The Royal Ballet, Wheeldon’s Triple Bill

The Royal Ballet, Christopher Wheeldon triple bill, February 16

Edward Watson, Matthew Ball and Natalia Osipova in Strapless (photo: Bill Cooper)

When the UK Critics’ Circle National Dance Awards recently voted Wayne McGregor’s Woolf Works the best classical choreography for 2015 I felt ballet had died and been relegated to purgatory. Fortunately Christopher Wheeldon has come along to rescue it with a triple bill for The Royal Ballet that includes the première of Strapless and two earlier works; over the course of the evening Wheeldon builds a salutary image of what the classical language can still say in both traditional steps and contemporary invention, in its musical phrasing as well as in something that has been in danger of extinction in recent years: danced characters, those that emerge convincingly through their dancing.

Strapless is the one commission of the evening but this is the first time After The Rain, created for New York City Ballet in 2005 and Within The Golden Hour for San Francisco Ballet in 2008 enter the Royal Ballet repertoire.

After The Rain is in two movements, both of which are set to music by Arvo Pärt. The first is an interwoven trio of duets and the second, to Pärt’s exquisite Spiegel im Spiegel, is a duet by one of the couples from the first movement. It’s a bit like an A-side which takes on a life of its own — it is often performed by itself — as if there were two distinct choreographic processes in Wheeldon’s mind at the time of creation. The opening movement of After The Rain finds a later echo in Within The Golden Hour; the musical play, the choreographic idiom and the spatial groupings are of the same family. The duet, however, is more ethereal, requiring a flow of two harmonious bodies in a series of seamless shapes that allow an audience to imagine their own dialogue; in this it is reminiscent of Norbert Vezak’s Belong. But in this performance Marianela Nuñez and Thiago Soares seem to add their own commentary to what should be free and dreamlike; it comes across instead as tense and curiously earthbound.

Strapless continues a worrying scenic trend in recent one-act narrative ballets for being opulently overweight. Since dancers are still the same size, the result is a miscalibration of scale, the scenic elements (five changes in 45 minutes) vying with the dancers for attention. Strapless is all about frames — in both society and art — in front of which we see the beau monde of Paris milling around in a state of heightened excitement until one beauty, Amélie Gautreau (Natalia Osipova), is finally enticed on to canvas by painter John Singer Sargent (Edward Watson) — his Portrait of Madame X — with unexpected, tragic consequences for the sitter.

While the drama depends for its climax on the slipping of a strap on an evening dress (the anticipation is intense), the core of the choreography is the tangle of intrigue in the lives of a quartet of principal characters: Singer Sargent is keen to paint society beauty Gautreau but needs the help of her lover (and his sitter) Dr. Samuel Pozzi to convince her to sit for him. Once she accepts, however, Sargent depends on the image of his lover, Albert de Belleroche, to inspire the pose. Sex is clearly the preoccupation from beginning to end but its depiction in the scene between Gautreau and Pozzi (Federico Bonelli) shocks in its clichéd artificiality. By contrast, Wheeldon treats Sargent’s lover (Matthew Ball) with an understated charm and elegance that exudes sensuality without giving him very much to do. The real sex is in the way Gautreau relates to her own image that she hopes will be framed in immortality. This is where Osipova’s characterization, through Wheeldon’s use of her formidable technique and artistry, brings to light Gautreau’s overweening ambition and irrepressible sensuality. The problem is that the role is too circumscribed; Osipova has the capacity to embody a much larger palette in a story that extends far beyond the picture frame.

I saw Within the Golden Hour when San Francisco Ballet performed it in their program C at Sadler’s Wells in 2012 and it didn’t appeal, perhaps due to a last-minute cast substitution. But this evening the performance is qualitatively different; the galvanizing effect on the audience of each successive movement is palpable. Wheeldon’s choice of short compositions by Ezio Bosso for each section (except for the sixth, to the andante from a Vivaldi violin concerto) allows him to weave a complex but playful choreographic line with only the subtlest musical support. Revisiting the opening motifs of After the Rain, three principal couples weave their patterns and shapes with four supporting ones over the seven sections, building up a vocabulary through the accumulation, reproduction and development of basic motifs. There is from the beginning a sense of mastery in the use of space; the large stage of the opera house comes alive with the asymmetric groups and interactions and with lighting and backdrop projections (by 59 Productions) linking to the autumnal colours of the costumes (to the designs of the late Martin Pakledinaz), Within the Golden Hour ensures the unity of its elements. The dancers look good because they are comfortable in the technique both they and Wheeldon understand. The Royal Ballet, as its title suggests, is devoted to the preservation and development of the highest level of classical technique, which is what Sir Frederick Ashton and Sir Kenneth MacMillan upheld. Wheeldon looks remarkably like their natural heir.

