The time it takes for a dance work to simmer, manifest and make its way out to the public can take anywhere from six months, to a year-and-a-half to five years plus; it usually depends on a number of factors including access to resources, levels of existing privilege and what platforms or partners are needed for distribution.
The speed at which we have seen works microwaved, packaged and distributed in the last nine months is somewhat akin to the current dialogue around the production, regulation and distribution of the new COVID vaccines in the UK. We’ve seen processes that have previously taken 10 years or more accelerated at an unprecedented pace demonstrating that things can be done if barriers are removed.
In a timeline of response, the dance works (and other art forms) that we’re seeing this autumn are actually an articulation of thinking from those first three or four months of the first UK lockdown and its effect on artists. Such works could be viewed as re-presenting an emotional digest of that time, foregrounding those feelings and bringing them into a sharp relief or understood as a shedding, a letting-go and removal of those feelings from their systems.
Premiered by Serendipity on October 26 during Black History Month as part of their Let’s Dance International Frontiers (LDIF21) preview, (Re)United is a short interactive film by Alleyne Dance that was available online for three days via a newly-built website from Mukund Lakshman.
Directed by Marc Antoine, the film was inspired by the real-life separation of Mo Farrah from his twin brother Hassan; they were torn apart at the outbreak of war in Djibouti during their childhood. With Sir Mo Farrar’s recent appearance on the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in November, a larger audience is now aware of the story. In the film, identical twin sisters Kristina and Sadé Alleyne have interpreted the anxiety of separation alongside the familial bonds of hope, love and connection.
In a nice touch, the interactivity in (Re)United fits the thematic driver of the work; after a short two-minute sequence in which we see the faces and isolated body parts of Kristina and Sadé in extreme close up, documenting their intimacy, their bonds, their tender huggings with each other, we have to choose. In a moment of split-screen forking, will we choose Kristina or Sadé? Which twin do we watch? Which do we leave behind? We are suddenly responsible for their fracturing and disconnection. After clicking on one of them, a technically beautiful and seamless window scroll triggers this fracture and reveals our choice of solo twin alone in a derelict empty room in a cottage, where for the next seven minutes they dance in moments of frustration, collapse and strength; it’s an entire three-act narrative arc in a tiny slither of time. After seeing one twin, we get the chance to watch the other; time is re-wound to the point of separation to see how the other dealt physically with the separation over the course of another seven-minute film.
Recognising the very real differences in internet speeds and video latency, there are at least four quality options depending on the viewer’s broadband connection, but in the highest quality settings (Re)United is lush; it has an incredible colour palette and is full of signature Alleyne Dance exquisite sequences that fill the screen for 20 minutes.
Because of the uncertainty of both COVID and Brexit that we are still experiencing, the notion of reunification has the ability to connect to audiences and reads in multiple ways; the coming together of families again for Christmas after so many months apart, a longing ode and love letter to live dance and the desire to see it live with other bodies again or an antidote to the UK’s relationship with the EU three and half years after the referendum vote and with the transition period less than a month away.
In terms of concept, production and execution (Re)United is a step above many of the plethora of short dance films that have been released during the last eight months and is testament to the work of director Marc Antoine, Alleyne Dance and their producer Grace Okereke.
In a glorious 20-minute hug of aural intimacy, Quanimacy, a binaural sound work created by disabled artist and choreographer Claire Cunningham, is an asymmetric conversation and reflection on their relationship with their crutches, the queering of their body and the concept of queer animacy.
Commissioned by The Place and hosted on their website from October 15 to November 13, it was presented as part of Splayed Festival, a suite of artists energised by queerness as an approach to creativity curated by Amy Bell.
Having Cunningham’s Glaswegian burr nestle in my ears alongside the voice and theories of scholar, rabbi, and activist for disability Prof. Julia Watts Belser is a delight. Quanimacy invites an attention, offers a place to sit in these conjured worlds in comfort whilst providing shifts of perspective on how Cunningham and Belser relate to their crutches and wheelchair.
The tiny personal revelations and historic symmetries of Fatima Whitbread and how she was ridiculed by the media and school friends because ‘she looked like a man’ but also revered for that same strength in javelin throwing drew parallels to how Claire felt about their body. As the use of their crutches slowly made them stronger it ‘took them further away from the feminine as that was what they thought they were supposed to be’; it’s these analogies, these moments of micro and macro testimony that create the architectural strength of Quanimacy.
