Show Me Your Nationalisms: Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1
Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell in Futuristic Folktales (photo: Amy Sinead)
At the beginning of the final week of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Creative Scotland (the national public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across the country and distributes funding from the Scottish Government and The National Lottery) issued the following statement:
“Creative Scotland has taken the difficult decision to close the Open Fund for Individuals to new applications due to the Scottish Government being unable to confirm release of £6.6m in Grant-in-Aid budget in the current financial year, 2024-25. The Fund will close to new applications from 2pm on Friday 30th August 2024. Creative Scotland planned to apply £3m of the £6.6m budget to support the Open Fund for Individuals in 2024-25, alongside £3m of National Lottery income.”
The Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, Angus Robertson MSP, who is responsible for cultural funding in Scotland via the Scottish Government, also wrote — in a ‘chef’s kiss’ moment of choreographic synchronicity — the introductory welcome to the nationalistic Scottish showcase Made in Scotland 2024: “Welcome to Made in Scotland 2024! Celebrating a wonderful collection of Scottish dance, theatre and music, Made in Scotland — supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund — gives Scottish artists the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet.”
So on one hand we have the munificent Angus Robertson telling us how he supports Scottish artists and companies to bring their work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to share and allow them to explore the international opportunities that arise from performing at the world’s largest arts festival, and at the same time and place we have the very same politician decimating the only open fund that individual artists can apply to by reneging on his “gold-plated” promise made in October 2023 to restore the £6.6million worth of Creative Scotland reserves.
In light of this aforementioned context, this Part 1 will be a response to some of the Made in Scotland work I saw alongside other international work which didn’t have a nationalistic frame or the support of their respective country, whilst a subsequent Part 2 text will examine work exclusively from some of the other inter/nationalist showcases, where financially-supported artists bring their work to Edinburgh as representatives of their respective countries and kiss the flag.
The first to clutch the saltire between their double denimed teeth is Common Is As Common Does: A Memoir (CIACDAM) by 21 Common at ZOO Southside. CIACDAM is my gold-plated, fringe smash, best-in-show and top pick by a country mile. If you imagine Goat Island swallowing the Tarantino filmography, then heading out to a line dance class before finishing off in a working-class karaoke booth before ripping off their wife beaters and kicking the shite out of their girlfriends, this is something close to what we saw.
Premiering at Johnstone Town Hall in March 2023, the directors Lucy Gaizely and Gary Gardiner (with Dan Brown) said: “We wanted to create a memoir based on lived experience that speaks to a large audience. How do you create a joyful, mesmerising and exciting show that looks so deeply at trauma and life’s bullshit?”
Presented over seven scenes and narrated exclusively by The Man (Gary Gardiner), the work encourages us to think about the relational aesthetics of cowboy culture, family dynamics and working-class white male violence. I loved seeing a multi-generational community cast — aka The Mob — on stage alongside the professional cast. The Mob are the ones who create the atmosphere, doss about happily on the sofa in their double denim and stetsons and deliver a number of satisfying line dance set pieces.
CIACDAM takes as its starting point the impact and lack of agency poverty affords young men and how exposure to violence shapes ideas of masculinity. When you get this hyper-realistic tension of yee-hawing bar room brawling and bottle-smashing blood bouts and “books are for fucks” call-outs, it comes startlingly close to some of my own experiences as a teenager. As the fringe (and the wider performing arts industry) becomes increasingly difficult and even more expensive for artists to attend and be part of, then the already minimal amount of working-class representation will only get scarcer.
CIACDAM is not an easy watch and asks questions about how we and the system normalise violence. Some of the middle-class people I spoke to about it didn’t like its rough edges or out-of-tune karaoke singing, but for me it’s my perfect theatrical Venn diagram and as Gabi Cepelyte says: “Same as you, I am looking for idols. Like you, I find it easier to believe I can become someone, when people who look like me win.”
The Last Forecast (TLF), by Bridie Gane and Catherine Wheels at Assembly @ Dance Base, is an exquisitely crafted production for ages 6+ (and costume designer Alison Brown and designer Alisa Kalyanova appear to have strong and (unattributed?) influences from Thandiwe Muriu’s Camp photography series). TLF tells the story of Gael (performed by the wondrous and expressive Shanelle Clemenson) — a gecko-like creature who lives alone, in harmony with their surroundings, where everything matches and everything is perfect. That is until a stranger (Kieran Brown) arrives, laden with earthly belongings and starts setting up home, disturbing this island sanctuary.
Shanelle Clemenson and Kieran Brown in The Last Forecast (photo: Sally Jubb)
TLF is a masterclass in how to craft and execute beautiful, lightly political, wordless and world-class dance for young people. Set in a highly-patterned, 70s psychedelic bothy somewhere on an unnamed Scottish island, we see Gael trying to come to terms with the incursion of the stranger and playing an unwitting game of camouflage, hide and seek and trying not to be discovered — with the perfect amount of slapstick, repetition and pure dance technique.
There are some witty alternative shipping radio forecasts which subtly prophesy the incoming rising waters and the impact it would have on their bothy, forcing the two characters to work together to bring all their furniture to a higher point, build a friendship and wait for the storm to pass. The warmth and connection between Brown and Clemenson is remarkable, especially considering that Clemenson was brought in and learnt the show in 8 days before their fringe run.
TLF is the latest in a long line of incredibly strong Scottish works for young audiences that have toured the world in the last 20 years, so if it doesn’t get booked at least 30 times outside Scotland in the next three years, then the theatrical touring landscape really is in its end-of-days scenario.
