Rambert New Choreography

Posted: January 2nd, 2015 | Author: | Filed under: Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Rambert New Choreography

Rambert New Choreographers, The Place, December 16

Dane Hurst in O'dabo (photo: John Ross)

Dane Hurst in O’dabo (photo: John Ross)

A student handed in a paper to his professor. The next time the professor saw the student he asked him if he considered the paper the best he could have done. Nonplussed, the student reflected, re-read his text, made some changes and re-submitted the paper the following day. When the professor saw him again he asked the same question. The student thought he must have missed something and decided to rework the paper one final time. On submitting it again, and faced with the same question, he replied with conviction, “Yes, sir.” “Then I will read it,” responded the professor.

A ticket-paying member of an audience, like the professor, has a similar expectation of the work he or she is about to see. Even if the performance comprises new choreography from dancers within a company trying their hand at the form, one wants to see works that have found their final form. Works that are still in a process of evolution should remain in the studio or be shown in an open rehearsal. As the evening in question involves Rambert, what excuse could possibly be wanting to open the doors of their new home for such a purpose?

Of five works on the program at The Place, only one has found its form, and that is Dane Hurst’s paean to Nelson Mandela, O’dabo. The other four, for all their crafting, are closer to sketches: interesting only in the context of the final form but as the final form they lose their cogency. Artistic Director of Rambert, Mark Baldwin, explains at the beginning of the evening that this annual platform is a necessary step for aspiring choreographers within the company towards making work for the main stage. Patricia Okenwa, who is working towards her first commission for the company in 2016, admits in her program notes that No. 1 Convergence is a process, but this is not her first attempt at choreography; she is experienced in this program and should, with a commission in the offing, be closer to bringing the parts of No. 1 Convergence into a formal unity. Choreographed on six dancers, the convergence of patterns is evident but the convergence of overall form is not.

Luke Ahmet’s duet Unspoken Dialect starts from an interesting premise of making internal dialogue visible, but it is a premise that lends itself more to a solo than to a duet. Adam Blyde and Carolyn Bolton in effect perform two solos that happen to intersect on the same stage at the same time. They are both striking dancers but the reason for them dancing together is missing and this detracts from the ideas Ahmet sets out to develop.

Some ideas for choreography seem destined not to translate and Simone Damberg Würtz’s RIFT, based on an old ad from her native Denmark illustrating the fatal consequences of not wearing a seatbelt whilst driving is a case in point. It might have helped to create the aural impact of a crash to set a clear, dramatic context, but instead Damberg Würtz takes an existential idea of ‘the unshakeable sense of guilt a death can have on the conscience’ on which to base her physical exploration. Such cerebral concerns reduce dance space and time in RIFT to a stillness unrelieved by an accompanying Danish text that, if it has significance for Damberg Würtz, is not shared with those of us in the audience who don’t understand Danish.

It is in Pierre Tappon’s Related that a clear choreographic idea begins to develop between the trio of Liam Francis, Antonia Hewitt and Stephen Wright. Tappon calls it a short story and sets up a stage of symbolic sculptural elements — a rock-like doorway and pedestal — on which and around which the characters dance. In the story, Hewitt appears to be a siren whose initial allure fails to win over the two men, perhaps because it is Francis who demonstrates a palpable allure in the fluidity of his dancing and the movement he is given to explore.

Hurst explains O’dabo (a Yoruba expression meaning ‘until I return’ or ‘goodbye’) as ‘a physical reaction to my reflections on the many faces of Nelson Mandela.’ Hurst, who was brought up in South Africa, has made the country his focus once before (The Window) in a Rambert choreographic evening, and his connection with his subject is visceral; his inspiration flows not only into his movement but through all the elements of the work — the first movement of Paul Gladstone Reid’s Symphony of Dust and Air, the richly coloured carpets laid out so carefully, Lucy Hansom’s lighting and Hurst’s costume of cloth and powder. He expresses in his body what he imagines it is like to build hope, to have a vision, to counter frailty, face defeat and emerge victorious and he has the courage to keep his choreographic language close to the ground, transforming his internal conviction into the physical symbolism of Mandela’s journey. This transformation breaks down only when Hurst defaults to classical technique in the form of turns and barrel rolls that appear more about the dancer than the master. If he can develop the early imagery and follow it through to its apotheosis rather than borrowing from a foreign idiom, O’dabo will gain in cohesion, something Mandela himself championed.