The words are supported by the musical arrangements of Matthias Herrmann and the dramaturgical care of Luke Pell, whilst a transcript of the entire work (beautifully designed by Bethany Wells) is also available. They all offer an emotional scaffold which helps to achieve that narrative clarity and personal intimacy which are the satisfying threads and reoccurring hallmarks of Cunningham’s works.
Whilst (Re)United and Quanimacy were available for extended periods of time, Something Smashing was a live Zoom event presented by Citymoves during DanceLive2020 on October 15. Something Smashing is – usually – a live performance platform for dancers and musicians to encounter, improvise and experiment with each other’s practice. This iteration at DanceLive was the first time that they’d presented it online and was curated by Skye Reynolds (due to her ongoing and strong relationship with Citymoves) and performed/devised with fellow co-curators Tess Letham, Graeme Wilson and Something Smashing regular Mike Parr-Burman.
With over 40 folks digitally gathered, our event chair, Citymoves’ Hayley Durward, started us off. For the next 60 minutes we saw three 12-15-minute home-based improvisatory sets from dancers Reynolds and Letham and musicians Parr-Burman and Graeme Wilson culminating in a Q&A.
The idea of watching an improvisatory anything over Zoom is usually enough to make me want to gnaw a pebble-dashed chalkboard, but the Something Smashing team has been putting on regular events across Edinburgh for a number of years so their improvising and communication muscles are taut and well honed. I was intrigued to see how it translated online.
From each of the performers there was a consideration of the frame of the screen and what parts of their body/instrument we could see during each set; as we have collectively been existing in Zoom boxes for the last nine months it was nice to see some creativity in scale, proximity and perspective in a close up strangled guitar head, floating midriffs and claw hands coming from the top of the screen alongside moving and handling the camera mid-set to re-orient our view. What was appreciated is that Tess and Skye not only changed costume in between each set, but moved to a different part of their house; this palette cleanse ensured that the possibility of boredom from a static visual plane was removed and demonstrated an awareness of how the audience was receiving Something Smashing.
The highlight was set three as we had both musicians in play and both dancers, but this time two new boxes appeared in the Zoom room; Reynolds and Letham had introduced an additional camera into their space, so now we saw their movement from a dual perspective. Six boxes and multiple things to choose. This was a feast. If I wanted to watch Parr-Burman play his guitar with a battery-operated whisk I could, if I wanted to see Letham open a bottle of wine from the fridge I could, and if I wanted to see Reynolds rolling citrus fruits around her kitchen I could.
Technically there was no latency, so we could see how sounds were responding to bodies or bodies were responding to sounds. However it was tuning into different rooms with their different energies and architectural restrictions that really sustained my interest. What the Something Smashing team has demonstrated is that as a live event it works online; the live presence is translated into a digital event and we’re able to relish those instant compositions in their homes from our living rooms.
The commonality between each of the works is that these are artists who are already deep within their own groove; they have a clearly established practice and are able to articulate the what and the why of their outputs. Having this confidence and depth has enabled them to move into new formats and new territories with an ease that many others haven’t been able to navigate. Their conceptual rigour and exploration of themes which are already familiar has enabled them to port an idea that is firmly rooted in their wider and established practice. Each work is an absolute delight.
Hannah Nicklin, Equations For A Moving Body, Summerhall, August 9; Rosana Cade, Walking:Holding, Forest Fringe, August 17, and Skye Reynolds, Pitch, Dance Base, August 17.
Skye Reynolds in Pitch (photo: Lucas Kao)
“A self is not something static, tied up in a pretty parcel and handed to the child, finished and complete. A self is always becoming.” – Madeline L’Engle
The self is firmly on show at Edinburgh Fringe Festival (as it is every year). There’s a constant examination and excavation of the self; performers offering a sliver of their lives to the audience in exchange for attention and time. How much can we see and are we allowed to see? When does dance, performance and live art really reveal itself (or the self’)?