So that’s 2/2, but is all work in the Made in Scotland showcase uniformly brilliant? No. At this point I’d like to introduce the commercially successful, but choreographically redundant double bill — The Flock and Moving Cloud — by Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) at ZOO Southside.
SDT describe their sell-out two week run as setting “the stage on fire with two of their most physically daring and dynamic works in an unforgettable evening of dance by two of the most exciting female choreographers in the European dance scene: Roser López Espinosa and Sofia Nappi.”
After a promising opening V-shape of The Flock by Espinosa full of synchronous wing flapping, flat backing, tiny little jumps and oodles of repetition I stopped counting the sloppy, technical mistakes and poor execution from the dancers after the tenth one. Add to this to the nearly 30 minutes of painfully manufactured running in dull patterned shapes (dancers cannot do fake running on stage) and awkward lift work (SDT are really not known for their lift work), it feels like the dancer execution, choice of choreographer and rehearsal direction are the weakest I’ve seen from SDT in the last ten years.
Moving Cloud, which has live Scottish folk music performed by TRIP, is a glorified #VisitScotland infomercial, and whilst the dancers execute this work better (I repeat, they really do not like being off the floor), you’re suddenly aware that this “flagship” company of Scotland, especially in the context of the fringe and the dozens of other dance companies performing, isn’t as technically good as a pack of Hip Hop and contemporary dancers from Berlin or the second-best dance show from the Taiwan Season.
At the fringe, broadly speaking, there’s comedy, art and entertainment on offer and with this double-bill it feels like SDT have squarely pitched their dancing tent in the entertainment field leaving behind their pioneering choreographic roots which would have been previously firmly pegged in the art field. If this is how they want to be known to their audiences, as creators of commercially viable and instantly forgettable staged entertainment that evaporates from our lives as soon as we’ve left the theatre then The Flock and Moving Cloud are an absolute success and their marketing team are the gold standard. However, if they continue along this path then they will continue to be no longer artistically relevant to the choreographic conversation in Scotland.
Stepping away from Mr Robertson and nationalistic frames for a moment, there were three other works (Ananta, The Eternal by Ragamala Dance Company from the USA, Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse from France and N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien from Canada) which are also worth talking about.
Aparna Ramaswamy’s Ananta, The Eternal at Assembly @ Dance Base is a programme of four shorter classical bharatanatyam works (two duets from the Ramaswamy sisters Aparna and Ashwini and two solos) to pre-recorded music and it marks the occasion when the sisters have “come together for their first duet evening.” The promotional material includes the following: “Aparna Ramaswamy preserves ancient dance forms with stunning virtuosity and expressiveness to create a living tradition that is resonant for modern times” (Boston Globe). “Award-winning choreographer Aparna Ramaswamy weaves together threads of body, memory, desire and devotion to describe the eternal relationship between the deity and the devotee.”
The work “was created with special commissioning funds from The Mayer Family and commissioning support from Asia Society Texas” and whilst there’s no doubt that Aparna is an excellent technician and charismatic performer with some sweet and powerful jaatis across the three works she performs in, there is a gap in technique and expressiveness levels between the sisters in the duets. Ashwini is noticeably weaker, especially across her shoulder line, and when the duets demand a mirrored precision it unfortunately draws the focus away from Aparna.
There is an introductory, pre-recorded voice intro to three of the four pieces. We hear how in the first piece the deity/devotee relationship manifests as: “Krishna, He is the Infinite and the Intimate. He saved the Yamuna River and its people from the snake-demon, Kaliya, dancing the snake into submission.” In the third work — choreographed and taught by Smt. Alarmel Valli — the deity/devotee relationship talks of: “Shiva Nataraja symbolizes the rhythms of the cosmos. His dance is the pulse of the universe, and He represents both the destruction of illusion and the creation of enlightenment.”
With so little bharatanatyam on UK stages, the understanding from audiences about this classical form is very shallow and consequently you get audience quotes on the fringe festival website like: “While I’m sure it is part of the cultural background, I found the ankle bells really quite jarring by the end; I was very ready to stop hearing them.” and “Beautiful dancing set to lovely traditional music. Would recommend this show. I haven’t seen dancing like this in person before so was educational to see.”
In the UK there’s been a 25+ year discussion around the framing of bharatanatyam as an ancient, traditional 2000+ year-old form; what some contemporary UK bharatanatyam performers and choreographers are attempting to do is educate audiences that this mythologising is false and it harms this classical form; yet this language is still perpetuated by some artists, venues and media outlets who want to keep bharatanatyam in a little, colourful, exotic box.
I would love to see at a future Edinburgh Festival Fringe or at the Edinburgh International Festival a collaboration between a suite of classical Indian artists and companies from the UK and abroad to reframe and present what these forms are really like in 2025, what they can achieve, and have an opportunity to talk about what artists think these forms could be in the future.
Continuing on the false mythologising train is the leery and misogynistic abomination that is Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse at McEwan Hall, Underbelly, which sells itself as: “Join world champions of hip-hop in an electrifying alternate universe where charleston footsteps and jitterbug beats meet freestyle hip-hop in a 1920s New York speakeasy. Infused with dazzling dance routines and thrilling burlesque to the remixed sounds of Miles Davis, James Brown and Jessica Rabbit, this is an afternoon of high-energy entertainment fit for the whole family.”
