Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1

Show Me Your Nationalisms: Ian Abbott at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Part 1

At the beginning of the final week of the 2024 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Creative Scotland (the national public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across the country and distributes funding from the Scottish Government and The National Lottery) issued the following statement:

“Creative Scotland has taken the difficult decision to close the Open Fund for Individuals to new applications due to the Scottish Government being unable to confirm release of £6.6m in Grant-in-Aid budget in the current financial year, 2024-25. The Fund will close to new applications from 2pm on Friday 30th August 2024. Creative Scotland planned to apply £3m of the £6.6m budget to support the Open Fund for Individuals in 2024-25, alongside £3m of National Lottery income.”

The Cabinet Secretary for Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, Angus Robertson MSP, who is responsible for cultural funding in Scotland via the Scottish Government, also wrote — in a ‘chef’s kiss’ moment of choreographic synchronicity — the introductory welcome to the nationalistic Scottish showcase Made in Scotland 2024: “Welcome to Made in Scotland 2024! Celebrating a wonderful collection of Scottish dance, theatre and music, Made in Scotland — supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund — gives Scottish artists the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet.”

So on one hand we have the munificent Angus Robertson telling us how he supports Scottish artists and companies to bring their work to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, to share and allow them to explore the international opportunities that arise from performing at the world’s largest arts festival, and at the same time and place we have the very same politician decimating the only open fund that individual artists can apply to by reneging on his “gold-plated” promise made in October 2023 to restore the £6.6million worth of Creative Scotland reserves.

In light of this aforementioned context, this Part 1 will be a response to some of the Made in Scotland work I saw alongside other international work which didn’t have a nationalistic frame or the support of their respective country, whilst a subsequent Part 2 text will examine work exclusively from some of the other inter/nationalist showcases, where financially-supported artists bring their work to Edinburgh as representatives of their respective countries and kiss the flag.

The first to clutch the saltire between their double denimed teeth is Common Is As Common Does: A Memoir (CIACDAM) by 21 Common at ZOO Southside. CIACDAM is my gold-plated, fringe smash, best-in-show and top pick by a country mile. If you imagine Goat Island swallowing the Tarantino filmography, then heading out to a line dance class before finishing off in a working-class karaoke booth before ripping off their wife beaters and kicking the shite out of their girlfriends, this is something close to what we saw.

Premiering at Johnstone Town Hall in March 2023, the directors Lucy Gaizely and Gary Gardiner (with Dan Brown) said: “We wanted to create a memoir based on lived experience that speaks to a large audience. How do you create a joyful, mesmerising and exciting show that looks so deeply at trauma and life’s bullshit?”

Presented over seven scenes and narrated exclusively by The Man (Gary Gardiner), the work encourages us to think about the relational aesthetics of cowboy culture, family dynamics and working-class white male violence. I loved seeing a multi-generational community cast — aka The Mob — on stage alongside the professional cast. The Mob are the ones who create the atmosphere, doss about happily on the sofa in their double denim and stetsons and deliver a number of satisfying line dance set pieces.

CIACDAM takes as its starting point the impact and lack of agency poverty affords young men and how exposure to violence shapes ideas of masculinity. When you get this hyper-realistic tension of yee-hawing bar room brawling and bottle-smashing blood bouts and “books are for fucks” call-outs, it comes startlingly close to some of my own experiences as a teenager. As the fringe (and the wider performing arts industry) becomes increasingly difficult and even more expensive for artists to attend and be part of, then the already minimal amount of working-class representation will only get scarcer.

CIACDAM is not an easy watch and asks questions about how we and the system normalise violence. Some of the middle-class people I spoke to about it didn’t like its rough edges or out-of-tune karaoke singing, but for me it’s my perfect theatrical Venn diagram and as Gabi Cepelyte says: “Same as you, I am looking for idols. Like you, I find it easier to believe I can become someone, when people who look like me win.”

The Last Forecast (TLF), by Bridie Gane and Catherine Wheels at Assembly @ Dance Base, is an exquisitely crafted production for ages 6+ (and costume designer Alison Brown and designer Alisa Kalyanova appear to have strong and (unattributed?) influences from Thandiwe Muriu’s Camp photography series). TLF tells the story of Gael (performed by the wondrous and expressive Shanelle Clemenson) — a gecko-like creature who lives alone, in harmony with their surroundings, where everything matches and everything is perfect. That is until a stranger (Kieran Brown) arrives, laden with earthly belongings and starts setting up home, disturbing this island sanctuary.

TLF is a masterclass in how to craft and execute beautiful, lightly political, wordless and world-class dance for young people. Set in a highly-patterned, 70s psychedelic bothy somewhere on an unnamed Scottish island, we see Gael trying to come to terms with the incursion of the stranger and playing an unwitting game of camouflage, hide and seek and trying not to be discovered — with the perfect amount of slapstick, repetition and pure dance technique.

There are some witty alternative shipping radio forecasts which subtly prophesy the incoming rising waters and the impact it would have on their bothy, forcing the two characters to work together to bring all their furniture to a higher point, build a friendship and wait for the storm to pass. The warmth and connection between Brown and Clemenson is remarkable, especially considering that Clemenson was brought in and learnt the show in 8 days before their fringe run.

TLF is the latest in a long line of incredibly strong Scottish works for young audiences that have toured the world in the last 20 years, so if it doesn’t get booked at least 30 times outside Scotland in the next three years, then the theatrical touring landscape really is in its end-of-days scenario.

So that’s 2/2, but is all work in the Made in Scotland showcase uniformly brilliant? No. At this point I’d like to introduce the commercially successful, but choreographically redundant double bill — The Flock and Moving Cloud — by Scottish Dance Theatre (SDT) at ZOO Southside.

SDT describe their sell-out two week run as setting “the stage on fire with two of their most physically daring and dynamic works in an unforgettable evening of dance by two of the most exciting female choreographers in the European dance scene: Roser López Espinosa and Sofia Nappi.”

After a promising opening V-shape of The Flock by Espinosa full of synchronous wing flapping, flat backing, tiny little jumps and oodles of repetition I stopped counting the sloppy, technical mistakes and poor execution from the dancers after the tenth one. Add to this to the nearly 30 minutes of painfully manufactured running in dull patterned shapes (dancers cannot do fake running on stage) and awkward lift work (SDT are really not known for their lift work), it feels like the dancer execution, choice of choreographer and rehearsal direction are the weakest I’ve seen from SDT in the last ten years.

Moving Cloud, which has live Scottish folk music performed by TRIP, is a glorified #VisitScotland infomercial, and whilst the dancers execute this work better (I repeat, they really do not like being off the floor), you’re suddenly aware that this “flagship” company of Scotland, especially in the context of the fringe and the dozens of other dance companies performing, isn’t as technically good as a pack of Hip Hop and contemporary dancers from Berlin or the second-best dance show from the Taiwan Season.

At the fringe, broadly speaking, there’s comedy, art and entertainment on offer and with this double-bill it feels like SDT have squarely pitched their dancing tent in the entertainment field leaving behind their pioneering choreographic roots which would have been previously firmly pegged in the art field. If this is how they want to be known to their audiences, as creators of commercially viable and instantly forgettable staged entertainment that evaporates from our lives as soon as we’ve left the theatre then The Flock and Moving Cloud are an absolute success and their marketing team are the gold standard. However, if they continue along this path then they will continue to be no longer artistically relevant to the choreographic conversation in Scotland.

Stepping away from Mr Robertson and nationalistic frames for a moment, there were three other works (Ananta, The Eternal by Ragamala Dance Company from the USA, Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse from France and N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien from Canada) which are also worth talking about.