Pitch is Skye Reynolds’ 30-minute solo, made in collaboration with Jo Fong, which she describes as ‘…a realisation: how are we living our lives? The act of selling oneself, selling an idea.’ This is a constant in the life of the independent, self-produced choreographer; selling themselves to venues, festivals and programmers to try and make what they’re offering appeal to the dance taste makers of the UK. Although there’s little choreographed dancing, there’s oodles of giddy movement interspersed with text which Reynolds delivers with aplomb; through her ebullience and constant refraction of her self and her history we see how a self can become centred — she offers us constant crumbs of personal milestones: playing the good wife and the whore; dreaming about David Bowie, playing the virgin in Pina Bausch’s Rite of Spring, truth bending about working with Kylie Minogue and the time she was in China pretending to be an animal in a perspex box. She leaves us no time to dwell on how these moments impacted her (or how they affect our impression of her) as she skittishly flits from one revelation to the next. She’s selling herself, her story and her experience to us. Are we buying? I think we are.
In the second half, Reynolds begins to pull out from her big black box pre-scripted texts about things that perhaps she and we could care a little more for: Brexit, Belgium, Syria, Calais and dozens more, macro issues that feel an infinity away from the first half. Beginning with a micro focus on the self and then scaling up and shifting onto the world stage is an intelligent way to anchor and shift our thoughts to global issues we are collectively facing that should warrant greater attention. Mid-way through the work Reynolds blends life and art even further as we hear an overly long home recording of her daughter Tallulah playing piano and practising her Misty Copeland; it’s a fine rendition but the impact is made within the first verse and chorus and we don’t need to hear the rest. After a short recitation of REM’s Losing My Religion Reynolds abruptly leaves the stage along with the spotlight that has been chasing her around for the entire show. Just as we think it’s an ending Tallulah herself emerges to sing an original song whilst pinning up a hand-written note that invites the audience to donate to Plan UK, an education scheme for girls in Africa (after three performances nearly £100 has been donated). The impact would have been heightened if Reynolds had stayed and watched her daughter sing so we could see that familial connection; it would have amplified all the different selves that she and we present to the world.
Scattered amongst Pitch there are echoes of the way Wendy Houstoun (Reynold’s has been a performer in Houstoun’s Stupid Women) presents her work, from the witty and rambling (though actually carefully constructed) word association to the visible control of the soundtrack through an mp3 player and making social commentary on the dance world, too. Pitch and Reynolds happily flirt on the artifice-to-reality spectrum with an intelligent construction, humourous delivery and buckets of vitality. We are introduced to what Reynolds was, is and could be; it offers an intriguing possibility of how Pitch could sit with a companion piece (authored by Reynolds or somebody else) that might allow us to dwell on, get under her skin of and make us feel a little more uncomfortable with ourselves.
“So you might say, ‘Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?’ Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality — so the function of art is to make things — to show: ‘Hang on, this is real.‘” – Simon McBurney
In the act of opening up on stage, does the level of virtuosic performance equate to the scale of trauma and of personal revelation from an artist? Does the fact that the more we hear about the tapestry of their life mean we should connect and empathise more?
Hannah Nicklin’s Equations for a Moving Body is an elegy to endurance and she describes it as ‘A story about the physiology of endurance — when our brains tell our bodies to stop — and the psychology of continuing.’ The psychology of extreme athletes is a rich research field; there are always people fitter and faster than you. However there is a set of traits which such athletes often share: curiosity, persistence, lack of fear and sense of boldness. This is a performance about prowess, mastery and the pursuit of betterment, yet it’s delivered with a precision and a sparse physical palette in which the emotional effect is arresting.
For over 80 minutes Nicklin guides the audience through her attempt to complete the Outlaw Triathlon (a 2.4m swim, 112m bike ride and 26.2m run) in July 2015 in her 30th year. The current narrative around Team GB’s success in Rio is that the public is seeing the rewards for the investment, sports science and the marginal gains that can be delivered through detailed preparation. It’s in this preparation and detail that Equations for a Moving Body shines brightest.
With a laptop, projector screen, some index cards on the floor and a water bottle, Nicklin talks to us from her chair or directly front on. Through her adept mix of live internetting and her nuanced vocal and physical delivery, we see flashes of her through the way she curates her online self in her profiles on Facebook, Flickr, and Bandcamp. As she scrolls, surfs and finds the URL’s to accompany her story we see her visual bibliography; there’s something satisfying in her sharing this intimacy. As she delivers stories of how she endured, trained and delivered we listen to Nicklin’s body as she slowly rock’s gently on her heels, the minute finger twitches and rubs on the palm; there’s all sorts of almost imperceptible physical signals at play here and although she clearly acknowledges us and is present in the room, I can’t help but sense she’s performing it for someone else, someone who’s not here.