Whilst this represents the debut of Wanted Posse at the Edinburgh Fringe, the same performance was at the Avignon Festival in 2018 and the combination of prohibition, Hip Hop dance and the speakeasy is one that has been mined multiple times by the England-based Southpaw Dance Company since 2013. Southpaw premiered an outdoor work called Faust in 2013 (“In this re-imagining of Goethe’s Faust, drinking, gambling, womanising, and general debauchery make the Speakeasy a perfect place for a man to lose his soul”) before going on to develop an indoor version called Speakeasy in 2019/20 before touring the UK in Autumn 2023: “The professional cast includes some of the UK’s finest Bboys who combine the vocabulary of breaking and contemporary seamlessly alongside Charleston, Lindy and other swing styles of the roaring 20’s.”
How Dance N’Speak Easy is framed as fit for the whole family is beyond me; with five male dancers constantly drooling, pawing and vying for the attention of the one female dancer (played by Jessie Perot) across multiple scenes via their breaking power moves, there’s a silhouette scene where Perot looks as if she is disrobing and we see only her outline in a cheap burlesque imitation. Dance N’Speak Easy is devoid of any atmosphere and I dream of at least 2D characterisation or a narrative arc; instead it’s made up of breaking buffoonery and a desire for dopamine theatre — show me a move, do the splits, perform faux drunkenness — which sees the audience seal clapping lightly every minute or so to respond to an unsatisfying and mediocre trick.
Choreographer Njagui Hagbé said: “In 2013, we were selected for the final of France’s Got Talent and presented Prohibition. The reception was so enthusiastic that we decided to create a whole show based on the same idea: the forbidden. Dance N’Speak Easy is a theatrical choreographic project, based on the themes of otherness and freedom, as seen through the eyes of the Prohibition years. We wanted to go back to these troubled years and draw parallels between the prohibitions of that period and our current situation. Our demand is clear: we want to defend our right to dance.”
In some respects, understanding the origin of the work (a TV talent show where you are working in 5-10 second segments to keep the audience and judges’ attention) offers an insight into how their decisions have come to fruition. But when you’re fitting the scene length to pre-existing music tracks, concepts are often spread too thin or not given enough time to develop and tableau, freeze frame and slow-motion theatrical techniques are as dated and as bad as their attempts at group choreography.
There’s no doubt that the level of breaking ability is incredibly high — there’s about 12 really innovative transitions, threads, lifts and power moves across the 60-minute show which are jaw dropping — but the dramaturgical naivety means that they appear out of nowhere with no set up and then disappear without a trace. The final ‘drunk battle’ between two dancers who are each holding one of the empty liquor bottles that feature heavily in the set is a highlight, as the complexity of executing a 1990 or a complex freeze with a bottle in hand is genuinely tough to pull off. Whilst this is firmly pegging itself in the entertainment field and not as a work of art, the representation of women is appalling and Dance N’Speak Easy adds another layer to the deeply problematic and grooved Hip Hop dance narratives of misogyny that continue to plague the Hip Hop theatre world.
Talking of dramaturgical naivety and a work devoid of atmosphere, it’s time to return to Made in Scotland and Guesthouse Projects’ performance of The Show For Young Men at Assembly @ Dance Base which is framed as: “A man and a boy meet on a stage that’s somewhere between a building site, a junkyard, and a hillside at dawn. Together they dance, play, wrestle, and sing trying to make sense of what it means to be a man. The Show For Young Men is a tender and moving new contemporary dance piece made for audiences aged 8+, co-created and performed by Alfie, a 10-year-old boy, and Robbie Synge, a 40-something-year-old male dancer.”
The further I get from this show the more I dislike it because of its sense of manufactured play. Eoin McKenzie (as Lead Artist and Director) has invited a bunch of other adults into a room who have together created a production that speaks to a much-discussed and funder cat-nipped concept. There were a lot of shows exploring the crises of masculinity at Tony Mills’ first full length fringe programme at Dance Base, and whilst there’s buckets of care in ensuring the safety of Alfie, everything is muted, artificial and feels dead behind the eyes. The junkyard tubes are shiny and new, the constant ex-footballer radio commentary is a cheap attempt at the semiotics of manhood, there’s not a scratch or piece of dirt on their costumes or their hands and the contact and lift work are calm and measured. Children don’t exist in this manufactured state of play; if a child was on a building site they’d be near feral, demanding, loud and wanting to climb up things over and over again, little beings full of emotion and giddy at the prospect of an unexplored playground. Whereas The Show For Young Men is actually a display of emotional regulation (at one point Synge suddenly started getting angry and banging the set which felt needlessly awkward and required Alfie to give him some biscuits to calm him down) and rewards both performers for not showing their real feelings. The Show For Young Men exists in a world which actively celebrates the repression of both expressive physicality and emotional variation of young and not-so-young men.
The final work to be Made in Scotland was Futuristic Folktales by Charlotte Mclean & Collaborators running for six performances in week two at Assembly @ Dance Base. This is how the work markets itself: “a dance for hope, reimagines the creation story through the tale of the first ever womb. It’s a place that unites everyone, we were all born from a womb. Using storytelling, contemporary and Scottish Highland dance, this experimental dance theatre production questions the preservation of tradition, myth, and identity whilst scrutinising body politics and reproductive injustice.”
With an extraordinarily distorted pipes soundtrack from Malin Lewis, a kilted Mclean opens the performance in a friendly and low-key way that offers a live contextual introduction about her desire to say ‘womb’ a lot, some thoughts about identity and reproductive rights, Scottish highland dancing, the 30 collaborators involved in making the show (including a witch and a b-boy) and her previous 5-star hit show. I really like this as a way of opening the show; it’s totally disarming and makes it clear what she wants the frame to be before introducing the two performer/collaborators, Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell.
