Resolution! 2016, performances on January 20

Resolution! 2016: Justine Reeve, Rhiannon Brace, Simone Mousset

Simone Mousset, Elisabeth Schilling and Hannah Ma in Their Past (photo: Bohumil Kostohryz)

Justine Reeve and Company is actually Justine Reeve sans Company, or the-one-and-only Justine Reeve distilling over 20 years of dance teaching into a satirical compendium of key principles. Reeve is a fine performer and the line she draws between performance and reality is also fine; she gets away with pointing out uncomfortable truths by offering them in a comedic routine that has us laughing hysterically. And this evening she is in full flow, hosting a mock Continuing Professional Development (CPD) seminar entitled Outstanding Dance Teaching and Tactics for Achievement, abbreviated nonchalantly to Outstanding and tactics, in which the audience plays the role of delegates. Reeve has a lot to say and she says it with delightfully-timed word play, bullet points, aphorisms, biscuit licking, a clip of her teaching a jelly-roll sequence to Chloe Mead and Corey Baker, a beached-whale dance, and a Tim Van Eyken song called Trust in Me that morphs into Trust in Reeve, while unflinchingly taking on the university dance syllabus and dreams of Michael Flatley. As a teacher she’s on dangerous ground; but behind the mordant humour of Outstanding and tactics it is not hard to sense that Reeve’s object of dissection is not teaching per se but the bureaucratic structure of dance training that sucks the life out of its teachers and replaces the oral tradition with administrative jargon. She has been teaching long enough to know the difference and in the custom of the court jester or clown, Reeve is a messenger who uses the art of performance to convey it. Outstanding and tactics is classic Reeve and the dance community should have the courage to present it and discuss its issues. As long as she agrees to share her biscuits.

Rhiannon Brace describes her creative path self-deprecatingly as ‘a clueless mother’s experience of pregnancy, childbirth and “life” after’ following the birth of her son, Dylan. Less clueless is her choice of music that inverts the meaning of ‘baby’ in pop culture to the biological phenomenon with which she has recently fallen in love. Baby thus has a similar structural reliance on popular music and the double-entendre of its lyrics as Jerome Bell’s The Show Must Go On. From Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Brahms’ Lullaby played on a music box through a juke box playlist of Be My Baby by The Ronettes, Kooks by David Bowie (to whose memory Baby is dedicated), Baby Boy by Beyoncé, Love Me Tender by Elvis Presley, Can’t Take My Eyes Off You by Frankie Vallie and the Four Seasons, to a finale of Tina Charles singing I Love to Love, it is the music that proves the driving emotional force through Brace’s autobiographical journey. Babies don’t dance (well, they do, but that comes later) so the cast reflects an older family hierarchy with Gracie-Jayne Angel as ebullient baby, Grace Kemp as mother, Mary Cox as young grandmother and Jey Jeyakumar as teddy-bearing father. Bookending her journey with a short before-and-after solo by Kemp, Brace’s choreography celebrates the bonds of family and friends and the mutual help that makes the process of early motherhood bearable, proudly sharing the fruits of her labour with five mothers and their (very young) offspring in Snugglies who join her in a loose improvisational finale to the Tina Charles track. Never has so much applause been showered on so many babies for such a brief appearance.

The initial impact of Simone Mousset’s Their Past is a first hearing of two movements from the extraordinary Middle Symphony by Russian composer Yuri Khanon. Mousset does not attempt to counter the urgent power of Khanon’s score but along with Elisabeth Schilling and Hannah Ma she weaves an ethereal contrast to it both visually and emotionally. The music rises up suddenly out of the dark and its haunting orchestration spreads like a mist. Their Past is inspired by Mousset’s experiences of travelling, living and working in Russia, Ukraine and Lebanon and there is in her approach to the music of Khanon (from whom she asked permission to use the score) a response to the expansive and mysterious land as much as to the music. Schilling and Ma in matching black bodices and red tulle skirts are described as guides to the white-clad Mousset as she journeys through time. There are traces of a Renaissance dance and a wonderful trio of three silent voices speaking through the body. Mousset revels in the gesture of ambiguity; the women float with mysterious shivers and shudders, hesitant in their fragile relationship in which they seem ineluctably drawn to each other. As rich in imagination and as enigmatic as Khanon’s music, Their Past forges a unity of its elements that sustains its folkloric enchantment to the end. A simple inversion of the opening relationship between the three women brings the work to a close with Mousset and Ma watching Schilling’s final abandoned spiraling of red tulle under a red light until she falls to the floor on the final percussive crack of the score and the spell is broken.