How a work settles in a body changes the delivery and intonation; I saw this performance in the first week of the fringe (when some works are still trying to find their natural rhythm) but Nicklin had a comfort with these stories and with the science behind them. She understood the rhythm of her story and how to tell it; how to build, when to rest and let us recover. The stories and training are her embodied experience and there was an ease with which it flowed out. Nicklin met with a number of scientists in the construction of the work and there’s a strand of research from Dr Sarah Partington on the idea of the Storied Self which Nicklin paraphrases on her Ironman blog. ‘She explained that we are creatures of narrative — that as self-aware animals we build our sense of self through storytelling — we communicate our sense of self through stories. We need our story of self to be ratified socially, and we build our identity out of the stories we tell of our past within our social contexts.’
Equations for a Moving Body is an intimate portrayal of the self, layered with emotion, tragedy and curiosity, from which Nicklin constructs a compelling narrative and delivers with a vocal charge that ensures her storied self is one that is worth listening to.
“. . .sometimes one feels freer speaking to a stranger than to people one knows. Why is that?”
“Probably because a stranger sees us the way we are, not as he wishes to think we are.” – Carlos Ruis Zafon
“Everything you see after you open your eyes is part of the performance.” That was the final instruction as I walked in silence from the Out of the Blue Drill Hall to the beginning of Walking:Holding, a work by Rosana Cade that turns Leith into a theatre. But the question is who are the performers? Hidden in the simple act of holding the hand of a stranger whilst walking together in public offers a number of self-examinations and surprises that I had not anticipated.
It was a blue, unclouded afternoon as I held the right hand of the first stranger; I denoted a tension in her arm as we paraded down Leith Walk. After a short exchange of questions and answers (we were free to be silent or to talk), she stopped and turned us to face the glass of a shop window: “What do you think people would say if they looked at us?” This one question knocks at the heart of Walking:Holding. Assumptions are often made based on how we dress, the age we look and our presumptive sex. I am guided over a zebra crossing and we are stopped by a man who asks, “Do you have a light?” “No,” I reply. “Well can I hold your hand instead?” At that moment, like a baton relay, I am handed over to my second companion and I discover an alternative physicality: he is taller than I am and so I need to raise my left arm higher to find his natural gait and we constantly adjust in an attempt to find a mutually comfortable proximity. As two people we are in an equally unstable position — we don’t know each other’s backgrounds, fears or curiosities — yet there is so much stimulation; I’m alive to new people, places and exchanges. The public are entirely unaware they are witnessing an intimate duet that has only just begun. Were we real in those 5 or 6 minutes together with each walker:holder? Were we performing a version of ourselves? What did we reveal to each other? I found out that one of the walker:holder’s identified as asexual and had never held a man’s hand in public in the daytime before.
There is a large amount of research in the field of walking psychology. Studies have shown that walking improves cognitive performance, aids problem-solving and creative thinking as well as enhancing our working memory. I remember so much of my emotional response in this 40-minute experience; more so than in many theatre-based performances: the sound of the loose change in the right yellow trouser pocket of walker:holder number six and the olfactory lingerings as I ambled past a number of oily garages with walker:holder number five. Your body is alert to everything: who’s thumb is on top; is it palms together or fingers entwined? Holding the hand of a child is loaded with safety and protection and it’s within that frame that I think Walking:Holding exists: we protect each other in public through this remarkable part of our body with which we can communicate so much. Without Cade being present she has constructed a frame and set in motion a number of carefully considered complexities that ensure this would resonate differently in parts of the world where human touch is either welcomed or frowned upon. For me, I left a little bit of myself with each of the six walker:holders and shared an equality of intimacy that has only been rivalled by Verity Standen’s Hug.Walking:Holding is a hugely intelligent work that left all sorts of residues on me: intellectually, physically and emotionally.
I came away from all three works thinking about the spectrum of artifice-to-reality and how other people can act as our mirrors. Skye had Jo Fong assembling, collaborating and refining herself as she went along; Hannah did the same through the people she encountered to build her story and the science behind it and Rosanna through her choice of walker:holders. All of them encouraged a self-reflection and if you combine the four titles (moving, holding, pitch(ing) and walking) they offer an instruction on how to approach the self and the people in your life; sometimes you dial up one or the other depending on the situation or who you’re with, but as a guide for the self you can’t go far wrong.
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