There’s a delicious Made in Scotland showcase meta narrative running alongside Futuristic Folktakes with Mclean talking about wombs (a place where things are made) in Scotland. The soundtrack from Lewis sets the emotional landscape which Chimutengwende and Bell inhabit and it’s a sonic environment that you definitely won’t hear on the Royal Mile. Lewis is an instrument maker as well as a composer and they’ve invented a new two-octave bagpipe that melds West coast traditions with a melodious discordant sound which cleanses and lifts the ears.
In a work that is as full of text as movement, Chimutengwende and Bell offer us a lightness in their presence and speak of “hypersonic wombs, womb patriarchy, womb empires, womb complexity” and dozens of other womb states. They begin to deconstruct the patterns of step dancing and the arm and hand positioning, almost absurding it into a glitch state. Sat alongside this is a repeated visual representation of the act of birthing through legs, arms and fingers as well as sometimes trying to crawl back inside to see how physically impossible that act might be.
Futuristic Folktales examines many of the tropes of Scottishness (pipes, kilts, highland dancing), looks them straight in the eyes and queers them with a gentle and joyous aplomb. I am totally here for it and believe entirely in the world that has been created.
And now the final work that was not made in Scotland, N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien, who were back at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the second consecutive year after achieving a certain level of critical and commercial success in 2023. This is how they describe themselves: “Provocative, dysfunctional and tender, N.Ormes is an award-winning circus show that pushes the limits of gender norms with never-before-seen acrobatic exchanges. Don’t miss its Fringe comeback! Skilfully combining acrobatics and dance, we follow our two protagonists and their relationship, navigating between complicity and power struggles. Come witness this inspiring journey to see how the exchange of roles and acrobatics blurs our preconceptions!”
Agathe and Adrien examine their bodies and notice they have the same diameter across many parts, including their calves, chest, biceps etc. and decide to invert some circus gender norms. N.Ormes is a really well-executed show that has a strong foundational concept and shares some new (to me) balances and acrobatics. There’s often the assumption that in circus shows it’s the man who is the base and the lifter, whereas in N.Ormes it’s not the case; it’s more like “anything you can do, I can do too.” What was refreshing to see was Adrien in a state of almost numb refusal, laying on the floor, emotionally vacant and resisting the urge from Agathe to fulfil his expected role of virtuosic physicality.
Their foot-bum-seat, springy-knees pike flip was a crowd pleaser, but for me the physical highlight of the show was a hugely effective, illusionary three-legged waltz where it looked as if they were hovering over the floor whilst circling together around the edge of the stage.
I could have done without the emotionally fey soundtrack from Simon Leoza which felt like AI had munched its way through the Mumford and Sons discography and spat out a sonically generic something which doesn’t support the quality of the performers’ execution or the strength of their concept. However, it is a well-loved show, returning for a second year without the support of a nationalistic showcase and for that it should be applauded.
So, Mr Robertson, what’s it going to be? How can a Made in Scotland showcase exist if the individual artists “who get the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet” do not have access to a highly competitive funding pot which enables them to develop their skills and build pioneering productions that represent Scotland on the international stage? How about a new showcase in 2025 called “No Longer Made in Scotland Due To The Political Dick-Swinging Chicken Antics Between Creative Scotland And Angus Robertson.”
*STOP PRESS*
Since filing this text, Mr Robertson has undertaken another sweet dime stop. On September 4th he announced “a review of Creative Scotland to ensure its operations and structure are optimal to the needs of the culture sector…the review, which will be the first since the public body’s establishment in 2010, will examine Creative Scotland’s remit and functions as a funding body, and how the overall impact of planned increases in levels of public funding can be maximised to support sustainability in the sector and in participation in the arts. The Culture Secretary also confirmed that following a period of necessary due diligence, Creative Scotland had now received funding previously allocated to it in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, including £1.8 million for youth music, and £6.6 million that will allow its Open Fund to be re-opened.”
Please, Mr Robertson, I’ve heard enough of your macho-posturing nationalisms. Perhaps you could reflect on the chaos that you and your government have created. The panic from your initial announcement meant that by the time the fund closed on Friday 30 August, Creative Scotland received an additional 819 applications totalling £11.9 million in requested funding. Creative Scotland have since announced that the Open Fund for Individuals will reopen for applications on Tuesday 8 October 2024. The story continues…
Scottish Dance Theatre, Velvet Petal, Southbank Centre, August 31
Alison Jaques in Scottish Dance Theatre’s Velvet Petal (photo: Jack Wrigley)
The way into Scottish Dance Theatre’s Velvet Petal is through a pair of portable coat racks carrying a rich assortment of chic clothing and fancy dress that the dancers put on, take off and exchange in an intimate exhibition of flamboyant identities. ‘Velvet petal’ is an apt description of this tactile, sensuous undersurface of the work that displays its flagrant sensuality with an impish grin. There’s also a central role for a well-used mattress, dragged around the stage to receive the next exhausted body or as a convenient space to make out; the entire cast, it seems, is open for erotic adventure.
