SERAFINE1369, IV at The Yard

SERAFINE1369, IV, The Yard, April 27

It comes as no surprise that Jamila Johnson-Small, aka SERAFINE1369, sees dance as a philosophical undertaking. Their program note is redolent of a manifesto and the quartet they have created, known simply as IV, adheres to the manifesto with the intimacy of a translation. Or perhaps it’s the other way round: IV is a choreographic manifesto that the program note translates into a succinct philosophical treatise. Either way there’s an alchemical process at play that transforms words into movement and movement into words.

‘I want to invite you’, the program note begins, ‘into the ethics of this work. This is about finding space and trying to be free, trying to move towards ourselves and one another. To co-exist without the feeling of taking or giving away too much.’ How often is the audience invited into a performance as opposed to being told — often in terms of some parallel universe — what the performance is? Invitation is indeed at the heart of IV and once the details and qualities of the work come to rest in the mind, it becomes clear how it fleshes out this introductory invitation in its structure and in its movement.

Presented at The Yard as part of its NOW 23 Festival, IV is a quartet of dancers comprising Johnson-Small, Steph McMann, Darcy Wallace and Natifah White. There are two frameworks: time, measured by the disembodied voice of a speaking clock — on the minute, every minute for an hour — and the space, which includes the audience. Josh Anio Grigg’s sound design and the lighting conceived by Grigg and SERAFINE1369 create an aural and visual environment within that space.

The essence of the work is a ‘relational practice, one that does not presume, where we work to disentangle from and unsettle our assumptions, and also yours. Here, we encounter one another and ourselves.’ As part of the space in which IV is staged, we in the audience are an element, like the lighting and the sound, that informs the relational effect of the performance. As a result, over the four nights at The Yard there will be effectively four different performances: ‘We are re-imagining and creating this work anew each time.’  This is of course hypothetical from the perspective of observing only one of those performances, but it’s a proposition that informs the nature of the relation and it’s entirely tenable from the evidence of what we can see and feel.

What may be confrontational in viewing the work is that IV is presented in all the trappings of a conventional theatre setting, where performers are on one side of the fourth wall and the audience on the other expecting to see a show. It doesn’t need to be like that, and there is an intimation in IV of a much larger space that is not a theatre, where we are not seated and not watching, and yet somehow still involved. IV hollows out the expectation of a show, drawing the audience into its mystery, inviting us to share ‘just what it is, what we all come with, what we want to keep and what we choose to shed.’

The idea of breaking down duration into one-minute segments announced by a speaking clock immediately releases time of any extraneous trappings and allows it to fill with the interior space of the dancers which is, of course, as vast as the universe. Their breath, whether in movement or stillness, keeps expanding and as we watch these sixty minimal tableaux we can begin to let time expand within our own lives. The duration of the performance seems to shrink in proportion to this expansion. There is never too much movement to fill the time, nor too little; the dancers use their bodies to wrap time around them, which affects the space in which they perform. It is a vindication of IV’s integrity in breaking down the tension that exists between the nature of the performance and the convention of the theatre that there is only minimal applause at the end; there is no need as we have all by then become performers within IV’s framework. This is not a fortuitous conclusion; SERAFINE1369 works consciously ‘with/in the context of the hostile architectures of the metropolis towards moments and states of transcendence.’ They conceive of dance as an antidote to the ‘hostile environment’ ‘by dissolving and unfixing our internal replication of [it], and attuning to our embodied experience in relationship.’

SERAFINE1369’s IV is a celebration of movement within stillness, of stillness within movement, and a choreographic breath of fresh air.

