Dance Umbrella 2018: Le Patin Libre in Threshold at Alexandra Palace

Le Patin Libre, Threshold, Alexandra Palace Ice Rink, October 21

Taylor Dilley in Le Patin Libre’s Threshold (photo: Romain Guilbault)

Seeing Le Patin Libre’s Vertical Influences on the ice at Alexandra Palace as part of Dance Umbrella in 2014 was a revelation, and a pleasure to see the company again on the ice at Somerset House in 2016, part reprise and part an essay of ideas for a new work. That new work, Seuil (Threshold), which premiered at Montreal’s season of international dance, Danse Danse, in April, returned to Alexandra Palace to fill the final slots in this year’s Dance Umbrella. Now in its 40th year, Dance Umbrella has a vision that looks at the outer reaches of the dance universe where the choreographic process may refer as much to ideas and cultural history as to the moving body. The stimulation of its programming questions the nature of dance by refusing to frame it, or in some cases by shredding it à la Banksy within the frame.

Le Patin Libre’s visual references — the ice rink, the skates and the freezing environment — anchor it within a framework of amateur pastime or of Olympic competition but its choreographic interest lies somewhere in between. The scale of Vertical Influences derived from the sheer speed and arc of it gliding motifs and its flock patterns; in Threshold the patterns are still there but have gained additional hints of abstract narrative in which the threshold of the group dynamic is challenged. Falling out and falling — the accident — have become linked motifs and the partnering takes advantage of locking skates and elements of contact improvisation. At the same time the creative inputs of music (Jasmin Boivin) and lighting (Lucy Carter with Sean Gleason) remain familiar.

One aspect of the performance that has changed is the audience perspective. For the first half of Vertical Influences the audience was seated high on one side of the rink lending the trails of speed and form a heroic stature. In the second half the audience was invited to sit on one end of the rink to watch from a different angle and the choreography was scaled, both broadly and intimately, to enhance the experience. For Threshold Le Patin Libre has eschewed heroic scale for a single, ground-level perspective for both halves of the program; the audience is divided at one end of the ice or the other. In an arena this size, the distance between the ends creates a problem of visual register: if a narrative element or one of Hamel’s virtuosic accents works for one end it is unlikely to read with the same clarity for the other. And although the choreography is not mirrored, there is an element of duplication so the performance is delivered proportionately to the two ends of the rink.

Operating at the mid point of the ice is an obvious compromise, and one of the motifs that works beautifully is the gliding formation from side to side across the ice of interweaving bodies, like lines of a poem. It is the kind of motif that is unique to skating but its gliding displacement patterns could equally have their inspiration in George Balanchine’s Serenade and they have a similar emotional mystery.

Nobody needs to tell Le Patin Libre — Alexandre Hamel, Pascale Jodoin, Samory Ba, Taylor Dilley and Jasmin Boivin — how to skate, but two outside influences have left their mark on Threshold, particularly on the second half. Choreographer Anne Plamondon has worked on individual vocabulary, notably a solo for Ba that extrudes his natural elegance into more classical forms, and dramaturg Ruth Little (whose Dance Umbrella Motive Force lecture is online) has carved out of the swirl of lines and speed a kind of form, be it an elegy on loss or individuality, a cinematic plot or an essay in dynamic structure and rhythm in which skating patterns form the grammar.

For a company that has already pushed the contextual boundaries of skating, the question for Threshold is which way it is facing, in or out. The new work is a step forward, but still very much along the lines of Vertical Influences, suggesting Le Patin Libre may be susceptible to holding on too safely to its initial inspiration. In the spirit of Dance Umbrella, the company might consider for its next move not so much a dramaturgical ordering of internal events within their form, but an external choreographic change in concept that, while harnessing their vital energy, speed, and dynamic balance takes them further outside their frame.