Aparna Ramaswamy’s Ananta, The Eternal at Assembly @ Dance Base is a programme of four shorter classical bharatanatyam works (two duets from the Ramaswamy sisters Aparna and Ashwini and two solos) to pre-recorded music and it marks the occasion when the sisters have “come together for their first duet evening.” The promotional material includes the following: “Aparna Ramaswamy preserves ancient dance forms with stunning virtuosity and expressiveness to create a living tradition that is resonant for modern times” (Boston Globe). “Award-winning choreographer Aparna Ramaswamy weaves together threads of body, memory, desire and devotion to describe the eternal relationship between the deity and the devotee.”

The work “was created with special commissioning funds from The Mayer Family and commissioning support from Asia Society Texas” and whilst there’s no doubt that Aparna is an excellent technician and charismatic performer with some sweet and powerful jaatis across the three works she performs in, there is a gap in technique and expressiveness levels between the sisters in the duets. Ashwini is noticeably weaker, especially across her shoulder line, and when the duets demand a mirrored precision it unfortunately draws the focus away from Aparna.

There is an introductory, pre-recorded voice intro to three of the four pieces. We hear how in the first piece the deity/devotee relationship manifests as: “Krishna, He is the Infinite and the Intimate. He saved the Yamuna River and its people from the snake-demon, Kaliya, dancing the snake into submission.” In the third work — choreographed and taught by Smt. Alarmel Valli — the deity/devotee relationship talks of: “Shiva Nataraja symbolizes the rhythms of the cosmos. His dance is the pulse of the universe, and He represents both the destruction of illusion and the creation of enlightenment.”

With so little bharatanatyam on UK stages, the understanding from audiences about this classical form is very shallow and consequently you get audience quotes on the fringe festival website like: “While I’m sure it is part of the cultural background, I found the ankle bells really quite jarring by the end; I was very ready to stop hearing them.” and “Beautiful dancing set to lovely traditional music. Would recommend this show. I haven’t seen dancing like this in person before so was educational to see.”

In the UK there’s been a 25+ year discussion around the framing of bharatanatyam as an ancient, traditional 2000+ year-old form; what some contemporary UK bharatanatyam performers and choreographers are attempting to do is educate audiences that this mythologising is false and it harms this classical form; yet this language is still perpetuated by some artists, venues and media outlets who want to keep bharatanatyam in a little, colourful, exotic box.

I would love to see at a future Edinburgh Festival Fringe or at the Edinburgh International Festival a collaboration between a suite of classical Indian artists and companies from the UK and abroad to reframe and present what these forms are really like in 2025, what they can achieve, and have an opportunity to talk about what artists think these forms could be in the future.

Continuing on the false mythologising train is the leery and misogynistic abomination that is Dance N’Speak Easy by Wanted Posse at McEwan Hall, Underbelly, which sells itself as: “Join world champions of hip-hop in an electrifying alternate universe where charleston footsteps and jitterbug beats meet freestyle hip-hop in a 1920s New York speakeasy. Infused with dazzling dance routines and thrilling burlesque to the remixed sounds of Miles Davis, James Brown and Jessica Rabbit, this is an afternoon of high-energy entertainment fit for the whole family.”

Whilst this represents the debut of Wanted Posse at the Edinburgh Fringe, the same performance was at the Avignon Festival in 2018 and the combination of prohibition, Hip Hop dance and the speakeasy is one that has been mined multiple times by the England-based Southpaw Dance Company since 2013. Southpaw premiered an outdoor work called Faust in 2013 (“In this re-imagining of Goethe’s Faust, drinking, gambling, womanising, and general debauchery make the Speakeasy a perfect place for a man to lose his soul”) before going on to develop an indoor version called Speakeasy in 2019/20 before touring the UK in Autumn 2023: “The professional cast includes some of the UK’s finest Bboys who combine the vocabulary of breaking and contemporary seamlessly alongside Charleston, Lindy and other swing styles of the roaring 20’s.”

How Dance N’Speak Easy is framed as fit for the whole family is beyond me; with five male dancers constantly drooling, pawing and vying for the attention of the one female dancer (played by Jessie Perot) across multiple scenes via their breaking power moves, there’s a silhouette scene where Perot looks as if she is disrobing and we see only her outline in a cheap burlesque imitation. Dance N’Speak Easy is devoid of any atmosphere and I dream of at least 2D characterisation or a narrative arc; instead it’s made up of breaking buffoonery and a desire for dopamine theatre — show me a move, do the splits, perform faux drunkenness — which sees the audience seal clapping lightly every minute or so to respond to an unsatisfying and mediocre trick.

Choreographer Njagui Hagbé said: “In 2013, we were selected for the final of France’s Got Talent and presented Prohibition. The reception was so enthusiastic that we decided to create a whole show based on the same idea: the forbidden. Dance N’Speak Easy is a theatrical choreographic project, based on the themes of otherness and freedom, as seen through the eyes of the Prohibition years. We wanted to go back to these troubled years and draw parallels between the prohibitions of that period and our current situation. Our demand is clear: we want to defend our right to dance.”

In some respects, understanding the origin of the work (a TV talent show where you are working in 5-10 second segments to keep the audience and judges’ attention) offers an insight into how their decisions have come to fruition. But when you’re fitting the scene length to pre-existing music tracks, concepts are often spread too thin or not given enough time to develop and tableau, freeze frame and slow-motion theatrical techniques are as dated and as bad as their attempts at group choreography.

There’s no doubt that the level of breaking ability is incredibly high — there’s about 12 really innovative transitions, threads, lifts and power moves across the 60-minute show which are jaw dropping — but the dramaturgical naivety means that they appear out of nowhere with no set up and then disappear without a trace. The final ‘drunk battle’ between two dancers who are each holding one of the empty liquor bottles that feature heavily in the set is a highlight, as the complexity of executing a 1990 or a complex freeze with a bottle in hand is genuinely tough to pull off. Whilst this is firmly pegging itself in the entertainment field and not as a work of art, the representation of women is appalling and Dance N’Speak Easy adds another layer to the deeply problematic and grooved Hip Hop dance narratives of misogyny that continue to plague the Hip Hop theatre world.

Talking of dramaturgical naivety and a work devoid of atmosphere, it’s time to return to Made in Scotland and Guesthouse Projects’ performance of The Show For Young Men at Assembly @ Dance Base which is framed as: “A man and a boy meet on a stage that’s somewhere between a building site, a junkyard, and a hillside at dawn. Together they dance, play, wrestle, and sing trying to make sense of what it means to be a man. The Show For Young Men is a tender and moving new contemporary dance piece made for audiences aged 8+, co-created and performed by Alfie, a 10-year-old boy, and Robbie Synge, a 40-something-year-old male dancer.”

The further I get from this show the more I dislike it because of its sense of manufactured play. Eoin McKenzie (as Lead Artist and Director) has invited a bunch of other adults into a room who have together created a production that speaks to a much-discussed and funder cat-nipped concept. There were a lot of shows exploring the crises of masculinity at Tony Mills’ first full length fringe programme at Dance Base, and whilst there’s buckets of care in ensuring the safety of Alfie, everything is muted, artificial and feels dead behind the eyes. The junkyard tubes are shiny and new, the constant ex-footballer radio commentary is a cheap attempt at the semiotics of manhood, there’s not a scratch or piece of dirt on their costumes or their hands and the contact and lift work are calm and measured. Children don’t exist in this manufactured state of play; if a child was on a building site they’d be near feral, demanding, loud and wanting to climb up things over and over again, little beings full of emotion and giddy at the prospect of an unexplored playground. Whereas The Show For Young Men is actually a display of emotional regulation (at one point Synge suddenly started getting angry and banging the set which felt needlessly awkward and required Alfie to give him some biscuits to calm him down) and rewards both performers for not showing their real feelings. The Show For Young Men exists in a world which actively celebrates the repression of both expressive physicality and emotional variation of young and not-so-young men.