Nora invites Deborah Hay – Where Home Is

Nora invites Deborah Hay – Where Home Is, Lilian Baylis Theatre, April 25 

“One never reaches home,’ she said. ‘But where paths that have an affinity for each other intersect, the whole world looks like home, for a time.” – Herman Hesse

Nora is dancers Eleanor Sikorski, Flora Wellesley Wesley and Stephanie McMann. Sikorski and Wellesley Wesley were previously a duo who in 2015 invited Liz Aggiss, Simon Tanguy, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion to make an evening of duets for them. With the addition of McMann their performance, staging and presence has shifted entirely. McMann has worked with a number of choreographers including Roberta Jean and Theo Clinkard; she has a beguiling and luminous presence that draws attention. The two bodies of Sikorski and Wellesley Wesley have a clear relationship with their previous invitees; with the trio on stage the reading becomes a little trickier. They define themselves as a dancer-led company; I get a sense they are collectors of a certain type of choreographer whose work has a conceptual pedigree but that is not averse to niche mass appeal. In November 2018 Nora worked with Deborah Hay to create a performance entitled Where Home Is which forms the first part of the evening followed by Playing Audience, a short conversational invitation to the audience to reconsider how we experience dance.

Hay is a scrambler, an unsettler, a not-dancer, a re-framer and Nora revel in her environment. In the thirty-five minutes of Where Home Is there is acres of attentional space for an audience to approach the work, be with it, ignore it, drift elsewhere or come back; it will give you what you give to it, but you have to give first. Located closer to choreographic performance art, Hay doesn’t often treat Nora as a trio but more like three ones with the odd two plus one; the interconnectedness and relational quality of the three isn’t present. Our visual grid is populated by solo components; we have buckets of almost still poses, Sikorski’s presentational arches, McMann’s faux cockney encouragement and Wellesley Wesley’s scenographic inspections. There are moments that face outward with Sikorski and McMann almost goading Wellesley Wesley with false hyperbole and exaggerated encouragement as she attempts to execute a series of stuttering classical moves and travelling sequences. This three-minute interjection offers an alternative emotional palette and a chance for the audience to laugh, release and enjoy.

The notion of home is an interesting one; these three dancing bodies are now a temporary home for Hay’s score. They are respectful and practiced guardians of the work, keeping it inside and between them. Nora is home and Nora is together thanks in part to a three-week period prior to the premiere working with rehearsal support from Rachel Krische who was herself a receiver of a Deborah Hay solo, The Swimmer, over 10 years ago. 

There are echoes of early Probe where two exceptional dancers — Antonia Grove and Theo Clinkard — invited choreographers including Lea Anderson, Rafael Bonachela, Yasmeen Godder and Trisha Brown to make work on them in Have We Met Somewhere Before (2005) and Magpie (2008). Over three years Probe collected 11 choreographers who made them look exquisite, squeezing the juice out of their technique and their relationship as a duo. They allowed space for themselves, their choreographic collective as well as for the audience. 

Playing Dance lasted for 20 minutes with each performer asking a question which might reframe how the audience receives the work: “What if, as audience, I remember to recognise time is passing? Time is not fixed.” Playing Dance became part of the evening because when Hay was making the work with Nora in Nottingham she would spend the mornings with the trio and each afternoon rehearsing her own solo work, leaving Nora to look at, reframe and process the choreographic questioning of Hay’s What ifs.

Where Home Is is a score that is practiced and it would be the same with or without our presence; this was reiterated after the pause during Playing Dance where the audience is told “This is not feedback for us, we don’t care, this is a space for a you.” An audience is already the guest of the presenting artist; individuals come to the theatre having purchased tickets and give their attention in exchange. Nora’s exchange ratio of performer to audience this evening is around 1 to 55, so we received 1/55 of a transmitted Deborah Hay and I left wanting more. Nora invites Deborah Hay but Nora does not invite the audience. 