Resolution! 2014: Vais, Burn, Clark

Resolution! 2014, The Place, January 29

Rachel Burn, Threshold (photo: Ben Hopper)

Culture Device Dance Project: I can’t explain and I won’t even try

An arm extends from the wings, a waking arm stretching out in the morning light, followed by the rest of John Livingston. He seems to be in close and intimate conversation with the light around him (provided by Maria Klochkova), his gestures close and passionate, catching the air in his fist and pulling it down, unrolling his arm and slowly revealing his face in his ‘circle of public solitude’. He revels in being upside down, his head as anchor and his leg pointing up in the air like an exclamation mark. As he gets up, Sarah Gordy enters with an altogether more dynamic phrase, gyrating like a gentle hoola-hoop. Livingston searches, pushes back, grasps at questions and twists his body as if squeezing out the answers. Gordy is already grounded, her legs bent deeply to the floor and her body freely laid out above, her arms circling as if to test the limits of her senses, making a wide sweep around Livingston. He expresses each gesture with timeless concentration, acting and reacting in a moving dialogue. When something doesn’t quite succeed, one can sense his determination to follow it through to its logical conclusion, like one straining to express his words and meaning clearly. At the end of this first section he falls and rises again while Gordy continues to orbit like a planet circling the internal combustion of its star.

The dreamlike drone of Stars of the Lid changes to a slow-drilling techno pulse by Emptyset. Both Livingston and Gordy are rooted to the ground, their gestures becoming more forceful. Livingston throws off his t-shirt while Gordy pushes and pulls at an imaginary boundary. The drama in Livingston’s dialogue notches up in intensity as if he’s turning the screw tighter; Gordy watches him with concern as she continues to orbit, picking up on the repetitive, mechanical nature of the music. There are magical moments when their two independent worlds unite for an instant in a complementary movement that jumps out of the soundscape like a spark but finally the symbiosis fails, their energy is depleted and they both collapse to the ground — only, one imagines, for the time it takes to gather up the resources to start again.

Culture Device Dance Project is a professional company for dancers with Down’s Syndrome using improvisation techniques and experimental electronic sounds to push boundaries. I can’t explain and I won’t even try was developed by artistic director Daniel Vais in collaboration with the dancers.

Rachel Burn, Threshold

I first saw Rachel Burn’s work at a Cloud Dance Sunday. It was Pull Through, Flick, which had a monastic, spiritual underpinning that is still present in Threshold but here Burn is inspired by Walt Whitman’s free-ranging lines in Leaves of Grass — particularly Song of Myself. When you travel from Pull Through, Flick to Threshold you realise how much the ‘self’ that Whitman writes about has imbued Burn’s ‘self’ to create a more confident and poetic universe as if she had developed his ‘loosen’d tongue’. Given that she created the work on the same three dancers — Lauren Bridle, Laura Erwin and Anna Pearce — the work also reflects their emotional and physical stretching. (Only three days before the Resolution! performance, Erwin broke three bones in her foot during rehearsal and was unable to perform, so we saw a stunningly composed — and sleepless — Burn herself as both muse and interpreter. Whitman’s line of the poem that is chalked on the floor could have been dedicated to Erwin: ‘Be of good cheer, we will not desert you’).

The work is episodic in the same way Whitman weaves one image or story into another, each linked to the others by his understanding of the essential unity of person and environment. Renu Hossain’s lovely score seems to be inspired by the same humanist spirituality, supporting the key elements of the sea, the earth and the air. In each of her performers, Burn brings out individual strengths to match: Pearce turns herself inside out in her solo, arriving at a oneness with her material that is timeless and it is lovely once again to watch Bridle whose ability to transcend form is ever present; she is like water to Pearce’s earth. As for Burn herself, when not joining in the trios she seems quite at home as the statuesque, white-robed goddess with the delicately supplicating arms.

There is so much to enjoy in this sculptural work that it deserves a more sensitive treatment in terms of light and shade. Verse is read while choreography is essentially a visual art and paintings may be an appropriate inspiration for this further refinement. Perhaps by the time Erwin’s foot is healed there will be time (and funding) to explore.

Rag Days: Scratch

Choreographer Timothy Clark and designer Emma Robinson close the evening with Scratch, a burlesque loosely fashioned on the antics of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and their companion April O’Neil.  In the opening scene, the four comrades (Ben Jones, Hannah Rotchell, Henry Curtis and João Cidade) are drilled by O’Neil (Patricia Zafra) as overbearing, over-the-top martial arts instructor. They have names that sound like The Whip, Morphine, Blue Mix and Red Lance and together they form the intrepid band of Dance Rangers battling evil — in the form of a manic, radio-controlled model car in satanic colours that races around the stage causing havoc — for the good of humanity. Off duty, they tend to talk all at once, or riff a cappella on their names. Clark is never at a loss for comic invention and keeps the audience entertained (i.e. laughing) throughout. According to Rag Days’ facebook page, Clark formed his company with the noble purpose of ‘making accessible dance works for the purpose of entertainment’, so Scratch certainly succeeds even if there is very little dance — accessible or otherwise — in it. Dramatic confrontation with Evil is finally averted by an enterprising Dance Ranger switching off the car to a rousing round of congratulations and a lot of energetic posing and fists in the air. The audience can’t help but respond in kind.

