Running Horses (photo: Paul Blakemore)

There is something unconventional if not transgressive in putting on a contemporary folk dance event atop a multi-story car park on an October night in London, but that is what Dance Umbrella and Dan Canham have done with Of Riders and Running Horses that opened this year’s festival. It is an apt pairing, for while Canham aims with his dance and music to carve out a space for people to gather, Dance Umbrella aims ‘to be a catalyst that introduces…the audience to artists in new ways.’

Canham is one of the most grounded choreographers I know and has compelling arguments behind each of his projects. Of Riders and Running Horses is the confluence of two principal ideas: to reimagine the transformative effect of folk traditions like the Molly dances of East Anglia, the straw bear festival of Whittlesea or the tar barrels of Ottery St. Mary, and to recreate the kind of urban public space where such events might happen. In his two previous works Canham proved adept at finding language to translate tradition and geography into dance: a paean for his childhood countryside in Ours Was the Fen Country and a tribute to the ghosts of an abandoned theatre in Limerick in 30 Cecil Street. His choreographic ideas grow not from abstract ideas but from fertile soil, from the life of the countryside he knows and loves. This is what makes his works not only graspable but memorable.

In thinking about what might constitute a modern folk idiom — one that eschews ownership and belongs to the life of the community in which it is practiced — Canham has taken aspects of house, jump and street dance as his point of departure for the work. And in the age of the Internet where the concept of ‘local’ is no longer bound by parochial geographical boundaries, Canham has borrowed and adapted steps he had seen in video clips of street dance in other parts of the world.

Of Riders and Running Horses is choreographed on five dancers: Anna Kazsuba, Isabelle Cressy, Odilia Egyiawan, Tilly Webber and Tanya Richam-Odoi. To be more precise, the choreography developed through both Canham’s input and the dancers’ improvisation to the music of drummer Luke Harney (aka Typesun) and singer Sam Halmarack. These two are the ‘Riders’ in the title and the dancers are the ‘Running Horses’. In other words it is not always clear who is leading the way but once they get going there is no stopping them. It is Halmarack who cuts through the crowd’s chatter with a singing voice that instantly commands attention. Canham has each dancer in turn jump, step or fly out of the audience to begin dancing to Harney’s complex musical rhythms with a mastery of undulation and quicksilver footwork that builds into high-energy ensemble sections with thigh-slapping rhythms punctuated with calls. In between these group dances, four of the five performers merge back into the audience while a fifth dances alone, giving free rein to her personality until the group reassembles. Although there are shared elements in the vocabulary, each solo has variations in temperament; on one end of the scale Kazsuba is contemplative, winding down with sinuous grace to an eloquent whisper of movement, while the space around Egyiwan has no chance to rest. Yet when they all move together they are an irrepressible quintet.

The NCP car park in Farringdon is perhaps more exciting in theory than in practice. Its promise as a communal urban space is diluted by fixing the boundaries of the performance area at one end of the top floor, surrounded on three sides by the audience and an inner sanctum of a tent for the two musicians behind. The stage may be open to the elements but it is effectively a theatrical culture (with its ethos of watching rather than participating) transposed to the rooftop instead of an organic congregational format where people are drawn into the activity to watch, mingle and wander at will (a format suggested in Paul Blakemore’s photograph on the cover of the festival program).

Perhaps because the audience is so formally arranged around the ‘stage’ the celebratory aspect of the performance doesn’t physically ignite the audience, however hard the dancers try and however gleefully they reach out to the front row of hands as they pass. It is only at the end that the dancers breach the wall and invite the audience on to the dance floor. The opportunity to warm up may be one reason for the eagerness to join in but it also suggests a desire to engage with the dancers and musicians that has been too long withheld by imposed convention.