Léa Tirabasso, In The Bushes, The Place

Léa Tirabasso, In The Bushes, The Place, March 7, 2025

There’s a curious blurring of perspective in Léa Tirabasso’s latest work, In The Bushes, commissioned by South East Dance and The Place, co-produced by Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, and presented at The Place for two nights. Whatever is happening in the bushes, we can’t quite see what it is; the frame of reference keeps changing. We know there are six dancers — Catarina Barbosa, Georges Maikel Pires Monteiro, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Laura Lorenzi, Mayowa Ogunaikke and Stefania Pinato — but from Monteiro’s very first entrance in his remnants of cross-period costume it is clear some transformation has taken place; his outer features are incontrovertibly human, and he is laughing, albeit hysterically, but his gait and gestures seem driven by another state of consciousness. The rest of the cast appears similarly afflicted. Afflicted? Among themselves the performers converse and act with knowing familiarity and, to our evolutionary pudeur, a disarming lack of self-consciousness. When Lorenzi takes off her clothes and wipes herself down before continuing on her trajectory she is seemingly unaware of our gaze. Throughout In The Bushes, Tirabasso plays with our gaze and that of her performers, to sometimes jarring and uncomfortable effect, but there is always a healthy dose of self-deprecatory wit to compensate. 

In the post-show talk Sarah Blanc aptly suggested that In The Bushes is a kind of Masque, not, as originally conceived, a festive courtly entertainment but a festive entertainment nonetheless, with the audience as sovereign. At first I felt as if I was looking through Ben Moon’s crystal clear lighting at an unequivocally chaotic presentation of the six dancers — dressed for the occasion in Jennifer Lopes Santos’s whimsical, colourful costumes — unified in their feral desire to reveal their behavioural eccentricities. Unlike story ballets that require a minimum of explantation, In The Bushes left me reaching in the dark for the program notes or, as on this occasion, waiting for clarification in the post-show talk. 

What we learn is that In The Bushes is built out of an interpretation of evolutionary theory, specifically by British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, Henry Gee, in his book The Accidental Species. One of the evolutionary concepts Gee rejects is that humans are fundamentally superior to other species — the notion of ‘human exceptionalism’. Tirabasso’s choreographic take on this is for her dancers to embody a movement vocabulary of insects or animals as a way of subverting this exceptionalism. At the same time — which is where the blurring of perspective comes into the choreographic equation — she questions our assumptions about the animal world relative to our ability to create, to think, to express and to function as a society. 

This is not the first time Tirabasso has developed such an idiosyncratic language; her two previous works, The Ephemeral Life of an Octopus and Starving Dingoes were developed with the help of Gabrielle Moleta, an animal transformation coach. Moleta does not appear in the credits for In The Bushes which suggests Tirabasso is taking what she and her dancers have already learned from Moleta in a new direction. In these previous works, animal movement was part of an allegorical framework; here, Tirabasso injects it into the bloodstream where it takes control of the choreographic framework. This requires of each of the dancers a Kafka-esque state of mind to allow them to inhabit another species without relinquishing their human form. It is the psychological tension in this dichotomy — and the brilliant achievement of the dancers in embodying it — that makes In The Bushes so arresting.

Dance is not the best medium for intellectual argument; to grasp Gee’s evolutionary theories it is probably better to read The Accidental Species than to watch In The Bushes. But Tirabasso’s evident stimulation by Gee’s thesis is what has engendered her creation of a powerful composite form of theatre that has the complexity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting and the dream-like imagination of the surrealists. It is precisely when she juxtaposes extracts from opera and choral work — spliced into the score by Johanna Bramli and Ed Chivers — that the imagery is transformed from the evolutionary to the surreal. Pinato’s memorable duet with Pavarotti’s voice, and the funeral ceremony for Barbosa officiated by Bishop Brekke in his flowing purple robe (not to mention the subsequent ascension) to the Lachrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem attest to the power of choral music as a characteristic of our human evolution. 

It’s another blurring of perspective.

