Sivan Rubinstein, Migration Through Dance at the Migration Museum

Sivan Rubinstein, Migration Through Dance, The Migration Museum, March 14

Migration Through Dance at the Migration Museum (photo: Paula Harrowing)

The mental concept and the physical details of maps guide the everyday course of human travel, where the features of a particular country or a city can be easily accessed online or in a guidebook. For migrants and refugees, the map is more of a geographical route of escape and arrival in a safe destination where the details of the map are perhaps less important than word-of-mouth knowledge of borders, checkpoints and pathways.

Sivan Rubinstein is one of the five choreographer/dancers who make up the current Swallowsfeet Collective. She has a family interest in maps — her father is a cartographer — and has thought deeply about their significance. She has used maps as signifiers of the world in which we live, as a philosophical entity that embraces all our activities. In MAPS that she presented in 2017 three dancers begin by creating a world map on a bare stage using white salt. As we sit around watching this map choreography, the shape of the world as we know it — or as we are used to seeing — takes form. The dancers describe it in terms of time differences and differentiate between the geological, the political and the social map. With their steps, meetings, confrontations and incantations they then transform it, erasing the contours, the seas and the landmasses with their bodies in a poetic analogy with the way governments have over the ages settled, pacified, conquered, seized, appropriated and robbed other lands as a measure of their power and influence. MAPS finishes, however, on a note of spiritual optimism with the tracing in the salt of a universal Mandala.

This year Rubinstein has developed the concept further, joining forces with the temporary home of the Migration Museum housed in the London Fire Brigade engine workshops on Albert Embankment in Lambeth and with Dr. Sarah Fine, a senior lecturer in philosophy at King’s College London to present Migration Through Dance.

As Rubinstein says, ‘dance is the movement of the map’, and within the museum’s migratory environment she has again created the outlines of a world, not out of salt but out of white tape in a configuration by Hamish MacPherson. We sit around three sides but this is a participatory performance called Active Maps with guitar accompaniment from Liran Donin; those who wish to be involved are invited to populate the map. Rubinstein invites us to walk our own migration and to land where we consider home; there is a large concentration of feet over England. She then invites us in turn to stand somewhere on the map where we don’t feel welcome and where we have family or loved ones. If the map was a plan of a house, where might we build an extension? It is the kind of game that could be played on a stadium scale. Perhaps the most controversial suggestion is to pull up the tape and place the former borders of our world in a sticky heap in the centre. What results is a different kind of space made up of connections between us but the rolling up of geographical borders causes some discomfort because of our attachment to them. Rubinstein suggests we mark out our own world, but this is more problematic; the results seem to indicate as much our individual presence in a fluid landscape as it represents a new map. Interestingly there are very few borders but rather dots and open lines crossed by others, as if designed by Paul Klee. We are approaching what Rubinstein calls ‘a desire map’ in which our feet are grounded but our minds are free to roam. And then she suggests we pull up the result of our communal geography too and add the tape to the existing ball that is then ceremoniously and respectfully set to one side.

The final stage in Rubinstein’s project, Ports of Pass, gives the stage to five dancers from Loop Dance Company and Swallowsfeet Collective who dance their passports. What is it like to take on an identity as a travel document? Harriet Parker-Beldeau stamps herself with fists against her chest repeatedly and the effect of the gestures suggests not an administrative experience but an agonising one. It is a reminder of the psychological barriers that travel can throw up; the cueing like cattle at border controls, the questioning, flight restrictions, security checks and airport navigation; Daisy Farris pulls herself from one direction to another as if listening to contradictory announcements. There are intense walking paths where the performers pass each other but do not meet, breaking off into individual partnerships and groups that seek connections. As with maps, there is no ending to this journey; a final running pattern attains an expression of unison without ever arriving at a destination.

Active Maps is part of a research and dance production called MAPS, commissioned by Creative Europe’s EU-funded programme, Pivot Dance, The Place (UK), Dutch Dance Festival (Netherlands) and Operaestate Festival (Italy), and with the support of Arts Council England and King’s College London. Ports that Pass was commissioned by Loop Dance Company, and made with the support of Arts Council England, the Israeli Embassy in London, and Turner Contemporary, Margate.

A preview of Swallowsfeet Festival

Swallowsfeet Festival, The Old Market, Hove, March 24-25

Swallowsfeet Festival promotional image (photo: Paul Seaby)

This article first appeared in the March edition of the magazine, Viva Brighton, who commissioned it. It appears here with the editor’s kind permission.

Billed as Brighton’s only platform for international contemporary dance in a city that hosts England’s largest arts festival, Swallowsfeet Festival embodies a culture of spirited resistance to the status quo. If one takes New York’s Judson Dance Theatre collective in the sixties as a point of departure, spirited resistance is what guides much of contemporary dance and since it uses the body as its primary instrument, its arguments are a form of physical discourse.

When Swallowsfeet Festival presents its program at the Old Market theatre on March 24 and 25, it will be celebrating its fifth outing. Some of the planned activities around the weekend have had to be put on hold following the failure of an Arts Council funding bid but the core program remains intact thanks to the pluck and conviction of the six-member Swallowsfeet Collective: Jessica Miller, Rosa Firbank, Jessica Léa Haener, Sivan Rubinstein, Gordon Raeburn and Harriet Parker-Beldeau.

They all met while studying contemporary dance at Laban Conservatory of Music and Dance in London but it was Miller who first grounded the performances of the collective in her native Brighton as an outlet for a group of Laban students to present their final works to an audience of friends and family. Just four years later the open callout for the 2017 festival has produced 280 proposals from 39 countries which the Collective has distilled to a program of nine works in the image of Brighton itself: edgy, diverse, challenging, and engaging.

Having narrowed down its 280 proposals, the Swallowsfeet Collective decided to include in the festival those that had, in the vocabulary of the physical, the possibility of the greatest impact on its audience, and the focus of these nine works coalesces around four predominantly physical themes: sexuality, gender, health and identity. At its best, contemporary dance picks up on issues of its time and transforms them through the body as voice.

Ironically, one of the works on the program, Joe Garbett’s No.Company, was conceived as a reaction to funding cuts for the arts. First shown at Emerge Festival in London, six choreographers in six different locations sent movement ideas, images and suggestions via text message to the two performers who then spent only two days in a borrowed space putting it all together. This is unheard of in the current funding matrix of rehearsal time and studio rental, but the result was fresh, immediate and magical. For Swallowsfeet Festival, Garbett is using a different score of text messages and is inviting two couples to interpret and perform two separate works from it; like musical improvisations, they will never be repeated. It might sound like a choreographic manifestation of a throwaway society, but the impression No.Company made when I first saw it was profound. It is this ability of contemporary dance to make the body speak, whisper and shout that has driven the Swallowsfeet Collective’s choice of all nine works on the program in March.

To book tickets for Swallowsfeet Festival and find out more about the events, go to

www.swallowsfeet.com/2017programme/