 

Abigail Reynolds: Double Fold

Posted: January 18th, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Performance | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Abigail Reynolds: Double Fold

Abigail Reynolds, Double Fold, Rambert Studio, Upper Ground, December 9

Double Fold installation

Abigail Reynolds is the current artist-in-residence at the Rambert Dance Company and to celebrate the company’s move to their new home on Upper Ground, she conceived Double Fold as a choreographic work in response to an installation of suspended acoustic panels that were cut out from the walls of the company’s old rehearsal space in Chiswick. In their recycled form they hang in the centre of the magnificent new Rambert Studio like an exploded axonometric view of soft interlocking planes. What attracted Reynolds to these panels was their symbolism: they contain — if only we could decode their stored experience — the voices, breath, sweat (and smoke) of thirty years of rehearsals: a material history of the company that provides a somatic link between old and new.

Chairs for the audience arranged around the installation define the performing area. The panels and Malcolm Glanville’s clean lighting create a sense of architectural design reminiscent of the intersecting planes in Gerrit Reitveld’s work, which was in turn influenced by the ideas of Piet Mondrian and the de Stijl movement. The positive and negative spaces create a small theatre within this expansive studio, focusing our attention from architecture to dance.

Hannah Rudd is the first of the five dancers to ‘enter’ the installation, bowing deferentially in front of a horizontal plane before crawling under it and following a maze-like path through the panels, mirroring the material shapes with her own. The fabric panels are hung to the scale of the dancers’ anatomy and the other four (Kym Alexander, Carolyn Bolton, Patricia Okenwa and Simone Damberg Würtz), loosely costumed in earthy colours by Rosalind Keep, likewise respond to the shapes with their bodies: placing their arms either side of a panel, kneeling or back-bending to fit neatly into an open space, the delicate planes broken or enhanced by sculptural movement. How you see the dancers in relation to the panels is a question of perspective, so after the fifteen-minute work is performed once, the audience is asked to move seats to see it again from another angle. It is an idea drawn from the art gallery, where the public has the freedom to wander around an object instead of contemplating it from a fixed point. It also derives from the cubist construct of seeing a single subject simultaneously from different angles. The gesture is reciprocal: while Reynolds is feeding the dancers with the richness of her visual training, the dancers define the visual elements with the quality of their dynamics.

Hannah Rudd, Patricia Okenwa in Double Fold

Hannah Rudd, Patricia Okenwa, Kym Alexander and Carolyn Bolton in Double Fold (photo: Abigail Reynolds)

The movement for Double Fold was conceived by Reynolds in close collaboration with Kirill Burlov, a Rambert company dancer and choreographer, whose role was to bridge whatever gap existed between visual and movement vocabulary. The unity of the dance and its environment is evidence of the clarity of Reynolds’ vision and of the subtlety of Burlov’s contribution: the panels interlock in the same way the dancers interlock; body images are formed in and through the cutout spaces, like photographs; a torso here, a foot there, endlessly rich in visual imagery. The five dancers move through the spaces as if through a piazza on a sunny day, alone, in duets or trios, framing and being framed by the light and shade, never separated from their architectural environment. Boundaries were challenged in the creative process: Reynolds had not initially conceived the panels as being part of the dance, but Burlov instinctively suggested the dancers wind themselves up in them like coats or scarves (Rudd, under the watchful eye of Okenwa, for a moment seems to revisit the fate of Isadora Duncan).

‘Double fold’ is a librarian’s term for testing the brittleness of paper by folding it one way and folding it back again. Seeing the dance from a different angle, we are in a sense folding the dance back on itself, but its resilience is enhanced. Dancers that had been in shadow are now in the light and choreographic processes are revealed afresh, countering the ephemeral nature of dance. No live performance is the same as another, and even here, back to back, Double Fold reveals new qualities and images, and the score by Emika, which begins in dense electro-acoustic sound and softens to a solo piano, filters more clearly into our consciousness as yet another overlapping, interlocking element.

After the performance there is a panel discussion hosted by Rambert’s artistic director, Mark Baldwin, on art and dance with Reynolds, Michael Craig-Martin and Catherine Yass. The discussion both derives from what we have seen and suggests a basis for continued exploration, something Rambert does so well.

On the way out, in the light-filled lobby, are two portraits of Madame Rambert, one more formal, the other quite free in the style of Isadora Duncan. Reynolds created the distinctive frames, and seems to have framed her dance within these very parameters of Madame Rambert’s image.