The heady atmosphere choreographer Fleur Darkin wants to create in Velvet Petal is inspired by Patti Smith’s memories of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel in New York that she describes in her book, Just Kids. Darkin releases her work from the biographical details and focuses instead on the record of innocence, of sexual fluidity and artistic experimentation in the couple’s search for individual identity and fulfilment. What struck Darkinwas ‘the love and commitment’ of Smith and Mapplethorpe that was revealed ‘in the values of the writing.’ Smith has that ability in her prose, poetry or lyrics to capture her impressions in imagery and conviction of equal intensity. The same can be said of Mapplethorpe’s provocative photographs of the male and female body that question the depiction of gender, stereotype and role-playing in New York as the AIDS crisis took hold; they underline a way of life that was vulnerable and perilous — he succumbed to AIDS in 1989 — but release from within that uncompromising vulnerability a ravishing beauty. In exploring these themes in Velvet Petal Darkin has set herself the challenge of expressing her own creativity in the values of her choreography.
A small selection of Mapplethorpe’s polaroids are projected against the mattress to underline the work’s provenance and to complement Emma Jones’ bedroom-studio lighting. The stage is engagingly fluid and awash in dancers and costumes but while Mapplethorpe exploited the performativity of the body to express androgynous, at times ambiguous, and ever beguiling individuals, Velvet Petal brings to mind the ambience of a fashion shoot where the fluidity of gender and role-playing is enacted as an enticing commodity. It is as if Darkin’s evocation of Mapplethorpe’s legacy has turned into one of display, a superficial show of sensuality within self-imposed conventions that are more entertaining than mordant. There’s a game of strip poker, for example, played with a couple and a skipping rope; the problem is it’s so utterly predictable that when the couple gets down to underwear the game stops.
In indulging individually and collectively what it might have felt like to be living in the creative heat of the Chelsea Hotel, the cast of Velvet Petal rarely embodies the experience. When Adrienne O’Leary becomes momentarily the bare-chested figure of Mapplethorpe’s model, the body builder Lisa Lyon, eroticism is watered down by a self-consciousness that is nowhere evident in the original photographs. All the performers in Scottish Dance Theatre are good at display; some seem to relish it and their visual allure is undeniable but Pauline Torzuoli stands out as finding in herself the quality of conviction that makes Darkin’s choreographic evocation begin to materialise.
In considering the sound track of Velvet Petal the glaring omission is the music of Patti Smith herself. It is eschewed for a saccharine selection of songs arranged by Torben Lars Sylvest that renders the intoxication of the Chelsea Hotel years rather too sober and mainstream. Perhaps it’s a musical rights issue, but the loss of an appropriate tone for the work — one that encompasses in the quality of the voice both the rasping poverty and delirious richness of bohemian life — points to a sense of compromise either in the creative process or in its manifestation.
The evening begins quite uniquely for a dance performance. In her musical research Darkin had discovered a little-known musician, Abul Mogard, and took the brave step of using her company’s appearance at the Purcell Room to introduce his music to a London audience. It’s a revelation, the kind of atonal electronic music to take you on a journey through closed eyes. But on the bare stage with Marja de Sanctis’ video projections the elongated figure of Harry Kane improvises a brief erotic trio with the mattress and the empty clothes rack that gets closer to the spirit of Mapplethorpe’s imagery than Velvet Petal ever quite allows.
Scottish Dance Theatre, Dreamers and TuTuMucky, Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, March 3
Scottish Dance Theatre in Botis Seva’s TuTuMucky (photo: Brian Hartley)
“My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.” – Ta-nehisi Coates
Welcome to Groundhog Day, fellow dreamers. This is my fourth sitting with Dreamers since it premiered in February 2015; Anton Lachky’s choreography has shared the stage with Jo Strømgren, Sharon Eyal/Gai Behar and now Botis Seva. The choreography has switched back to the original 29-minute iteration after being tweaked and extended last year. The last few months have seen a significant amount of change for Scottish Dance Theatre that has brought a different energy to the company: 7 out of 10 dancers are new and there’s a newly appointed rehearsal director, Naomi Murray (who was in the original Dreamers cast). The new dancers are stepping into choreography that was created for and with dancers who are no longer there; they’re inhabiting ghosts and it is difficult for me to un-imagine those who forged and imprinted themselves in their work with Lachky. Although Dreamers has been shaved by 5 or 6 minutes, the essence of taking control and taking back control (though that phrase has been used and coloured since the EU referendum) is the same; narratively it is tighter, but the bullet sharpness and anatomical prowess from the majority of the new dancers isn’t there and consequently the difference between the vignettes isn’t as pronounced.
However, new bodies fitting into old shapes can breathe something revelatory into those carcasses and James Southward (last seen in Janis Claxton Dance’s Pop Up Duets) is a fine example. An excellent addition to the company bringing an energy, presence and attitude to the movement, Southward dances everything with his whole body, hits his lines, responds and reacts to others and he draws the eye as he moves around the stage. Such is his ease with the choreography and in his relationships with the other dancers it feels as if he’s been in the company for years. However, the time it takes for a choreography to really settle on a dancer is different every time and the majority of the company has had only two months to revive Dreamers and create and learn a new work, TuTuMucky; this is evidently too little and the gel and magic isn’t quite settled yet.
“It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.” – Henrik Ibsen
TuTuMucky is an invitation for the company to move differently. Scottish Dance Theatre’s artistic director, Fleur Darkin, saw Botis Seva’s company Far From The Norm perform at British Dance Edition 2016 (I too was in that audience) and commissioned Seva to make a new work on SDT. Seva established Far From The Norm, aged 18, in 2010 and he and its members have developed and refined a shared physicality, training rhythms and performance vocabulary that is unfamiliar to many UK theatre audiences. What makes Seva and his company unique is the trust and commitment to what they want to do; he has kept close control over who is and who isn’t in the company and consequently has developed a trust and communication system that enables his dancers to deliver exceptionally distilled performances. Forged ‘outside’ the subsidised dance sector, Far From The Norm is creating an alternative choreographic language that is attracting attention from London’s dance critics’ cabal, commissioners, festivals and venues across Europe. Darkin was canny to be the first to commission him for SDT and she won’t be the last.