The final work to be Made in Scotland was Futuristic Folktales by Charlotte Mclean & Collaborators running for six performances in week two at Assembly @ Dance Base. This is how the work markets itself: “a dance for hope, reimagines the creation story through the tale of the first ever womb. It’s a place that unites everyone, we were all born from a womb. Using storytelling, contemporary and Scottish Highland dance, this experimental dance theatre production questions the preservation of tradition, myth, and identity whilst scrutinising body politics and reproductive injustice.”

With an extraordinarily distorted pipes soundtrack from Malin Lewis, a kilted Mclean opens the performance in a friendly and low-key way that offers a live contextual introduction about her desire to say ‘womb’ a lot, some thoughts about identity and reproductive rights, Scottish highland dancing, the 30 collaborators involved in making the show (including a witch and a b-boy) and her previous 5-star hit show. I really like this as a way of opening the show; it’s totally disarming and makes it clear what she wants the frame to be before introducing the two performer/collaborators, Seke Chimutengwende and Orrow Bell.

There’s a delicious Made in Scotland showcase meta narrative running alongside Futuristic Folktakes with Mclean talking about wombs (a place where things are made) in Scotland. The soundtrack from Lewis sets the emotional landscape which Chimutengwende and Bell inhabit and it’s a sonic environment that you definitely won’t hear on the Royal Mile. Lewis is an instrument maker as well as a composer and they’ve invented a new two-octave bagpipe that melds West coast traditions with a melodious discordant sound which cleanses and lifts the ears.

In a work that is as full of text as movement, Chimutengwende and Bell offer us a lightness in their presence and speak of “hypersonic wombs, womb patriarchy, womb empires, womb complexity” and dozens of other womb states. They begin to deconstruct the patterns of step dancing and the arm and hand positioning, almost absurding it into a glitch state. Sat alongside this is a repeated visual representation of the act of birthing through legs, arms and fingers as well as sometimes trying to crawl back inside to see how physically impossible that act might be.

Futuristic Folktales examines many of the tropes of Scottishness (pipes, kilts, highland dancing), looks them straight in the eyes and queers them with a gentle and joyous aplomb. I am totally here for it and believe entirely in the world that has been created.

And now the final work that was not made in Scotland, N.Ormes by Agathe and Adrien, who were back at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the second consecutive year after achieving a certain level of critical and commercial success in 2023. This is how they describe themselves: “Provocative, dysfunctional and tender, N.Ormes is an award-winning circus show that pushes the limits of gender norms with never-before-seen acrobatic exchanges. Don’t miss its Fringe comeback! Skilfully combining acrobatics and dance, we follow our two protagonists and their relationship, navigating between complicity and power struggles. Come witness this inspiring journey to see how the exchange of roles and acrobatics blurs our preconceptions!”

Agathe and Adrien examine their bodies and notice they have the same diameter across many parts, including their calves, chest, biceps etc. and decide to invert some circus gender norms. N.Ormes is a really well-executed show that has a strong foundational concept and shares some new (to me) balances and acrobatics. There’s often the assumption that in circus shows it’s the man who is the base and the lifter, whereas in N.Ormes it’s not the case; it’s more like “anything you can do, I can do too.” What was refreshing to see was Adrien in a state of almost numb refusal, laying on the floor, emotionally vacant and resisting the urge from Agathe to fulfil his expected role of virtuosic physicality.

Their foot-bum-seat, springy-knees pike flip was a crowd pleaser, but for me the physical highlight of the show was a hugely effective, illusionary three-legged waltz where it looked as if they were hovering over the floor whilst circling together around the edge of the stage.

I could have done without the emotionally fey soundtrack from Simon Leoza which felt like AI had munched its way through the Mumford and Sons discography and spat out a sonically generic something which doesn’t support the quality of the performers’ execution or the strength of their concept. However, it is a well-loved show, returning for a second year without the support of a nationalistic showcase and for that it should be applauded.

So, Mr Robertson, what’s it going to be? How can a Made in Scotland showcase exist if the individual artists “who get the opportunity to showcase their work to the international artistic community, gathered each year in our city for the greatest celebration of arts and culture on the planet” do not have access to a highly competitive funding pot which enables them to develop their skills and build pioneering productions that represent Scotland on the international stage? How about a new showcase in 2025 called “No Longer Made in Scotland Due To The Political Dick-Swinging Chicken Antics Between Creative Scotland And Angus Robertson.”

*STOP PRESS*

Since filing this text, Mr Robertson has undertaken another sweet dime stop. On September 4th he announced “a review of Creative Scotland to ensure its operations and structure are optimal to the needs of the culture sector…the review, which will be the first since the public body’s establishment in 2010, will examine Creative Scotland’s remit and functions as a funding body, and how the overall impact of planned increases in levels of public funding can be maximised to support sustainability in the sector and in participation in the arts. The Culture Secretary also confirmed that following a period of necessary due diligence, Creative Scotland had now received funding previously allocated to it in the 2024/25 Scottish budget, including £1.8 million for youth music, and £6.6 million that will allow its Open Fund to be re-opened.”

Please, Mr Robertson, I’ve heard enough of your macho-posturing nationalisms. Perhaps you could reflect on the chaos that you and your government have created. The panic from your initial announcement meant that by the time the fund closed on Friday 30 August, Creative Scotland received an additional 819 applications totalling £11.9 million in requested funding. Creative Scotland have since announced that the Open Fund for Individuals will reopen for applications on Tuesday 8 October 2024. The story continues…

Ian Abbott on Outdoor performances in 2021: Part 1

Due to the interrupted possibilities of seeing indoor work across 2021, I will focus predominantly in this two-part review on work presented in England’s green and pleasant land, the great outdoors. When the UK government released their four-stage roadmap for loosening Covid restrictions in February 2021, stage three approved the return of outdoor performances as of May 17, allowing audiences once again to see live work in person. Norwich and Norfolk Festival were fresh out of the blocks, running from May 17 to 30, stating that the ‘2021 edition of the arts festival will be a one-off adaptation, with programme and presentation designed especially for Covid times.’ To celebrate the first festival of the 2021 outdoor arts season I ventured to Norwich to see the premieres of three new dance works by Alleyne Dance, Requardt and Rosenberg and Far From The Norm.

Future Cargo by (Frauke) Requardt and (David) Rosenberg was originally planned and advertised to premiere at Greenwich and Docklands International Festival (GDIF) in 2020, but instead landed in Chapelfield Gardens in mid-May on a rainy Norwich evening at 6pm for around 100 audience members. This is how it describes itself: “A truck arrives in Silvertown from a distant planet. As the sides roll up, an unstoppable series of events are set into motion. This contemporary sci-fi dance show reveals a world where the normal rules don’t apply. This extraordinary new outdoor production takes audiences into a surreal visual and aural experience enhanced with 360-degree sound on personal headsets.” 

Future Cargo is actually a cross between the conveyor belt challenge on the Generation Game and a space crematorium — all set on the back of an articulated lorry with bespoke shipping container and treadmills a plenty — as four skin-tight, silver morph-suited performers parade and attempt to escape the inevitable furnace of death. The opening twenty minutes see the chrome morphs ice skate in slow-motion as they continuously adopt multiple mannequin stretches and choreographic poses in both solo and duet encounters before the gradual inclusion of props designed to pique our visual interest in the treadmill conceit: tennis racquets, plants, a very long bench, a water cooler, a bowling ball and ten pins, wigs, combs and dodgems. There is also a truck driver who spends most of their time in the cab before climbing on to the top of the container towards the end only to switch places with one of the silver bodies. 

Having seen all of Requardt &Rosenberg’s four previous works — Electric Hotel, Motor Show, The Roof, and DeadClub — they share a clear aesthetic, and a production prowess (courtesy of set and costume designer Hannah Clark and lighting designer Malcolm Rippeth) in which we are connected to the spoken words and music via a set of headphones with a binaural sound design and composition by Ben and Max Ringham. All have a similar thematic field that is being ploughed, but each one is dressed in different clothes. 