Gianluca Vincentini, Wild Card

Gianluca Vincentini, Wild Card, Lilian Baylis Studio, November 23

Amarnah Ufuoma Amuludun and Stefania Pinato in Encounter One (photo: Danilo Moroni)

For his Wild Card program at Lilian Baylis Studio, Gianluca Vincentini presents dance makers based in the north of England: Carlos Pons Guerra, Crystal Zillwood and Jamaal Burkmar. Having been artistic director of VERVE (the postgraduate company of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance) for five years, Vincentini knows these dancers and choreographers well. Prior to the main program, he presents his own company, Möbius Dance, in a short film, Encounter One, with Amarnah Ufuoma Amuludun and Stefania Pinato, followed by a structured improvisation to guitar accompaniment by Otis Jones with the same two dancers among the pre-show audience in Fox Garden Court. According to its website, Möbius Dance has two dancers (Amuludun and Pinato) and four collaborators, all of whom are presented or represented in the film. The program note for Encounter One — ‘Can I allow myself to let boundary lines blur while being within myself and accept compromises as part of co-existence’ — is so fluid and open-ended that the presence of two bodies moving in space is enough to fulfil its premise, and they do. But for those who enjoy a little more meat, Pons Guerra’s O Maria on the main stage hits the spot.

Written for two women, a man and a ham, it is played by two women, a man and a ham but gender correspondence is not on the menu. Concepción (Marivi Da Silva) and Armando (Azzurra Ardovini) are at home one evening, though all we see is the domineering Concepción sitting at the dinner table in a dress as black as her eyes with the wrapped or bandaged figure of Armando at her feet. There’s another wrapped figure (Phil Sanger) lying a little distance from the table, and a wrapped ham on the table. Clearly Ryan Dawson Laight has had as much fun with the costumes as Barnaby Booth with the lighting. The relationship between Concepción and Armando is described as ‘an unhappy marriage’ but this is an understatement; the ties that bind have turned to rope and bondage. In a beatific vision, Sanger’s arising — or arousal — as anything-but-the-virgin Mary is the catalyst that releases poor Armando from his wrapping to reveal his true gender and entangles Mary with the leg of ham. The program note for O Maria serves notice of nudity and sexual references but the satirical treatment of suffocating religious hypocrisy in 1950’s Seville is positively seditious.

Evolutio is one of three solos Zillwood will include in her creation, Spiral. In it she examines evolution with a little scientific guidance and abundant inspiration. She enters the stage out of darkness, from a distance too far to comprehend. Her postures on that first diagonal towards the light suggest the successive stages of human evolution but in reverse order, finishing on her haunches before repeating the sequence; at the third attempt she evolves into a dancer. Zillwood moves quietly and lightly along her exploratory journey, dancing a language that derives from classical technique but which breaks into a series of organic images derived from the natural world: from invertebrate motion to a human embryo, from a bird in flight to an anthropoid marveling at the stars. Her final pose is balancing on her coccyx, floating in the vastness of evolutionary history. She sketches these images fluently and fluidly against the musical phrases of a haunting arrangement by Nigel Kennedy of a Polish folk song, Ederlezi, that she has digitally altered and extended to fit the dynamic range of her choreography. There is nothing of the anthropological museum in Evolutio; it reveals itself like the spark of an idea with an intelligence that matches Zillwood’s musicality.

Jamaal Burkmar presents The Calm, one of three works he created for the New Adventures Choreographer Award showcase he won in 2016. Inspired ‘by family, home and music’, The Calm is a quartet of solos to a quintet of funky, soulful songs. Burkmar focuses first on the songs, playing Angie Stone’s Makings of You in the dark, and a second, D’angelo’s Send It On, as the four dancers — Burkmar, Lucia Chocarro, Tom Davis Dunn and Kasichana Okene-Jameson — lie in a stylised heap on the floor. As a choreographic device the heap is clichéd and artificial; no effort is made to suggest how the dancers arrive in that place, nor in the heap, nor how they relate to each other. Nor does the rest of The Calm offer any further clarification, but focuses instead on the individual choreographic responses to the music. Here Burkmar and his dancers are far more interesting, especially Okene-Jameson who blasts into her theatrical space with a freedom and invention that is all her own; if the others make it happen, she lets it happen. She also uses the direction of her head and eyes as she dances, which takes her expression to a level that is as generous as it is self-reinforcing. The Calm, however, ends on a note that is as anti-climactic as it is predictable, with the music fading and the lights dying slowly on a heap of dancers.

My friend Ian Abbott has also written about Carlos Pons Guerra’s De Nada Dance in a triple bill at mac last year.