TuTuMucky offers the programme note: ‘Botis Seva defies traditional classification to offer a distinctly new form of dance that blurs the boundaries between ballet, contemporary and hip hop technique.’ Opening in dusky par-can haze we’re aware of writhing backs isolated in pools of light; with these slithery articulations Seva is attempting to get the company to move differently and unlike anything I’ve seen in the previous seven SDT productions. Shifting their energies and dropping their gravitational centres, he’s trying to school them in the hunger, urgency and articulacy of krump. Dressed in dark mesh tutus, the dancers combine a ballet-backed and first-position stiffness with the unnerving Wheelers from Return To Oz — rigid dolls hovering across the stage, mechanical in body and face.
The narrative pace and emotional zoning doesn’t begin to emerge till over halfway through the 30-minute work; it feels like the dancers need to start dancing 15 minutes before they come on stage so the adrenalin is running and we are immediately dunked into their world. Until that point I saw classically-trained dancers attempting to recreate an alien, krump-inspired language. Harry Clark (trained at Rambert and previously dancing with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures) is particularly exposed in Seva’s choreography, needing to soften his spine and to give himself over to what is being asked. I think it would benefit the dancers if they were to experience and participate in a krump battle, to drink in and taste the emotional shower that spurts from those who krump when they are entirely in that other zone.
The duet between Amy Hollinshead and Southward pivots the energy of the entire work and we see Hollinshead take to krump like a cat giving birth to a fur ball, hissing and verbally banishing her ballet training to birth a new movement language on her body. The transformation of form is the root of the work: seeing bodies begin in one state, transformed to another and then resort back to their default setting. Southward revels in the intensity required and his face channels that intensity whilst his body matches the demands for articulation from his neck to his wrist. From here TuTuMucky begins to build and the electro, glitch noise soundtrack by Torben Lars Sylvest swirls the energy around the dancers and the audience; we begin to be pulled towards the rhythms, potency and urgency of the movement and I get a sense that the dancers finally start to believe; they’ve found Seva’s groove and in taking on his language transform themselves.
When some dancers are able to transform and execute a new language and some really can’t, the effect is a visual unevenness that leaves me unsettled; in a company like SDT I’m left with the question of where the responsibility lies for such unevenness? Is it with Seva who has not communicated or built the necessary trust with the dancers to convince them to give themselves over to his world? Is it the rehearsal director who isn’t noticing the stark differences in the stiffness and supple spines and taking steps to resolve them? Is it the dancers who are unable to execute what is being demanded of them or do not understand what they’re being asked to do? Or is it with Darkin in her choice of bringing a choreographer who is without doubt carving a name for himself but whose language creates an incompatibility with the current company of dancers?
When a choreographer like Seva is invited to make a work on full-time, salaried dancers who exist in a place of comfort and privilege it is impossible for him to recreate the conditions and terrain which he and his company have encountered and which make them so rare. The reality and experience gap is too large and consequently I feel like the two worlds haven’t come together; trust hasn’t been established and they’re still eyeing each other across the choreographic divide. If those who encounter TuTuMucky love what they see, they should seek out the work of Seva’s own company that is offering a choreographic palette, emotional intensity and insight as to where the next wave of British choreography could be going.
“I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.” – Haruki Murakami
Scottish Dance Theatre, Miann, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, April 9
Amy Hollinshead in Fleur Darkin’s Miann (photo: Brian Hartley)
The word ‘miann’ is Gaelic for ‘the ardent desire to know God.’ Ardent is the operative word in Fleur Darkin’s new work for Scottish Dance Theatre not only in terms of the choreography but in the music of The One Ensemble who play live on stage. Miann is also a spiritual work that battles with death and separation not in philosophical terms but in a visceral, personal confrontation that commemorates Darkin’s stepfather. Darkin’s description of the work is every bit as passionate as her choreography: ‘I wanted to create a space that we could share. I wanted the music of The One Ensemble to ring out like a thunderstorm shaking our bodies. I wanted the dancers to remind us that life is felt before it is thought about. I wanted us to taste the fresh water, breathe in forest air and feel the willow under our bare feet. I wanted to prove that feelings are real. I wanted a space where the invisible might be felt. I wanted a space to honour my parent…I wanted to create a gift out of dance.’ Seeing Miann is to embrace these words in physical form.
With no curtain at the Queen Elizabeth Hall we have plenty of time to contemplate the set. Designed by Alexander Ruth and lit by Emma Jones, it looks as if it was conceived for in-the-round performance: a circle of white floor in the middle of which is what looks like a sundial or a sail on its mast. All around the white circle are bundles of dry branches and beyond them towards the back are the spaces for the four musicians and their instruments. On either side at the front of the stage are two urns of flowers that Audrey Rogero and Naomi Murray pick up and hold like living statues at the entrance to a cemetery. The smoke that issues from the urns is probably dry ice that looks like incense for there is no fragrance. I suspect Darkin’s original idea of immersing our olfactory senses in the production has been compromised by health and safety (another administrative incursion into the production is that after Rogero and Murray circulate with their urns through the audience and return backstage the QEH reminds us to turn off our mobile phones).