If you think of Future Cargo as season five of Requardt and Rosenberg rather than as an individual isolated work, then things begin to make a little more sense; we’re deep into the narrative arc where distance, proximity and intimacy have all been repurposed. Setting aside the awkward season two that was Motor Show, the new(ish) feature for this season is that there’s treadmills and a shipping container in play. I say the shipping container is new, but Rosenberg has another creative partnership with Glenn Neath called Darkfield where together they have produced three 20-minute works in customised shipping containers that audiences enter; they’re pitch black and the work is experienced through sound, scent and haptic encounters.

Throughout May I was also watching the three seasons of Dark (a German language sci-fi series commissioned by Netflix and created by Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese) which explores the existential implications of time in 33-year cycles, intergenerational time travel and its effect on human nature. It’s all about loops, black holes, repeated lives and making decisions which might or might not impact what happens to us in the future. Dark definitely had an impact on my reading of Future Cargo and the synchrony that exists between the two works; they fed and enhanced each other. When I was watching these chromed bodies disappear off stage left on the truck and heard a whoosh in the soundtrack leading us to believe that the bodies are being flamed, I was also seeing the burnt eyes and burst eardrums on the characters from Dark.

The visual field of Future Cargo is highly controlled and very limited; as an audience experience it’s akin to watching TV. You’re fixed in a single position, watching something play out in front of you at some distance; there’s very rarely more than one thing to watch at once and the majority of it plays out in front of you in a narrow rectangle of constantly evolving moving shapes. Future Cargo is visual dopamine, designed for Instagram likes and contains short-form choreographed nuggets that are perfect for the Tik Tok TV generation.

Good Youtes Walk (commissioned by GDIF) by Far From The Norm was presented in the shadow of Norwich Cathedral and self-describes as a “chaotic and frenzied Hip Hop dance theatre work” that “explores how divided we are as a nation. Due to the recent surge of global events including the Covid pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement heightening, now more than ever we are a nation divided. It unravels how the youth of today are reclaiming their future and want to address the divide by creating unity and empathy that transcends race, class, gender and geography.”

In June, when Glastonbury 2021 was a screen-based encounter due to the restrictions on numbers of people who could gather, Kano performed a “career-defining” 35-minute set at Worthy Farm that was joyous, complex and political, demonstrating an artist at the top of their game. Good Youtes Walk Amongst Evil is a song by Kano (released in 2019) and the first lyric is: “We’re doing this for the money”.

Premieres are strange things; they are the first public outing of a work on a date that is often determined by a presenter. Good Youtes Walk was simply not ready to be out in the world. At 40 minutes long it was flabby, had over-stretched ideas outstaying their welcome, energies that sagged between choreographed sections and if you compare the reality of what it claims to be versus reality, it felt thin and flimsy. 

Set on a static lump of a structure that looked like a decaying building (designed by Ryan Dawson Laight), the five dancers attempted to deliver a series of episodic scenes, interspersed with tightly choreographed norm dancing that flips boomer perception of the good/bad binary of what the  “youth” are up to on the street; they tried to goof around and aim their water pistols at political satire with a Boris Johnson-esque character, cheap props, wigs (by costume maker, Kingsley Hall), fishing rods with fake money as bait, superhero masks and inept police officer chases. The FFTN dancers (Amanda Pefkou, Hayleigh Sellors, Jordan Douglas, Shangomola Edunjobi and Ezra Owen) are incredible dancers. They’re not trained clowns, actors and comedians, so why would you attempt to make a work of this length with a limited creation and rehearsal period, asking the dancers to try and deliver all of these other skills on top?  

We know that since the Conservative party came to power in 2010 the real-term spending to youth services has been cut by over 70% in less than a decade; we know that there are so few public spaces designed for teenagers and we know that if you were born after the year 2000 you have only known an England that is suffering the effects of a financial crash, over a decade of Conservative rule and now a pandemic. Young people have only known this state; this is their norm.

I’m unsure whether Good Youtes Walk is Far From The Norm embodying and wholly owning the opening lyric from Kano; after all, a company has a duty of care to those it employs, people need to be paid and which company is going to turn down a sizeable commission in these pandemic times? After the premiere, I don’t know if there was any more time spent re-working it before further dates in the summer, but I cannot say the same for Good Youtes Walk that I did for Far From The Norm’s full-length BLKDOG I saw at Warwick Arts Centre in February 2020: that I’d be happy to meet that work again at a later date to see how it had settled. I’ll share some new thoughts on BLKDOG in the second part of this review.

Bonded by Alleyne Dance was an absolute highlight of 2021; it warrants a much larger tour in 2022 and beyond and demonstrates a rare trinity of conceptual simplicity, refined craft and expert delivery. The work self-describes as “an outdoor production that explores the construct of human dependency, especially that of siblings — and how time and external conditions can affect the synergetic connection. Performed by twin sisters, Kristina and Sadé Alleyne, the work takes the audience through a transitional journey of inter-and-independency through abstract dance narrative.” 

Our thirst for human touch has been foregrounded since March 2020 and although Bonded isn’t a COVID work, it was made during these times. Whilst the use of “synergetic” and “inter-and-independency” in the marketing copy may lead us to believe this is a slightly dry and academic performance, it is anything but. 

At a shade under 30 minutes, we’re introduced to Kristina and Sadé who are alone on either side of a revolving, 8-metre long, narrow, transparent corridor; they encounter this physical barrier (designed by Emanuele Salamanca) which restricts their ability to touch and be together. They begin to mirror movements on either side of it — lighting up our mirror neurons that are enhanced by their visual similarity as twins — until the corridor begins to rotate which forces them to move, inhabiting a space that the other was just in, but the body is no longer there. The corridor and choreography begin to transform and transform again in many and unexpected ways offering encounters on alternate levels, new restrictions to overcome and eventually leading to them being reunited. All of these moments of being apart and facing restrictions before finally coming together were empathetically landing because that had been the lived reality for so many of us before May 2021. 

Kristina and Sadé are exceptional performers who describe the Alleyne Dance style as “blending West-African, Caribbean, Kathak, Hip Hop and Circus Skills within a contemporary dance context” and over the past decade they’ve worked for a suite of international choreographers including Wim Vandekeybus, Akram Khan, Gregory Maqoma, Alessandra Seutin and Boy Blue. However, what is remarkable is that Bonded is the first outdoor performance they’ve created and performed as Alleyne Dance (they were commissioned by 2Faced Dance Company to create Power in 2019). For an outdoor work to be so well crafted, that demonstrates an understanding of how story beats are released to sustain an audience’s attention and how they combine with a structure and score that enhances the conceptual understanding is a massive achievement and heralds an exciting arrival onto the outdoor arts circuit.

Reflections on other work from the great outdoors across in 2021 will continue in part 2.

Resolution 2020: WonderWoman Collective, Harry Parr & Autin Dance Theatre

Resolution 2020, WonderWoman Collective, Harry Parr, Autin Dance Theatre, February 20

WonderWoman Collective is a trio of dancers from the London Contemporary Dance School’s Developing Artistic Practice programme: choreographer Hannah Adams and her collaborators Greta Gauhe and Marta Stepien. Their work, Her Agency, explores ‘womanhood and female empowerment’. The program note is written in the style of an abstract, detailing what we can expect to see. ‘The performance will highlight the importance of mutual support in the time of social isolation’…and ‘(the three women) will find themselves in unexpected complex situations, easing into unforeseen connections that demand instant response.’ In the field of academic research papers, an abstract is intended to connect to the arguments elaborated in the text, but in a visual, image-based art like dance such a desired concision is lost between the performance and the onlooker. As Roland Barthes argued in the field of literary studies, once a book is published, its author has no authority in its interpretation. It’s not just a question of the program notes; Adams has interpreted the physical aspects of Her Agency quite literally while loosening their connection to the dimension of dance. On a bare stage with three hanging microphones, we can see the development of ideas like mutual support and precarious balance, as well as complex, unconventional interaction, but a section of guided contact improvisation with Adams at the microphone seems straight out of the school curriculum. What is missing is an enveloping choreographic and spatial dynamic that takes thinking-as-dance to the realm of dance-as-thinking. 

