Transitions Dance Company, Triple Bill 2018 at Laban

Transitions Dance Company, Triple Bill 2018, Laban, June 1

Transitions Dance Company in Jarkko Partanen’s Lovers (photo: Lidia Crisafulli)

Transitions is called a conservatoire dance company, which means it renews its dancers each year within Laban’s MA Dance Performance program and is designed to help these artists ‘fill the gap between formal training and their entry to the professional world.’ The artists are selected ‘through an intense and competitive international selection process’ so on the one hand Laban seems to suggest the BA level formal training for these dancers — including those from Laban itself — is not sufficient to give them a competitive chance of joining a professional company upon graduation, and at the same time the formation of Transitions relies on the ability of these dancers to be so competitive in an international audition process to win a place in the company.

The nature of Transitions — and of any conservatoire dance company — is thus somewhere between institutional and professional, and is essentially transient. The invited choreographers are not creating a repertoire that allows the company to mature and grow — there is no possibility of maturity and growth — but that enables the dancers to demonstrate what they have learned. One corollary of this approach is that all fourteen dancers are included in each work; no marked choreographic preference is given to an individual’s ability. The qualities of individual dancers may shine in a given work but only in the sense of an accent of colour or texture in a choreographic quilt. In effect the constraints of these triple bills show not so much the possibilities of the dancers and choreographers as the nature of the MA Dance Performance program itself.

This is certainly a more varied selection of works than last year and one that tests the dancers in quite different ways. Paradoxically, Jarkko Partanen’s work, Lovers, is the most challenging for its initial lack of any recognizable dance element. Partanen has organized the dancers ‘in such a way as to allow them to act, understand, and continue only through touch’ and in partnership with Laban’s Suzie Holmes has covered them in layers of foil and mesh that entirely obscure their identity; not only is their sight impaired but Partanen has evoked sightlessness in sculptural form. At the beginning there is an uncompromising lack of sound, too, leaving the audience to ponder in silence what appears to be a neat row of black plastic bags on the upper side of Fay Patterson’s square of floor lights. The initiation of movement is barely perceptible but as the dancers rise in their coverings Partanen’s vision is transferred to their sense of touch. Their challenge in subsequent couplings and grouping is to convey the sensory limitation as sensually and naturally as possible. When it is successful it is powerfully poignant, but if the level of gestural intention slackens or falters it can become comic. When a mirror ball descends and Rihanna’s Diamonds breaks the silence we feel a sense of relief as our sensory apparatus is restored but for the dancers the concentration must remain until the final, sightless exit.

Hagit Yakira’s The Ar/ct of Moving Forward celebrates the freedom of movement as a mode of expression. The dancers initially walk or run in one by one from alternate sides of the stage; it is like a choreographic form of introduction, but instead of moving forward towards the audience they move away from it, from downstage to upstage, glancing back to look at us and to allow us to look at them. As one exits upstage another enters downstage in a mirror-like procession. The range of movement accumulates and accelerates over the course of the work, reveling in an abandoned enthusiasm that is contagious. As in Lovers, there is more to this choreography than the doing of it; it requires presence over reserve, connection over isolation, solicitude over individuality. The surge of Sabio Janiak’s upbeat score adds to the work’s sense of travel as bubbling pockets of exuberance explode and dissolve in a continuous stream of humanity.

Richard Chappell’s When running starts and stops contains within its title a sense of what has gone before but introduces the articulation and flow of classical dance in an intriguing evocation of ‘animalistic physicality’. Created on eight dancers (there is an alternate cast of six with Orion Hart and Umut Ozdaloglu appearing in both) who form a band of friends caught up in a mysteriously undefined adventure, the work retains a muscular vocabulary that engages the dancers technically and allows individual expression within the whole. Albert E. Dean’s electronic score is implicated in the action like a ninth performer, playing counterpart to the physicality and marking the way forward, while Chappell’s choreographic grammar reveals a convincing ability to coax a story out of movement.

Transitions Dance Company, Triple Bill 2017

Transitions Dance Company, Triple Bill, Laban Theatre, June 1

Giannis Economides and Bryn Aled in Christian Duarte’s & (photo: James Keates)

It would be hard to imagine an evening of dance in which there was less transition from one work to the next. If Charles Linehan’s Nothing But Time raised high the bar for minimal movement in Transitions Dance Company’s Triple Bill, Oded Ronen’s Kintsugi added to it only a superficial psychological layer and Cristian Duarte’s & framed it in conceptual conceits. Linehan shows how minimal movement can be interesting; his spatial awareness and the intent in starting a movement are worth experiencing. Not all the dancers are comfortable in beginning movement from stillness but when it works you know something significant has happened; Becky Horne shows how it can be done at the very beginning of the work as she peels off from Sean Murray. There is also an idea in Nothing But Time that lends itself to choreographic treatment; it evolved out of Linehan’s research combining choreography and drone technology. In a film he showed at the Brighton Festival last year it was the long shadows of moving figures seen from the air at sunset that formed the choreographic material. Here, Michael Mannion’s searchlight stands in for the sun and Jonathan Owen Clark’s electro-acoustic score places us in the heart of the drone, its engine in our ears, looking down on the mundane motions of silent figures far below. There is thus a dynamic tension between Clark’s stormy, elemental score and the stark simplicity of Linehan’s movement that holds the work together. Linehan presents the dancers in a neutral unmannered way, their motion and gestures removed by distance from their implicit thoughts and relationships.

We might expect to find the dancers in Ronen’s Kintsugi inhabiting a different universe from Linehan’s, but the layers of psychological gesturing Ronen uses to suggest ‘a broken, lonely and fragmented world’ are little more than psychological dressing. Ronen uses the metaphor of Kintsugi — the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery — to suggest a parallel art of healing social wounds, but his choreography digresses too often into accumulative patterns and endless solos to keep the subject alive. Woven into all this action is the shaping of a line of yellow confetti — ‘leaking’ like stuffing from the pockets of the dancers — into a crack on the stage that is erased by one of the dancers in the final moments. To conclude the work with this facile reference to Kintsugi is to diminish the metaphor.

If, as the program note states, Duarte’s & ‘invites the dancers to (re)visit and plunder their own physical and conceptual memory banks’, can we be sure they have accepted the invitation? And if they have, what does Duarte’s work reveal about their years of training? Not very much. But judging by the self-conscious flirtation with minimal movement, the involvement with absurdist props and the derisory breaking down of the third wall, the dancers have been duped into adopting Duarte’s physical and conceptual memory banks as their own. There are moments when dancers like Bryn Aled and Marcus Alessandrini do re-visit their own physical memory bank, pulling off some bravura steps that light up the stage, but they are sparks in what is otherwise a rather damp confection of conceptual clichés.

I realised at the beginning of & that once the dancers had appeared in Linehan’s work, they did not seem to change in any physical or psychological way in subsequent works; they simply reappeared in different costumes. At this level of postgraduate performance it would have done the dancers a service to provide a more varied program in which they would be challenged by contrasting choreographic voices to bring out their own intrinsic qualities. Audiences might have benefited too.