Resolution 2019: works by Cisarikova, Green and Harris-Walters, January 25

Resolution 2019: works by Cisarikova, Green and Harris-Walters, January 25

All the works on this evening’s Resolution program begin with cogent ideas that have strong emotional integrity. Michaela Cisarikova’s I Love Myself, Do You? examines the duality of identity and self-worth, Sara Green transforms her own experiences of major spinal surgery in Burnt Out and Dani Harris-Walters traces a journey in search of fatherhood in Happy Father’s Day. Both Cisarikova and Green use striking imagery at the start of their respective works while Harris-Walters uses his presence alone to reveal his biologically-inspired choreographic exploration. While each beginning holds promise, in a Darwinian sense Harris-Walters is the only one to keep that promise throughout, ensuring its survival somewhere in our choreographic imagination.

What happens to a work that begins well but trails off in interest? Where does the interest go and why? Ideas in choreographic terms are argued primarily through the body and visual imagery, working with music as an emotional and rhythmic support. Each of this evening’s works places the body in a central role; Cisarikova suggests ‘the old Cherokee fable of two wolves fighting within you’ by the initial entangled embrace between herself and Jenn Vogtle; Green divides her persona into four performers each shaking off their oversized jackets as a metaphor of disintegration, while Harris-Walters takes us through his own body’s encounter with the process of procreation. It could be argued that Harris-Walters has an advantage by using text; without it the physical component would not add up to much of an argument, but it is the way he gleefully pairs text with gestures and unassuming hip hop sequences that engages the imagination of the audience. Borrowing from his own material, this process of engagement is like a mating ritual that depends on the maintenance of stimulus for its successful outcome. 

I Love Myself, Do You? opens on a billowing swathe of greenish gold parachute silk suspended diagonally from an upper corner covering much of the stage. In the middle of the silk is a hole through which Vogtle is supposed to rise in the dark on the shoulders of someone hidden underneath but a premature lighting cue finds her on her way up a little unsteadily and the magic is lost; it is on such small details that the fate of visual imagery depends. More importantly, for its overpowering spatial influence, the silk seems to have a relatively small impact on the work’s concept; Cisarikova joins Vogtle in the centre opening for a duet, seen from the waist up, that has a sculptural quality of both a physical and a psychological battle, but when the silk is later withdrawn its significance is called into question. Simeon Miller’s lighting makes clever use of silhouette projections inside the silk that present alternative identities, but when Anna Guzak slides out from under the silk, her role in the duality of good and evil seems superfluous. Ross Allchurch’s score accompanies the work but is not sufficiently anchored to keep it together. 

In Burnt Out Sara Green, with assistant choreographer Sara Kaspersen, sets out to translate experiences and memories of surgery through the filters of illustration (Simon Gardner) and music (Burnt Outby Jamie Jay and Carlos Posada of Low Island). The opening sequence, with costumes (and perhaps makeup) by Auriol Williamson and strong (unattributed) lighting, holds the space together in a tight theatrical form that has emotional clout, but as the four performers (Olly Bell, Steff D’Arcy, Orion Hart and Murielle Werthauer) disperse the space dissolves into a long improvised freeform section like a series of filmic takes all joined together and superimposed. Perhaps Gardner’s creative input may have helped us decode this section, but watching performers in various permutations trying to scale the back wall on the open stage has limited allure. Green has already worked with Low Island on their music videos but their relationship is quite different here, more complex and less well defined. 

The beginning of Happy Father’s Day is almost accidental, rather like the meeting of a sperm and an egg around which the work revolves. But Harris-Walters hooks us unerringly into his monologue with allusions and an imaginative acronym of Seven-Up while identifying himself not only with the gang leader, Tess Tyrone, but as the biological hero of the story. Once the penny has dropped, he is fully in charge of the stage, and whatever he does uncannily insinuates or illustrates his path. The image that remains is the final one, where after a caterpillar-like spiral trajectory towards the centre of the stage his head slides into the spotlight of conception. Mission accomplished.

Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende, Black Holes

Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende, Black Holes, The Place, June 21

Seke Chimutengwende and Alexandrina Hemsley in Black Holes (photo: Katarzyna Perlak)

“How do you know I’m real? I’m not real. I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real. If you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as a reality; I come to you as a myth. Because that’s what black people are. Myths. I came from a dream that black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a present sent to you by your ancestors.” – Sun Ra

Alexandrina Hemsley and Seke Chimutengwende are darkness newscasters exposing the black holes in white history. Black Holes is a cosmic 70-minute orbit that sees them ‘speculating on how to be with their bodies that carry histories of marginalisation and anti-blackness’ while combining ‘elements of Science Fiction and personal narrative to propel the personal and the mythic onto a cosmic scale.’

With a substantial co-authored text delivered alongside their labours, improvisations and choreography we are at once distanced by their static delivery and use of an Afrosurreal language (after D. Scot Miller’s Afrosurreal Manifesto) before being brought proximate by their lived realities of racism, persistent micro-aggressions and the all too familiar fetishization of black hair. They are sayers delivering strange news from another star; a deliberate and disturbing fleshing of ignored personal and conquered histories including Alexandrina recalling how she had her neck pinched in a jazz club in Gloucester.

“I’m trying to speak to write the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.” – Octavia. E. Butler

Arriving into the Robin Howard Dance Theatre I am unsure what we are watching with Alexandrina and Seke already on stage lit beautifully by Simeon Miller’s design that could have been plucked from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Are they the last two survivors on a space ship crashed into an unknown star? Are they interplanetary buccaneers looting the corpses of a long dead splinter cell? Or are they a pair of prophets oscillating between the portals of our world and theirs? Their physical language remains consistent throughout with Seke using his willowy spine-flicking and flashing-out limbs as he rides the score; he is all dart while Alexandrina is totally coily; internalised, groove-filled musicality roaring through her body playing between the desire for stillness and the necessity for movement.

With a set design by Rosie Elnile and Eleanor Sikorski that features afrofuturist asteroids (large, black plastic-wrapped cumbersome cuboids tied with thin chains), both performers labour deliberately, pulling these objects/histories/anchors around the stage at regular intervals leaving slow glacial pushing patterns behind; the weight of their intention and the heaviness of their labour leaves much residue on the eyes long after the 70 minutes have elapsed.

“This success permits us to hope that after thirty or forty years of observation on the new Planet [Neptune], we may employ it, in its turn, for the discovery of the one following it in its order of distances from the Sun. Thus, at least, we should unhappily soon fall among bodies invisible by reason of their immense distance, but whose orbits might yet be traced in a succession of ages, with the greatest exactness, by the theory of Secular Inequalities.” – Urbain Le Verrier

Black Holes uses orbit as a mode of creation and as a means of receiving. We see and hear repeated choreographic patterns, poetic text and black light; sometimes the asteroids are downstage, sometimes clustered, sometimes circled. These movements are not invisibled by stage hands in the dark quietly making ready for the next scene; instead we see Alexandrina and Seke as the movers taking the time that time takes to place them where they want; an exercise in space and patience. Hearing repeated phrases (“It was like the bath was already empty and you take the plug out while the bathtub goes into the plughole”) and encountering familiar physicalities leaves space for other imagined and existing works that Black Holes sits alongside; Rachael Young’s Nightclubbing, Project O’s Voodoo, Reni-Eddo Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race and Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm‘s Br’er Cotton.

Lacking any real sci-fi weight (Seke revealed in the post-show conversation that their writing process brought a number of Google-lite searches picking out language from Octavia E. Butler, Brian Cox and Sun-Ra etc. that they remixed and respliced with their own words), Black Holes successfully creates language runs that act as the Sun to the smaller choreographic planetary interventions and would suit a radio/streaming audience in their own right. In contrast to the rising tide of people of colour looking at Afrofuturism and untold/deleted histories, we are still awash in the saturated presence of abstract work that exists solely in the black hole of many white male egos jumping on the science/space/technology bandwagon in order to fill their choreographic deficiencies; Black Holes has more integrity, offers a place for stimulation and reflection and leaves a valuable indentation in head, heart and space.