Reckonings: works by Cunningham, Seva and Seutin at Sadler’s Wells

Reckonings: Julie Cunningham, Botis Seva & Alesandra Seutin at Sadler’s Wells, October 13

The cast in Botis Seva’s BLKDOG (photo: Johan Persson)

Marking its refurbishment 20 years ago as a production house catering uniquely to dance, Sadler’s Wells has commissioned 20 new works, three of which form Reckonings, a celebration of the future featuring UK-based choreographers Julie Cunningham, Botis Seva and Alesandra Seutin. Sadler’s Wells has lavished its production capacity on each and the result is a richly textured triple bill unified by Tom Visser’s lighting that demarcates regions of the stage into which the dancers can withdraw from sight and from which they can emerge; there are no theatrical exits and entrances. This corresponds particularly with the fluid spatial staging of Cunningham’s m/y and with Nell Catchpole’s engulfing interior soundscape. The work is a translation into choreographic form of Monique Wittig’s attempt in her novel, The Lesbian Body, to ‘create a new language that can function outside the dominant structures of patriarchal power’. It is not the cast of six women — Cunningham, Eleanor Perry, Hannah Burfield, Seira Winning, Sara Ruddock and Stephanie McMann — that suggests a lesbian discourse but the subtle structures that link them together, a fine weaving of almost abstract strands with sapphic overtones that creates a space in which no muscular, patriarchal figure would ever feel comfortable; the performers, dressed in Alexa Pollman’s body suits with diaphanous outer layers, seem to relish this independence. It is a pleasure to watch the way Cunningham opens up the space with such intellectual rigour; it starts in muffled containment as if the cast is an operatic chorus in a prison cell and develops into a sense of lightness and emancipation that Catchpole’s score reaffirms in its trajectory from dark clouds of industrial effluence to the open air, from interior rumblings to serene silence.

After the first intermission the contrasting, dark masculine energy of Seva’s BLKDOG is immediately palpable. In combination with Visser’s lighting, Ryan Dawson Laight’s wrapped anonymous costumes and Torben Lars Sylvest’s visceral score, Seva has invented a haunting, powerful reflection on depression inspired by Sally Brampton’s Shoot The Damn Dog. It was Winston Churchill who termed his depressive condition ‘The Black Dog’ from which Seva derives the title of his work and on top of Sylvest’s score are recorded voices from an imagined therapy session: ‘Let’s start with how you’re feeling.’ Set in a hip hop vocabulary on six dancers — Joshua Nash, Jordan Douglas, Ezra Owen, Victoria Shulungu, Shangomola Edunjobi and Naima Souhair — BLKDOG seethes with an inner malaise that explodes in tight, controlled gestures and broods in hooded acquiescence. Seva has developed an intricate and eloquent language within an urban context that manages simultaneously to get inside the head and flow through the body, seamlessly bridging emotional abstraction and a harrowing social narrative — an effect that is more Crystal Pite than Hofesh Schechter. In a work that depends for its affect on precision in both individual gesture and unison articulation it is a tribute to the dancers and to the rehearsal director Ekin Bernay that Seva’s conception is so fully embodied.

Like the two previous works, Seutin’s Boy Breaking Glass has a literary inspiration, this time through Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem of the same name. Breaking glass becomes in Seutin’s conception a metaphor for breaking through what may seem transparent but proves impassable, otherwise known as inequality of opportunity. She writes that five other authors ‘were all invaluable in my research about inequality, the act of survival and self-love.’ The problem is that however clear Seutin may be in her intellectual research such clarity fails to coalesce on the stage. From the outset there is a contrast between the formal volumes of the set — a broad white platform at the back for her five-piece band with a white dance floor bordered in black for her seven dancers — and the informal, folk-inspired choreography ‘inspired by Senegalese and Southern African traditional and social dances’. Visser’s liminal lighting is again on display but he seems unsure how to unite these contrasts. The members of the band are visually dominant which gives an importance to their presence and their music over the narrative taking place on the stage below them, while Randolph Matthews as the central figure among the dancers — the victim of inequality — is a vocalist. Attention on the primary theme is thus dispersed among the performative elements and while they are independently rich in expression, Seutin and her dramaturg/co-director Maxwell Golden have not succeeded in synchronizing their full value.