Harry Parr’s desire to ‘connect the space, the dancers and the audience with a rousing energy in a shared experience of flow’ is like an adrenalin shot that kicks the evening’s program into gear. PEAK is an unapologetic opportunity for Parr to exercise his ‘own idiosyncratic vocabulary’ in a work that does a lot more; it imprints itself on the imagination by the nature of its formal and spatial organisation. The responsibility lies both with the dancers — Parr, Adélie Lavail and Corrie McKenzie — and with Zak Macro’s lighting that treats light and shade as if it were pulling focus between sharpness and blur. Parr’s idiosyncratic, edgy vocabulary borrows from the gestural language of mime; the use of his body, hands and fingers has a dramatic intent that, although abstract, has a quality of language that gives structure to his choreography. He projects the persona of a puppet master or magician in relation to Lavail and McKenzie who in turn enter into this alchemy with finely attuned contributions that are like a wild, animalistic chorus. Far from simply an exercise in idiosyncratic vocabulary, PEAK has perhaps inadvertently stumbled on an expression of movement in space that is at the heart of drama. Macro’s play of light and Parr’s detached groupings — like the closeup focus on a dialogue of legs between Lavail and McKenzie while Parr’s torso coordinates in the shade behind — work together to create a unified emotional field. 

For the purposes of full disclosure, I rehearsed and performed with Johnny Autin in a production of Lindsey Butcher and Darshan Singh Bhuller’s Rites of War in 2014, so I am familiar with his vocabulary and way of moving. But nothing prepared me for the searing psychological evocation of mental health that permeates his solo, Square One, for Autin Dance Theatre, a work that would be impossible to achieve without him having personally driven through the landscape it explores. It is a landscape of black floor and walls in which a broad cylinder of white paper in various permutations is both the material of his preoccupation and his path to survival. Autin is already on stage as we enter the auditorium, obsessively tearing white paper into small squares and littering the floor around him while staring out absentmindedly at the audience as if through a window. The crossover between mimicry and the recollection of mental disturbance is unnerving but the visceral energy of Square One derives from this proximity of performer and subject and Autin has both the courage and necessary distance to combine the two. The effect is a carefully constructed diary of images that is both attractive through Autin’s sensual athleticism and chastening in its psychological fragility. Joe Henderson’s lighting enhances the idea of archetypical opposites, contrasting the white paper against the black walls to create opacity and translucence, shadow and substance. 

The program defines Square One as a work in progress, but the performance belies this; it is polished with experience, candour and Autin’s perverse delight in performing it.

Mette Edvardsen in Music for Lectures at Fest en Fest

Mette Edvardsen, Music For Lectures/every word was once an animal, Fest en Fest, February 9

It’s a welcome opportunity to see Mette Edvardsen again at Fest en Fest after last year’s No Title. She brings not a solo work but a collaboration with Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion and Francesca Fargion: Music for Lectures/every word was once an animal. The setting is not a stage but one end of the Fuel Tank bar, against a door with a no entry sign on the outside. It’s a wet, stormy day and some people enter through it anyway to avoid an extra walk around the building. Seats are improvised, cushions are laid on the floor and Edvardsen is seated facing them cross-legged on a mat with microphone in hand. She is backed (or sided) by what is called a rock band consisting of Burrows on drums, Fargion senior on bass and Fargion junior on keyboard, but the musical style is more affected minimalist than rock. 

Once she begins her text in her deadpan Norwegian lilt, it is clear that Edvardsen’s discursive lecture, both in its rigorous construction and in the patterns of her thinking, is in fact a choreography of words and ideas that move with the fluidity of an enchaînement. That she remains seated is inconsequential; we can see the movement behind our eyes. She begins with a characteristic digression by saying she had once thought her title, ‘every word was once an animal’, was a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, but her memorisation of the misquote — its repetition in her memory — had value since it led her to read all Emerson’s works and what others had written about him. The way Edvardsen’s words contain meanings that spread out into other meanings like an endless stream of associations is perhaps something she has learned from Emerson. In fact, it wasn’t a digression at all, but a repetition of something that Edvardsen had prepared, rehearsed and was now performing.  

The meaning of the English words ‘repetition’ and ‘rehearsal’ is joined in the French ‘répétition’, and Edvardsen takes us through aspects of the word’s signification, teasing its many cultural connections and spatio-temporal ramifications, from the micro-cosmos of performances, rituals, and daily routines to quantum explanations of space-time. She integrates a story about the filming of the burning house in Tarkovsky’s Offret (The Sacrifice), examples of the Spanish artist Dora Garcia, the Beatles’ song Number 9 and considers the proposal of an alternative universal rhythm with a Big Bang followed by a Big Crunch followed again by a Big Bang. 

Repetition acts both as an affirmation and a procrastination, a looking back but also a distillation of possibilities in the future. Quoting the Danish philosopher Søren Kirkegaard, Edvardsen reminds us that repetition and recollection are the same movements but in opposite directions, because in recollecting what has been, one also repeats it. Such an economy suspends the repetition of the past in the future, giving rise to the entropy of what Edvardsen refers to as a ‘non-concept’. Through her diverse references Edvardsen is not merely illustrating repetitive patterns but turning them into a choreographic lecture as a way of knowing.

Throughout, Edvardsen never loses the thread of associations; she does, however, find a red thread stuck on her sock but this, she reminds us, is a repetitive digression at the core of any performance and of the performing arts: the rehearsal of a pattern that is never the same and yet not so different as to be unrecognizable. 

In a previous project called Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine, Edvardsen associated the memorisation of a book with the way a dancer learns choreography in rehearsal, and a live reading with performance. A copy of one of the books in the project was Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, but the memoriser’s copy was beginning to fall apart from wear (it can happen to a dancer, too). When she replaced it with a new one she was horrified to find the opening line was a different translation. By repeating the same line in a number of English translations, Edvardsen demonstrates how each iteration of a gesture, a word, a phrase or a verse can create a different image or association. As Emerson actually wrote, ‘Every word was once a poem.’ 

Fest en Fest offers its audiences examples of what it calls ‘expanded choreography’. The symbiotic link between language and dance that Edvardsen develops through the medium of the voice — with or without an accompanying band — is a perfect example. 

Ian Abbott on H2Dance’s Fest en Fest at Laban

Fest en Fest 2020 by H2Dance, Laban, 8 and 9 February

Fest en Fest is an international festival of UK/Nordic artists looking at notions of expanded choreography initiated and curated by H2Dance. Fest en Fest ‘makes space for artists and audiences to come together and present live works and ideas, to discuss, provoke, influence and be a force for change.’ This is the second edition and took place over a week in Colchester, Cambridge and London. I saw a number of works and attended a discursive lunch and round table with Janine Harrington and Grace Nicol in Deptford. Due to the storms that weekend, the performance of Phantasmagoric by Helgebostad/Berstad/Brun was unfortunately cancelled. 

Cry Me a River – the Quest for the Source by Karen Røise Kielland/Katja Dreyer is a buoyant choreographic postcard offering an autofictional account of a joint expedition to the source of the River Styx via the side quests of multiple Greek mythological hero(ine)s. Kielland and Dreyer are a pair of affable performers busying themselves with their stage-based tasks related to casting effigies of multiple body parts in plaster whilst retelling their real life stories of meeting Odysseus, Cerberus and Echo on a 1500-mile adventure. 

