Alleyne Dance, Far From Home, Dance East

Alleyne Dance, Far From Home, Dance East, Ipswich, April 21

Alleyne Dance’s Far From Home, presented at Dance East in April, treats the question of immigration and assimilation with a warmth and empathy that is crucially missing from current political discourse. The work speaks on behalf of migrants by using their own voices not only to make them heard above the clamour of public opinion but to extrapolate a humanitarian resolution to their situation. Immigration, of course, has underpinned the UK’s cultural life since before the Romans landed, and the issue of who can reside in this country and under what conditions has exercised social and political discourse ever since. Only recently, unscrupulous politicians used the fear of a migrant ‘invasion’ to make the case for ‘taking back control’ of our borders in the run-up to the Brexit referendum.

Alleyne Dance — the twin sisters, Sadé and Kristina Alleyne — has developed a powerful choreographic presence through work based on the image of their twin selves: small scale embracing significant themes. In Far From Home, a co-commission by The Place London, Dance City Newcastle, Dance East and Dampfzentrale Bern, the Alleyne sisters again take on a significant theme but increase the scale of the work by employing a cast of six professional dancers — including themselves — and a multi-generational group of non-professionals recruited from the local community. Such a shift in scale may be a necessary step in the evolution of Alleyne Dance, but it comes with challenges. In their previous work as a duo, the physical and mental bond between Sadé and Kristina has been a syntax that is both compact and expressive; they can play off each other with the confidence of a unified language. With an enlarged cast, that strength of common language is dispersed and weakens the choreographic treatment. At the same time the excellent production values — Emanuele Salamanca’s  set, Giulia Scrimieri’s costumes, Salvatore Scollo’s lighting and Nicki Wells’ music — seem to conspire towards a rounded entertainment that, instead of highlighting the gravity of the subject, effectively masks it. The German playwright Bertolt Brecht experimented with this balance in the performance of his plays so as to free a critical approach to the story from the illusory effects of theatrical convention. The polemics of immigration in Far From Home are implicit in the voices it presents, but the voices merge too much into the production values for the polemics to register. One need look no further than their previous work, A Night’s Game, to see how the Alleyne sisters can find exactly the right balance when they put the subject of incarceration into powerful emotional focus.

It may be an unintended consequence of the commission of Far From Home that has compromised the Alleyne sisters’ critical approach to their subject. The decision to use local, non-professional movers in a production is a way for theatres to strengthen ties with their community but from the perspective of the production, the disparity in movement styles can compromise choreographic invention. Allocating the role of migrants to the professional dancers and those of a host community to the local cast only exacerbates this divide. On the other hand, transferring the Alleyne sisters’ own muscular choreography to the professional dancers can end up in gratuitous acrobatics, drawing attention to itself for the wrong reasons.

Where the Alleyne sisters reveal their sense of history most powerfully are in the images throughout the production that show, sometimes overtly and sometimes subliminally, the intimate relationship between immigration and slavery: the opening setting of long braids on the floor like the points of a compass, the pulling of ropes against an unseen force, and, for a fleeting moment on a crowded stage, the awful sense of bodies adrift in the water, reminiscent of JMW Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On). Not all images work, however: At the end of Far From Home, updating history to the present, we are left to contemplate a pile of bodies washed up under a high shower head of dripping water. You know its significance, but it misses its mark by reducing the human loss and the absence of empathy that caused it to an image that is less disturbing than all too theatrically literal.

Far From Home is a stage of development for Alleyne Dance in response to an important commission, but it reveals some of the pitfalls in scaling up production. What is not in doubt is the hard-hitting intent at the core of their work.  

(Alleyne Dance has just been announced as the winner of the Best Independent Company Award at the 2023 National Dance Awards in London.)

Alleyne Dance, A Night’s Game

Alleyne Dance, A Night’s Game, Rich Mix, February 18, 2022

A couple of weeks before seeing Alleyne Dance in A Night’s Game at Rich Mix I saw an exhibition of photographs at David Zwirner Gallery by the late Roy DeCarava, a New York-based African American artist whose monochrome prints recorded predominantly the lives of people and the neighbourhoods of his native Harlem in the 1940s and 50s. What struck me about the prints, quite apart from his empathy for his subjects, was that DeCarava appeared to calibrate his register of shades between black and white from the darker end of the scale, from the colour of the skin he was photographing. Being a master printer, he was able to bring out the colour of his subjects in relation to their socio-economic and physical environment. 

Seeing the Alleyne sisters so soon after was to rekindle DeCarava’s vision in performance; for a start, A Night’s Game is conceived in shades of black and white that reach towards the darker end of the scale, and it employs an additional register of sound —an eclectic array ranging from ambient sources to Ólafur Arnalds — that serves as the aural site in which the work is set. The work begins in total darkness intensified first by the sound of whispering and then by rhythmic body percussion; as Salvatore Scollo’s lighting levels gradually rise we see and hear a seated Sadé Alleyne beating out something between a syncopated slave rhythm and ritual self-flagellation. It is a tour de force she expresses in unsparing shades of fear: she lies back in pain, looks around in apprehension and thrusts her pelvis forward in a taught bow-like gesture of vulnerability that lasts just long enough to register before snapping back into a frenzied muscular argument. She stops to gain her breath then starts again with a doubling down of frustration until she seems to surrender to the weight of her hands and arms in despair. Like DeCarava’s vision, we experience not only the visual registers in A Night’s Game but feel their psychological counterpart. 

The program note informs us that A Night’s Game is ‘inspired by real-life stories of imprisonment, escape and fighting for freedom. It reflects the turmoil and strife that comes with the prospect of incarceration.’ All art is political, and A Night’s Game is no exception, but its political message is presented as it were from within; rather than a statement of opinion it is one of vicarious experience that demands an end to entrapment and puts the audience on jury duty. It’s un uncomfortable position to be in, all the more so because Sadé draws you into her testimony with such conviction. Like a trial, all the evidence of A Night’s Game — gathered in verbal interviews and presented in physical form — is collected for the benefit of the audience on behalf of those who endure systemic social and racial injustice. What Sadé and her twin sister Kristina invoke in these untold histories is the implicit link between incarceration, racial discrimination and social inequality. As Eric Williams wrote in Capitalism and Slavery, ‘slavery was not born of racism: rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.’ A Night’s Game is putting history itself on trial. 

When Kristina first arrives on stage there is some reprieve but not much — or perhaps we are just hoping there would be — for she soon takes over where Sadé left off until the two join forces; in the language of bodies, their close communication both entangles and supports them to the point of exhaustion. They scuffle, throw chairs to each other and find kinship in a dreamlike duet that in its synchronicity and adversity indicates a form of bargaining, like writing on the ground with their bodies. This constant advocacy on behalf of those who face the loss of freedom or who have already lost it — the ‘bodies of evidence’ — rises to a climax of rage and indignation in the form of exhaustive solos that not even the final dimming of the lights can lessen. It is worth mentioning that Kristina is almost five months pregnant but there is never a sense that she is holding herself back; to do so would be to compromise the dual thrust from which A Night’s Game derives its singular integrity and force. 

A Night’s Game is one of four shows that comprise Shipbuilding, a performance festival from Certain Blacks that has been created in response to the UK’s societal climate.