In her program note, Darkin references the Callanish stone circle on Lewis, a landscape in which she ‘wanted us all to get lost…with no story, no orientation points, only beckoning paths.’ When Amy Hollinshead first appears on stage she has muddied limbs and hands as if she has been running and slipping among the stones on a wet day; she carries with her the evidence of the wild countryside but it is not embodied in Ruth’s clean and dry construction; I keep wishing for a simple stage of turf or peat. Hollinshead sets the physical tone of the choreography in jumping frenziedly, repeatedly, exhaustively to the sound of her exertion. It is a motif that will return poignantly at the end suffused with uncontrolled grief and anger. On this occasion it is the anticipation of Francesco Ferrari’s arrival — the loved one — who wraps her, after some trepidation on her part and some coaxing on his, in his long cloak (Ruth’s costumes, as one might expect from a fashion designer, excel here). The other dancers enter as different manifestations of filial grief: a stoic Quang Kien Van in a dance with ritual overtones, a tentative or agnostic Matthew Robinson and a maternal Aya Steigman carrying her child (Murray) clasped to her front. The ensuing mêlée of dancers running, rolling and hurling themselves to the floor is like a wild mating game of sensual, brutal proportions. But this is not narrative; this is raw, primal emotion expressed in familiar human patterns; the message is in the rawness not the patterns. Steigman and Murray work like demons to rip up part of the floor to reveal turf: a funeral plot before the grave is dug. Artur Grabarczyk dances a powerful, erotically charged duet with Murray while Steigman remains motionless on the grave and the other dancers make their reptilian way around the branches like the circular path of life. When Ferrari has completed his circle, Murray brings in a crown of flowers with which she finally crowns him like a chosen one. He watches Hollinshead don a black mourning shroud and the sundial/sail element becomes a metaphor for the river Styx that the Greeks represented as the division between life and death. As Ferrari passes through to the other side, Hollinshead tries to follow. Her final outburst and the communal response is an apotheosis in dance and music of heroic proportions.
The depth of Darkin’s emotion is clearly a powerful creative force. Her physical movement phrases have the authenticity of grief and anger and she has harnessed the force of the music to amplify them. She seems to drag her dancers into the ring and they give themselves fully to this production, a quality in Scottish Dance Theatre that is impressive. When I first saw them it was at the very beginning of Darkin’s appointment in a double bill of Jo Strømgren’s Winter, Again and Victor Quijada’s Second Coming; it was a wonderful cast but one of the difficulties with a change in artistic direction is a possible (some may say inevitable) shakeup in dancers. I hope Darkin can keep the present dancers together; they are well worth watching. In a performance like Miann there are enormous benefits when the dancers are used to each other, open to each other and familiar with the way they each move.
If only the setting could descend to the earthy intensity of the music, costumes and the choreography…
I have invited my friend Ian Abbott to contribute to these musings on dance. As some of you will already know, Ian was until recently Head of Creative Programs at Pavilion Dance Southwest in Bournemouth and I was always grateful for his encouragement through invitations to review various shows or summits he had planned there. We would also cross paths at performances elsewhere. If there was something I really enjoyed I would say to him, Ian you should program this. ‘I already have’ was the inevitable reply. Ian has now moved to Scotland and I am very happy to welcome his thoughts on performances he is seeing there.
Scottish Dance Theatre, YAMA, Dundee Rep Theatre, February 12
Scottish Dance Theatre in Damien Jalet’s YAMA (photo: Brian Hartley)
“Entering a novel is like going on a climb in the mountains: You have to learn the rhythms of respiration – acquire the pace. Otherwise you stop right away.” Umberto Eco
Mountains invite a challenge.
Scottish Dance Theatre, under the artistic direction of Fleur Darkin, at first commissioned Damien Jalet to create YAMA (Japanese for mountain) as half of a double bill, a munro if you like, in February 2014. Originally inspired by his trip to Japan and the Yamabushi’s (a practising group of ascetic monks) pagan and animalistic rituals, Jalet was invited back to re-build and re-birth a new mountain in the shadow of Dundee’s extinct volcano, The Law.
With a low, rumbling electronic soundscape provided by Winter Family, the opening frames of YAMA created a set of the most striking and original experiences I’ve come across in a theatre. As an opening and immovable central focus, the revelation and consistency of Jim Hodges’ ‘abstract geometric form’ sink hole provided the only channel through which the Scottish Dance critters could arrive or depart. Legs began to slither and ooze from the surface leaving me unsure of the number of bodies present. A giant amorphous flesh ball – with each individual covered by Jean-Paul Lespagnard’s nude shorts and torso-brushing horse-hair facial stockings – started to divide into smaller iterations, writhing and mesmerising me for over 20 minutes: I realised I was already on the journey with them, halfway up the mountain. Through a careful handling and guiding of my attention, I realised I’d been sucked in by the physical concatenation and snap and flow of bodies; the way they’d scurry and come together like a hairy chorus drawn from the brush of Busby Berkeley’s undulating worship of geometric forms and patterns was verging on sorcery. I didn’t want to leave this brave and unusual world.