With their direct address and small audience interaction (one member got a cast of their hand) it’s a work that raises a few chuckles at the word play and storytelling as Kielland and Dreyer relay their encounters; it feels that there’s enough presented for us to believe it is real…or real enough. It dabbles with the venn diagram of truth and non-truth whilst keeping their onstage labour legitimate. Sat alongside all of this is a long set-up for what is a delicious final set of images (no spoilers) and feminist commentary on the patriarchal histories, stories and collections that are so heralded in Western heritage institutions. The act of casting bodies and the residue of patriarchal statues that are littered throughout history tell a particular story of a particular body type from a particular stratum of society; Kielland and Dreyer’s gentle lampooning is a fine start to my Fest en Fest.

If audiences were trying to find traditional examples of ‘dancing’ and ‘choreography’ in Cry Me a River – the Quest for the Source they would struggle, but Fest en Fest is clear in what it is and what it will present. ‘Expanded Choreography’ as a notion could be an alternative moniker for performance, live art or theatre. An ‘Expanded Theatre’ festival like Fest en Fest includes dance, music, and visual art in a widening boundary that encompasses other things. Fest en Fest is a festival. A festival of work from the UK and Nordic countries. It doesn’t need to indulge in a dance-will-eat-itself debate – let the work speak and get your ears ready for what it has to say.

Music For Lectures is a series of works by Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion where they invite a speaker (this time Mette Edvardsen) to give a talk on a subject of their choice which is backed by the Burrows/Fargion ‘rock band.’ At 35 minutes Music For Lectures/every word was once an animal saw Edvardsen sat cross legged with microphone and script in hand, Burrows on drums, Fargion (Matteo) on bass guitar and egg shakers and Fargion (Francesca) conducting from a keyboard. 

Edvardsen’s text is a dry and stretched desert traipse through the pop science section of Waterstones picking up some sugary and shallow philosophy on repetition on the way; the rock band play simple chords and beats whilst Edvardsen speaks. For 35 minutes. With the audience sat at the end of Gaff@FuelTank bar, 40 people were subjected to the theory of the eternal return, to Flashdance and to Kierkegaard. It was thin, self-satisfying and could have been presented as a radio programme/podcast such were the levels of performativity or audience engagement; if I wanted a performed bibliography in the shadow of John Cage I would have gone elsewhere.

I do not subscribe to the cult of Jonathan Burrows. Having seen four of his works I cannot understand why a performance of quaint Englishness — a peacocking simplicity masked by pseudo intellectual academia — appears to be so well received by the cult which surrounds his work. His performance persona is like an English Poundland version of Matthew Goulish and Tim Etchell’s lovechild but has inherited neither their performance charisma nor their intellectual heft. 

With Edvardsen the second, White, female frontperson (previously Katye Coe) in Burrows and Fargion’s collection, I don’t understand why or how her presentation is of interest in the live realm. Expanded choreography this is not. Expanded intellectuality this is definitely not. Burrows and Fargion expanded ego, 100%.

What H2Dance have done for this second edition of the festival is to extend it outside London, bringing a number of UK premieres to Cambridge and Colchester as well as attracting a set of artists and students from Laban for whom some of the work resonates/challenges assumed thinking. Fest en Fest has — in just two years — found a tribe of audiences, artists and programmers to attend this micro-festival that is artist run/curated and led. It is rich, full and divergent and although I had a strong response to Music For Lectures, I appreciate a work that makes me feel such a strong set of emotions. 

Leaving Laban I went back to thinking about Cry Me a River – the Quest for the Source and how Kielland and Dreyer could expand their own repertoire and offer their take on other histories choreographically, from the Greeks to the Romans to the plague or the sealing of the Magna Carter in a series of alternative edutainment shorts looking at dance/history through a feminist autofictional lens.

Resolution 2020: Kindred & Judd, Parbati Chaudhury, Grand Gesture

Resolution 2020, Kindred & Judd Collective, Parbati Chaudhury, Grand Gesture, January 29

A theme of this Resolution triple bill of the Kindred & Judd Collective, Parbati Chaudhury and Grand Gesture is the linking of the individual’s everyday struggle with, respectively, identity, pain and old age. 

In aGender, Helen Kindred and Maga Judd confront their quest for identity in the continuous juggling of roles, expectations, and norms. Garments scattered around the stage are metaphors for the way in which identities are constructed, adapted and articulated. As the audience walks in, Kindred is wandering from pile to pile, selecting, putting on and taking off items of clothing with the timeless nonchalance of one accustomed to improvising; Judd is already exhausted by the process and is resting, camouflaged, on a pile of clothes. But not for long; soon dresses are pulled over their heads like playful tokens of subversion and liberation as they both drop on all fours and scamper around to Judd’s mix of Polish and English endearments until she screams and time comes to a deafening stop. As much a performance of rebellion as it is an affirmation of dogged persistence, aGender continues with the repeated rhythmical motif of falling and getting up, in which an endearing sense of mutual help and friendship develops between the two women that borders on the euphoric. The dancers pile layers on layers to the point they impede their movement; Kindred succumbs to the load, but Judd cannot help her: ‘I have to go,’ she says, ‘I have no time.’ Judd’s score, which acts like a ground from which the colours and textures emerge, now goes into reverse with a joint refrain from the two performers prefixing a familiar list of tasks for which they have no time, a refrain of the perpetual attempt to keep up with professional, domestic and social roles to the point of exasperation. While such a search for identity resonates with the history of feminism and established constructions of womanhood, the ambiguity of the final gestures — both achievement and exhaustion — suggests the struggle continues.  

Sigmund Freud’s formulation of the concept of trauma emerged from his observation of the belated psychological pain suffered by patients who had been involved in railway accidents that had caused them only minor concussions or injuries. In Fader, choreographer Parbati Chaudhury links questions around the persistence of pain with two emblems of modernity that are deeply implicated with colonialism — the system of railways and the discipline of psychoanalysis — and reinterprets them through kathak dance movement. In the opening, Meera Patel’s kneeling body sways forward and back as if on a journey; her hands move continually to a source of pain in her side until it resolves. The work is episodic, divided both into different states of pain by choreographic gesture and into different spatial areas by judicious lighting and haze. While there are some unresolved tensions between dynamic representation and static illustration, Fader is an evocative expression of trauma that Patel’s lyrical qualities, poise and acute musicality help to convey. She is helped by Jesse Bannister’s score, composed for sarod, guitar, and bass, on which she dances like an additional instrument, creating together a choreographic and musical journey of richly rewarding cross-cultural fertilization. 

Grand Gesture’s That Old Feeling introduces four ‘geri-anarchists’ — a new identity designation — who explore attitudes to ageing. The work examines the ambiguity of age between subjective sensation and societal expectation, throwing down the gauntlet in a riotous affirmation of the former. Depositing themselves centre stage in plastic bags at the beginning of the work, Mary Cox, Bruce Currie, Gilly Hanna and Andy Newman collectively embody the recorded litany of derisive epithets used to describe older people, from ‘old git’ and ‘duffer’ to ‘coffin dodger’. It’s a dark, hard-hitting image that quickly loses its satirical bite to self-mockery; the four geri-anarchists climb out of their bags in long white coats and subvert the lyrics of Guy Lombardo’s That Old Feeling by acting out the physical attributes of ailing. In the subsequent series of solos and ensemble numbers, however, subverting lyrics turns into subverting assumptions, no more so than in Currie’s enthusiastic belly dance number. The danger of using assumptions about age in order to flaunt them is that the manner of flaunting becomes a new meme that perpetuates the original assumptions. Cox breaks the mould by creating choreographic impressions of her memories, but within the piecemeal construction of the work, her subtle contribution is overpowered by the irrepressible desire of Grand Gesture to forcibly ‘shake off the cloak of elder invisibility’. 

