JV2: Tomorrow

JV2: Tomorrow, The Place, April 5

photo: David Gerrard

JV2 consists of ten dancers from Europe and Asia who are studying for the Jasmin Vardimon Company Professional Development Certificate. Part of the course includes a series of seven performances that premiered at the Gulbenkian in Canterbury on March 19 and ends at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal on April 27. ‘Our aim,’ writes Vardimon, ‘is to train and develop well-rounded stage artists in a variety of performance disciplines and at the same time enable them to develop their own creativity. By blurring the definitions between art forms and encouraging collaboration they will be able to create and present work in a new and engaging light.’

Vardimon chose these dancers at an open audition, and they have been working alongside the professional company as part of their course. Seeing them on stage, it seems that any one of them could move seamlessly into the main company, which makes the course rather like a 25-week audition for which the students pay college-level fees. It is an inspired business model (unique in England), an inspired pedagogical model, but as a model for an evening of dance it proves less alluring.

JV2 is in part ‘an ideal opportunity for participants to deepen their knowledge of Vardimon’s methodology’ and there is no better way than to perform her works. Vardimon has designed this triple bill specifically for this tour, creating one of her own — a collage of extracts from previous works called paradoxically Tomorrow — and commissioning two others: Mafalda Deville’s Silence and Tim Casson’s Chapter One. Both choreographers have danced in the main company and Casson is the course leader for the JV2 Certificate, while Deville is the director of the company’s Education Project. One would expect a strong stylistic influence on their work from Vardimon, but Silence and Chapter One bear such a close resemblance to each other and to Tomorrow as to take their creative exploration to a level somewhere between plagiarism and sycophancy. While this may be stimulating and beneficial to the students, the effect of the triple bill over the course of the evening is one of predictable surprise.

On the positive side, Vardimon’s work is always witty, visually stimulating and musically eclectic and her dancers never give less than their all. On the distaff side, the wit, visual stimulus and musical eclecticism can be formulaic, like an overused refrain. All three works have a similar juxtaposition of unison movement and solos, narrative diversions, textual humour, surreal imagery, the use of voice, the overuse of the tucked-up fourth position and an overtly punishing tic of dancers having to hurl themselves to the floor (a dancer’s career is fragile enough as it is).

Deville’s Silence opens with a white sheet entering as a rectangle and turning into a sofa stuffed with dancers. The story of a first date on a dance floor (former ballroom dancer Lawrence James is a powerful and engaging presence) morphs into a crowd of hysterical fans at a Marilyn Manson concert giving us the full range of their voices (Noriko Nishidate’s hysterics indicate a performer with boundless resources). Tchaikovsky’s Only the Lonely Heart changes the mood to a mourning procession at the head of which Nishidate is pulled around the stage on the white sheet like a figurehead or an angel of mercy. In the background a couple is struggling in their embrace: a rag doll girl who can’t stand up and a violent partner who picks her up and lets her fall through his arms repeatedly. Silence is billed as an exploration of loss and longing, but it is loss and longing seen through the prism of Vardimon’s methodology; it is carefully crafted, has all the Vardimon attributes, but it lacks a unique voice.

At the very beginning of his work, Casson reminds us wryly of a dominant aspect of the Vardimon style when Joe Garbett flies prostrate from the wings on to the stage in his boxing gloves and shiny shorts as if ejected forcefully from the ring. Casson explores the music of the American folktronica duo, The Books, bringing out its quirky theatrical imagery in the wittily titled Chapter One. There’s a girl with a talking flower in a pot, a couple in clear plastic raincoats, Aleksandra Jakovic with her pet goat, Maria Doulgeri with a squid in a plastic bag and Connor Quill in a raccoon hat. In between The Books’ songs, Casson explores gestural correlation with both the speech of an incoherent drunk and with upper class conversational interjections. Casson’s strength is in his attention to detail, creating an intricate work — perhaps the most original of the evening — though it tends to default to the Vardimon style when it comes to broad phrases of movement and ensemble work. Although all ten dancers share equally in the details of gesture and voice Casson calls for, Cornelia Voglmayr is the one who is most herself in this work.

Vardimon’s Tomorrow is made up of the past; it is the art of making a retrospective look like an entirely new work. While three of the original works (Park, Justitia and 7734) were conceived with an integral vision — the fourth, Yesterday, is itself a collage of past works — their fragmentation and reconstitution into a new work raises the question of what we are seeing: without the integral vision, what is left is a visual and aural stimulus. It is as if we are seeing the building blocks of Vardimon’s creative process, the very methodology that is at the heart of the Certificate course. Interestingly, even though both Deville and Casson have created integral works, the form they use is heavily influenced by this building block concept, which in turn is facilitated by the eclectic choice of music: Tomorrow allows room for John Fahey, Sparklehorse, Brian Eno, Deathprod, Wagner, Mozart and Spiderbait. Deville’s Silence has a more restrained menu of Einstürzende Neubauten, Marilyn Manson, and Tchaikovsky.

The predominating image in Tomorrow is the vision of a moulting angel (Vogelmayr) in white with an armful of feathers. A flush of other angels swish crabwise like a blizzard back and forth across the stage, accenting their steps with their breathing. Vogelmayr gets caught up in their movement as she advances, losing feathers to the stampede despite her efforts to protect them: a sacrifice of purity and innocence to the passing of troubled times. This is where the redemptive music from Wagner’s Tannhauser swells the heartstrings along with Sparklehorse’s It’s a wonderful life and the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem. The feathers become the leitmotif, but Vardimon’s unison patterns and crashing fourth position dominate the choreography like an army on the rampage. It’s an unequal competition and the feathers remain scattered on the stage at the end, the ephemeral remnants of something alive and pure.