Joss Arnott Dance: Dark Angel seeks light

Joss Arnott Dance, South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell, September 13.

Joss Arnott’s The Dark Angel tour (sounds better without the definite article) opened at the Wilde Theatre in Bracknell’s South Hill Park Arts Centre on Thursday evening. Arnott is a young choreographer with pluck and determination who already finds himself in the enviable position of working with his own company of seven dancers, all young women (though one, Lisa Rowley, is on loan from Tavaziva Dance). More quietly driven than confident, he has an air of knowing what he wants, and where he wants to be in the dance world and is busy carving out his territory, a brand in the making. He has the fragility of being on his own (although the tour is supported Arts Council England, commissioned by South East Dance and produced by Dep Arts), but this is part of his singleness of purpose. He may already have set his sights on work of an altogether grander scale, perhaps the opening ceremony of some festival or sports event. Indeed, there are elements of this in his group choreography this evening, with its running entrances and exits and its relentless physical pulse.

Whether it was planned or not, the titles of the works on the program are suggestive of cosmic growth from chaos to form – perhaps an unconscious metaphor for his own aspirations – but the works are not necessarily in that order. Arnott’s own solo, in the middle of the program, is called Origin, in which he emerges from the obscurity into the light, and the final dance for the entire company is called Threshold. The program opens with a short work he has created (uniquely for the Bracknell performance) with dancers of Berkshire County Dance Company Youth called State of Matter. The odd one out is 24, inspired, according to the briefest of program notes, by ‘themes and concepts explored within the Alexander McQueen exhibition, Savage Beauty…’

The Dark Angel tour is thus a statement of Arnott’s interests at this early stage of his career. For now the inspiration of McQueen’s surreal, dark imagery remains insufficiently realised to be apparent; it is still tucked away in Arnott’s imagination, for future development. What predominates in this show is the primordial energy and the very personal style of movement. Origin is a gathering of forces and shape, as his body struggles to arise into form. Most of the movement comes from within his joints, which have extraordinary flexibility, displacing his body with subtle, rippling movement. A sudden lyrical whiplash turn of the arms and torso draws him up from the floor, where we see him clearly. The side lighting is focused high, so when he is moving close to the floor he is in a murky light that is already suffused with smoke. In what is perhaps another connotation of the title, one can see the origin of Arnott’s choreography here, but it is a quality of movement rather than a vocabulary. It is thus a highly individual work, a solitary statement of his persona that stands in stylistic contrast to his two other works on the program. He also has a certain inbuilt pathos that provides one of the few moments of emotion in the evening’s performance. The work has no climax, for that would suggest an end, and this is a continuous beginning.

The two company works presented either side of his solo are thunderously energetic. James M. Keane’s drumming scores set the tone for both works – more so in Threshold than in 24 – so it is difficult to escape the pulsing rhythm, and even more difficult for the dancers to maintain the relentless drive. But maintain it they do, up to the final beat, which is a remarkable achievement. The costumes of 24 suggest an Amazonian rite of passage and the feral vocabulary for the all-female cast of five reinforces this. Not all his dancers have Arnott’s movement quality, but wherever possible he favours extensions and hyper-extensions of arms and legs, backs and hips and grounds his movement in deep pliés and lunges, which heightens the sense of power. Arnott uses a mix of solos, duets and trios interspersed with ensemble work to keep the continuous dynamics fresh (and to give the dancers a moment to recover) with entrances and exits made running at full speed into the movement, rather like a relay race with no winners. The competitive aspect in Threshold, in particular, can get quite intense, however, with its instances of (choreographed) violence. Only occasionally do the dancers have eye contact with the audience; otherwise the focus is predominantly inwards towards the group. In terms of full-throttle dynamics, Lisa Rowley and Lauren Wilson stand out, and Jessica Hall has the grasp of Arnott’s hyper-extended lines.

These girls are dancing for all they are worth, and we are watching their rites of passage. And Arnott’s, too.