Dance Umbrella 2019: Out of the System Mixed Bill at Bernie Grant Arts Centre

Dance Umbrella 2019: Out of the System – Mixed Bill at Bernie Grant Arts Centre, October 22

Out of the System is a guest-programmed section of Dance Umbrella; for the past three years it has been curated with characteristic flair by Freddie Opoku-Addaie who described it in 2017 as ‘the presence of diverse dance cultures within vocational and non-vocational structures outside the regular framework of dance presentation’. Two years later Out of the System has worked its way into the system with the Big Pink Vogue Ball at Shoreditch Town Hall and a mixed bill at, and presented in partnership with, Bernie Grant Arts Centre. With five artists over four works, the mixed bill consists of small-scale works with large-scale themes of identity and racial politics that Opoku-Addaie characterises in public transport terms (influenced by his commute on a No. 26 Routemaster bus between Waterloo Station and Hackney Wick) as telling ‘complex journeys that are routed in the shared struggle, continuous stop/start but dealt with a crafted overview of human fortitude.’

Theo TJ Lowe (THÉO INART) has worked with Hofesh Schechter and Akram Khan, among others, and this shows in his compelling presence on stage in his solo, Fragility in Man – Part 1. He makes his entrance through the doors of the theatre on to the stage that resembles a bare waiting room with three chairs; ill at ease, he takes a seat like a patient waiting to be examined or, more ominously, a suspect about to be interrogated. There is something simmering or explosive in his succession of halting gestures and periods of stillness that respond to human commands, the barking of dogs or the cocking of a gun. The trauma of past violence extends out from behind his eyes to land somewhere on a vertical plane between us, like a two-way mirror; he shines a light on the audience but sees only his own reflection. Even behind a superhero mask he cannot hide his vulnerability because he is turned inside out; when he exits through the same doors he entered, he leaves behind him the fragile landscape of his being. 

Like Lowe, Becky Namgauds turns herself into an exhibit, Exhibit F, tracing figures back and forth across the stage with her swirling, naked torso and long hair like a brush gradually filling in the paper with lines and colour. She is not so much building up a figure — the space is not like paper and releases the image as soon as it has passed — so much as laying down her emotional ground in repetitive patterns. What is exhibited and what is not is the constant issue in Exhibit F in which costume, movement and Michael Mannion’s lighting are fluid factors. Namgaud’s work, according to the program, deals with ‘recurring themes of feminism, femicide and the environment.’ There is no object in Exhibit F; it is its own constantly transforming subject. 

Breaking the solo format, Ffion Campbell-Davies enters at the start of Beyond Words, vocalising high on the shoulders of Tyrone Isaac-Stuart while he blows a cool saxophone below. Beyond Words questions the framework of a colonial approach to black dance through ‘a journey between two people communicating matters of the heart’. Beginning as a procession, it disintegrates to the sound of machinery into images of physical oppression and struggle that lead to questions of self-worth and respect. Campbell-Davies and Isaac-Stuart confront a broad canvas of history and social significance, from ancestry and tribal affinity to the idea of home, with a sense of residual frustration. At the end, perched once again on Isaac-Stuart’s shoulders, Campbell-Davies asks the audience, ‘Who are you standing on?’ It’s a question, ironically, that Opoku-Addaie’s curation over the last three years has set out to answer. 

Jonzi-D’s Aeroplane Man, created in 1999 ‘but sadly still resonating today’, is founded on a similar frustration but ends in a more measured affirmation. His finely-honed parable of identity and cultural politics pulls no punches and makes its point in keen satire and brilliant mimicry. Born and bred in the East End of London, he is both pilot and passenger traveling in his Adidas trainers to search for his ‘own country’ at the unceremonious urging of one of his white colleagues. His air miles take him from Grenada (‘my mother’s land, not my motherland’), to Jamaica, the Bronx and Zululand, but wherever he lands he finds he is not quite genuine enough. With the running refrain of ‘Call up Mr. Aeroplane Man, Yeah Man, Yeah Man’, he returns to London to discover ‘this brown frame has found his name.’ 

Helen Cox, Bodies in Space at the Bloomsbury Festival

Helen Cox, Bodies in Space, Bloomsbury Festival, Goodenough College, October 13

Dancers are often urged to ‘explore space’ in class, but choreographer Helen Cox has taken this encouragement far outside the walls of a studio in her new work, Bodies in Space, at the Bloomsbury Festival. Teaming up with composer Dougie Brown, she has choreographed a trio to the sounds of the stars. Actually, as Professor Fabio Iocco clarified in a post-show talk, we can’t hear the stars because there are no molecules in space through which sound can vibrate, but there are recordings of light emitted from stars far beyond our solar system captured by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. What Brown has done is to take two available sources of this data, mapped their topographical qualities and then processed the results with reverb and granular synthesis to produce what to the layman’s ears is the sound of the stars. It’s not quite as catchy as Pink Floyd’s Interstellar Overdrive, but all the more affecting for being close to the real thing. Adding movement to this sonic sense of mystery, three dancers — Natasha Arcoleo, Jordan Ajadi and Andrew Oliver — move with planetary suspension through a subtly darkened space in a hall of London House (part of Goodenough College in Bloomsbury), displaying in equal measure both a resistance to, and a celebration of gravity. Having seen Cox dance previously, this is the way she moves, but while Bodies in Space is the first time she has remained on the outside of a creation, the transposition clearly has not affected her choreographic intuition.

The audience is seated on four sides of the open floor, delineating the physical perimeter of the hall but not limiting the kind of spatial universe the dancers imagine as they ease slowly around and in between each other maintaining contact through slender wooden batons stretched between their index fingers with just enough pressure to keep them in place. It’s like linking stars with lines to make a classical astrological figure, but the stars are constantly moving; a dancer may drop a baton but the elastic geometry of the trio is simply suspended until the baton is retrieved and replaced. 

It’s the first of a series of choreographic ideas Cox created during an intense two-week period in the studio, in which she plays with the central axis of body movement that arises from stillness and silence. Against Brown’s otherworldly soundscape there is a stealth in the dancers’ articulation, a feline quality that is a mark of muscular control and articulation. Exploring this further in a series of duets, trios and inter-related solos, Cox is clearly inspired by the subject and its intimate relationship to dance; her imagery weaves celestial figures with choreographic form. Arcoleo’s solo starts with swirling circular patterns within the body that expand out into the curvature of the trunk and limbs, while Ajadi seems to flow through the ether, measuring space with his hands in a fluid articulation that knows no boundaries. After a trio in which the dancers move in orbits around each other, Oliver’s solo conjures up the smooth working of an exploratory space arm extending from the fulcrum of his shoulder. They are all visual ideas that have a natural coherence, and in combination with Brown’s soundscape and the sombre lighting of the hall, Bodies in Space gives a corresponding impression of suspended time.

With such a short period of gestation — all too frequent in the socio-political context where space and time equal money — it is such a pleasure to see the distance travelled from Cox’s initial movement ideas in a studio to the outer reaches of the universe and back to this Bloomsbury Festival venue in the heart of London. 

Certain Blacks’ Circus Circus Circus at Hoxton Hall

Certain Blacks, Circus Circus Circus Festival, at Hoxton Hall, November 22

Certain Blacks ‘is an East London-based arts development organisation formed in 2015 to support the work of diverse artists. Circus Circus Circus, a new festival, aims to showcase the different and exciting work from a variety of performers, artists and musicians.’ This evening’s festival finale is produced in partnership with the artistic director of Upswing Aerial Circus, Victoria Amedume.

Hoxton Hall is one of five surviving nineteenth-century salon-style music halls in London and it is in remarkably good shape thanks to a long stint in the hands of the Quaker Community. It opened its doors in 1863 and lost its performance licence eight years later due to complaints by police. Sitting in the tall, narrow hall with its elevated stage, shallow stalls, and two levels of wrought-iron galleries on three sides, it is not hard to imagine a raucous nineteenth-century crowd, eating, drinking and smoking, packed in tight on a popular night, raising the roof with their laughter, cheers and applause and spilling out afterwards into the slumbering, smoky streets. 