“Never measure the height of a mountain until you have reached the top.” Dag Hammarskjold
YAMA is the total theatrical realisation of a mountain; the dizzying and breathless ascent, the embrace of the summit and a dawning that the journey home will never contain a place so high again. Ritualistically the performers removed their hair and revealed their faces for the first time. The sonic and visual world was broken. An evolution had taken place and the final 25 minutes consisted of what others would recognise as contemporary dance. The intensity of the choreography – the dancers matched what Jalet painted on their bodies – increased until the striking finale of the channel reclaiming the bodies which had birthed them 55 minutes ago. I left with an increasing sense of regret of what might have been. Had that strong and pioneering world that was so well crafted in the first half been continued I believe YAMA would have been an incredibly courageous and special work.
YAMA invites a challenge and it’s a work that deserves to be encountered and conquered. Scottish Dance Theatre is a rare company in the UK – they house a set of dancers equal to any choreographic challenge – and are traversing a daring choreographic path with confidence and without fear.
“Great things are done when men and mountains meet.” William Blake
Scottish Dance Theatre, Double Bill, The Place, March 8.
Lewis Wilkins and Eve Ganneau in Second Coming. Photo Maria Falconer
Joan Clevillé draws me so convincingly into his subterfuge that I can forgive Victor Quijada for the beginning of his Second Coming; I had checked the running time of the show and had booked a train that would give me just enough time between the end of the performance and the departure from Victoria station. When Clevillé, who is rehearsal director of the company as well as a dancer, announces that there will be a delay to the start of the show — he has an excellent command of English but his searching for a word and his roving accentuation underlines the hesitation and insecurity of his explanations — I feel my comfort zone shrink rapidly. Luckily I am sitting next to Chantal Guevara who surreptitiously checks online and reassured me that this is in fact the beginning of the show (but don’t tell anyone). It’s a forewarning that we will be kept in a constant state of unpreparedness throughout the evening as there is no clear demarcation between true and false, belief and non-belief. Even the score by Jasper Gahunia erases boundaries, seamlessly interpolating turntable riffs into classical music and vice versa. Quijada and Gahunia are clearly on the same wavelength.
Twenty minutes into the show, Clevillé admits to the dramatic subterfuge, and starts another, but we are now attuned: the choreographer has been fired. It is a harmless, self-deprecating put-down of choreographers as macho control freaks with anger management issues, but, as Clevillé states modestly, there is still some amazing dancing to come and he saves the best for last: his own solo. What follows is much more, for although it starts (after a false start) with his slow, deliberate, finger-tracing solo to a phrase of a Bach prelude, it develops with Mozartian richness into a confrontational duet with Jori Kerremans on a spirited phrase of Paganini, and then into a trio with Nicole Guarino on a phrase from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 13 (Emma Jones’ must have been dancing along to get the cues so perfectly). It is as if Quijada has arranged an epic breaking battle for these three composers who then join forces to play variations on their respective themes and by the end we are all laughing and cheering so loudly because Quijada, Gahunia, the three dancers and Jones have it all down so perfectly.
Matthew Robinson cuts through the applause (he has to wait a while) to deliver his critique of this ‘performance-non-performance thing’ as ‘overworked pseudo-intellectual rubbish’, but he has to continue his defiant monologue in defense of dancers while being dragged slowly by his collar around the stage.
Quijada has reached the summit but there is no lessening of quality as the ensemble descends the mountainside climbing through and under each other in a grouping that leaves behind the opening images of birds and street gangs, flocks and individuals, suspicion and tension as it slips freely to the point of dispersal. Only Eve Ganneau and Lewis Wilkins are left to deliver a duet that is as magical as it is off balance, as heartfelt as it is artfully constructed and which ends on a mysterious note of inversion.
It is rare to find a company with such a diverse range of qualities and a delight to see choreography that brings out those qualities to perfection. We are doubly fortunate this evening for it happens twice.
Lewis Wilkins, Giulia Montalbano, Julian Juárez, Jori Kerremans, Joan Clevillé, Nicole Guarino and Eve Ganneau in Jo Stromgren’s Winter, Again.
Jo Strømgren is as much a theatre director as a choreographer; in his Winter, Again he brings together both drama and dance in a fluent form that integrates visual imagery and choreography so well that the dancers could well be speaking. Strømgren’s text is the cold and bitter emotion of a selection of songs from Schubert’s Winterreise (played by fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes and sung by Ian Bostridge) though he can never take quite seriously the high romanticism of Wilhelm Müller’s verse. Instead he mischievously juxtaposes Schubert’s music with the bloodthirsty, churlish actions of an isolated hunting community dressed in shades of ghostly white (by Bregje van Balen) that lives its daily fight for survival with as little emotion as the winter itself. Echoes of Ibsen and Chekhov abound in the chilling screams, pistol shots, dead birds and other furry carcasses but Strømgren has us laughing helplessly from the beginning with his brand of dark, irreverent humour. Not even the fate of a young girl (Natalie Trewinnard) who spends the entire performance searching for her eyeballs that the pigtailed beauty Maria Hayday finds in a tin and mindlessly drops in the snow can prompt a sense of sympathy. Trewinnard finally finds her eyes and pops them back in, but her focal adjustment is so masterfully funny — and Strømgren’s dramatic sense so seasoned — that her subsequent suicide by pistol shot that brings the performance to an end is less of an emotional charge than a dramatic full stop.
This program is the parting gift of former artistic director Janet Smith. Fleur Darkin is in the seat now. In the evening’s program she writes that ‘contemporary dance is a form that lives by destroying its past’ and yet both of this evening’s remarkable works make creative use of the past to find new forms rather than destroying it. Scottish Dance Theatre is, in its present form, a gifted company and while it has such a rich repertoire may the only kind of destruction under discussion be creative destruction. And long may it last.
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