Circus Circus Circus at Hoxton Hall reimagines this past in the present through the diverse skills of the performers and their stand-up chairman, ‘eyes on me’ Athena Kugblenu. Specialty acts were always a part of music hall, and these included aerial acts, drag artists, stilt walkers and jugglers as well as comedy routines and songs; Circus Circus Circus has a smattering of each, with acts that are either extracts from longer works, like Out of Order’s Once Standing, Sadiq and Hauk’s The Chosen Haram and Symoné’s Utopia, or scratch performances like Joana Dias’ 89 and both of Amelia Cavallo’s routines. 

Contemporary circus struggles with the use of narrative; while dance brokered a deal with narrative from its beginnings, circus has yet to sort out its relationship with it; either the apparatus is too obtrusive for the narrative, or the narrative is too artificial for the apparatus. Once Standing is a contemporary fusion of physical theatre and circus that imagines the behaviour of the last two people on earth. In its opening, performers Angeliki Nikolakaki and Jesús Capel Luna, both wearing little more than gas masks, create a convincing image of near extinction through the play of acrobatic strength and articulation, but when they move to the silks the circus arts leave the narrative hanging. The next two sections, however, work beautifully as narrative imagery integrated with the means. In one, Luna dressed in a fur coat dances on a precariously balanced skate board while Nikolakaki in a red tulle bodice and skirt plays a restless interpretation of Chopin on a keyboard, and in the second Nikolakaki is rooted to the floor by Luna’s coiled body at her feet as her sinuous upper body finds the yearning tone of both Janis Joplin’s vocals and Sam Andrew’s solo guitar in Summertime. The final section returns to the imagery of the opening with various props and masks but an abrupt curtailment of Ravel’s Bolero robs the work of its apocalyptic climax. 

Amelia Cavallo, aka King Tito Bone, comes closest to the spirit of music hall as ‘first and last, an intimate medium, in which performers and audience were locked in an enduring embrace.’* Cavallo, ‘your average, blind bisexual drag king’ with green glitter eyebrows and goatee, engages the audience with the force of her fearless personality and self-deprecatory humour in both works. The first is a brilliant parody of ‘I will always love you’ directed in fine voice to her white cane, that ends (in true music hall tradition) as a risqué conversation, and the second a flawless ‘fitness routine’ on silks that guides us irreverently through the feel and experience of every step and preparation as if we are the unsighted. 

In between Cavallo’s two acts, Joana Dias’ work-in-progress, 89, focuses on her aerial hoop skills where the intertwined flowing lines of the Arabic numbers 8 and 9 aptly describe the circular arabesques she creates. As a former ballroom champion and singer in her native Portugal, Dias draws together the quality of her motion and the emotion of her Fado accompaniment in a rich aggregate form that leaves any narrative to the imagination of the audience. 

After an intermission, Sadiq and Hauk’s The Chosen Haram is another example of narrative and circus paraphernalia crossing over but not binding together. Both Sadiq Ali and Hauk Pattison are adept at the Chinese pole but using it within an ‘exploration of a gay man’s narrative’ is not an obvious association. The opening of The Chosen Haram sketches the gay context between the two men but their subsequent agility on the poles does not corroborate it. Perhaps the extract does not do justice to the full work. 

In exploring her experience of living in a cult, the means Symoné uses in Utopian are an integral part of the story. Projected instructions for each of us to find, select, pass on, inflate and let go a balloon seem innocuous enough but Symoné makes her point by having us follow the instructions without questioning. Utopian has a longeur that expresses mind manipulation and altered realities; in relating her story she offers three options for each incident with the warning that maybe only one is true. Performed with Duane Nasis and Ruby Gaskell, Symoné mixes her narrative with elements of pole dancing, voguing and fluorescent rave culture while including her signature roller-skating and hoola-hooping. It’s an extended extravaganza that has a disquieting heart, as stimulating as it is sobering.

* John Major, My Old Man: A Personal History Of Music Hall (William Collins, 2013).

Dance Umbrella 2019: Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero at Barbican

Dance Umbrella 2019: Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: A Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero at Barbican, October 18

In a pre-festival interview, the artistic director of Dance Umbrella, Emma Gladstone, talked of ‘difference’ as a factor in her programming. “To me difference is always part of the politics: looking at difference, understanding difference, not being afraid of difference. I think it’s something the art form as a whole can do very well.” Gladstone was referring to Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: A Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero that Dance Umbrella presented at Barbican as part of this year’s festival.

Maqoma’s work is, as its title suggests, a requiem, but for whom and under what auspices? It is based on two novels by South African novelist and playwright, Jakes Mda: Ways of Dying (1995) and its sequel, Cion (2007). Both novels follow the life and trials of Toloki, a professional mourner who earns his living traveling from funeral to funeral in the South African townships during the country’s fractious transition from apartheid to democracy, interceding between the horror of politically motivated brutality and the efforts of individuals and communities to come to terms with it. In Mda’s sequel, Toloki travels to the United States to research the history of slavery, so in taking on this narrative Maqoma assumes a vast history of violence, from racial injustice to internecine wars both in Africa and elsewhere. He writes that ‘Cion’s message of death and its dire consequences must be communicated through a lament in order to tackle a universe where the age-old phenomena of greed power and religion result in unnatural deaths.’ 

While the thrust of aggression is global, rituals of mourning belong very much to the local communities in which they occur. ‘Cion is as in Zion, the African church’, writes Maqoma. ‘It is set in a graveyard, a church where the body is religion and the voices are personal.’ Maqoma’s role is like that of Everyman, placing himself in a specifically African setting with a group of spirits or mourners (eight members of his own Vyuhani Dance Company) and a quartet of superb vocalists — beatboxer Siphiwe Nkabinde, Sbussiso Shozi, Xolisile Bongwana and Thabang Mkhwanazi — who sing compositions in Isicathamiya by composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu. The opening of Cion sees a lone, bent-over figure shuffling his way across a darkened stage of crosses giving expression to his grief in stifled, plaintive a capella sobs. It is a prologue that builds a powerful sense of mourning, and when the single snare drum beat of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero begins, the juxtaposition of cultures is ripe for exposition and resolution. When the lights come up, however, only a vestige of that opening mystery remains. The setting of a graveyard by Oliver Hauser, the costumes of Jacques van der Watt of Black Coffee and the exquisite lighting of Mannie Manim have the sophistication of a West End musical, while the figure of Mda’s Toloki ‘in his threadbare suite, cape and top hat’ is replaced by a stylishly dressed Maqoma whose movements in his five solos often exude the status of a pop idol; the itinerant mourner Toloki has become Michael Jackson. 

Maqoma is familiar with, and in, the West — he trained at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels and has toured widely outside South Africa to great acclaim (this is his third invitation to Dance Umbrella) — so he is well placed to combine his life experiences with his dancing and choreographic exploits. There is no doubting the sincerity of Cion’s conception and Maqoma’s desire to bring about catharsis, which he regards as ‘a universal grief that conquers the sadness continuing to permeate the living who are plagued by deaths that are not their own.’ By assimilating into this catharsis such a recognisably western piece of music as Ravel’s Bolero sung in Mahlangu’s arrangement by the a capella quartet, Maqoma suggests an imaginative conflation of the fate of his country with that of its colonial history. However, in Cion‘s translation of harrowing events from the South African townships to the Barbican stage there is a problem of theatrical signification; while the choral element maintains a powerful evocation that allows us to transcend difference, the choreographic and visual elements borrow too much from an overly familiar image of western contemporary dance — or even the classical tradition of soloist fronting a corps de ballet. Grief in artistic performance is always susceptible to a treatment that grants it exquisite form, but in the case of Cion there’s a risk the form inhibits the full realization of Maqoma’s catharsis.