LCDS Undergraduate Show 2016

London Contemporary Dance School, Undergraduate Show, The Place, February 3

LCDS undergraduates in Ori Flomin’s Things Happen Just (photo: Alicia Clarke)

Undergraduate shows shift the way dance is usually presented. Choreographers come to set work on students and the school in effect becomes a temporary, and quite unique company. Tonight there are three commissioned works for ensembles but the opening pieces are choreographic miniatures by the students on the BA1 Composition course and the BA2 Music & Choreography course respectively.

As soon as Edward Hookham and Conor Kerrigan begin their It’s Nice, Isn’t It? you feel in safe hands. And Hookham’s hands are large, an extension of long arms that he weaves in articulated patterns around his tall frame. It’s Nice, Isn’t It? is a structured improvisation in which Kerrigan wrily comments on Hookham’s improvisation then Hookham on Kerrigan’s. The two are quite different; Hookham has a languid lyricism while Kerrigan is more compact and forceful (‘aggressive’, suggests Hookham). Kerrigan’s desire to interfere with his friend’s improvisation ‘just to see what will happen’ seems in character. He bumps into him, destabilizes him; Hookham stays low, undeterred, and continues his soliloquy in a smaller space. Both performers come across as relaxed and in tune with each other, performing their material with natural ease. A pleasure to watch.

Not to be outdone by the men, Evelyn Hart and Charlotte McLean munch into cake? what cake? with relish for both the Sarabande from J.S. Bach’s cello suite No. 1 in G and for their gestural play. They seem to find in the curves of their short unctuous phrases the curves in the music, and even the playful nibbling routine seems embodied in the score. Designed as ‘an exercise in being in conversation with the music’, it is only three minutes long but its irreverent humour and pluck reverberate long afterwards.

In another exercise, Let in Fall, Daniel de Luca and Bethany Edwards choose to juxtapose their movement to the music of Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina. The juxtaposition nevertheless retains a relationship with the score, a kind of love-hate relationship that juxtaposes less than it aggravates. It’s as if neither de Luca nor Edwards quite know what to do with the music, which sails on notwithstanding.

For Me, You & Us, choreographer Fin Walker reworks the third duet from her 5 2 10 (5 duets, 2 solos and 10 instruments) which she created with composer Ben Park when their company was resident at ROH2. Explaining how 2 became 14, Walker writes, ‘I have taken the concept, ideas, structure and intention and adapted it for this piece.’ The original seven dances were based on the seven chakras, and the third, located in the solar plexus, is the seat of taking action (or not). As Walker writes, ‘At times we are unable to step forward into life, other times we follow an unconscious “doing, doing, doing”.’ It is this contrast on which the choreography focuses. Initially dancers in a line alternate between gestures of still self-reflection and wave-form action but then the fire takes over and the line explodes into wild movement in which someone screams an angry Fuck You! and from which quartets and quintets detach in complex patterns marked with vocal instructions and contrasted stillness. It is not long before the fire burns out and the asymmetric groups reform in the calmness of the orderly opening line. But even if this final poise, reflected in Park’s music, is intended to convey a spiritual resolution, it is the reverberating influence of patterns and energy in Me, You & Us that overwhelm it.

Tom Roden’s Anya speaks and dances for itself. The story of Anya’s life is told from the historical perspective of an older woman through the eyes of her youth in the person of Eleonora Ramsby Herrera. Roden clearly admires Anya’s strength and social conscience (she could be someone he knew well) and invests the work with an appropriate warmth and energy that the entire cast soaks up, in particular Elena Zubeldia Perez who plays Anya’s little sister with a delightful sense of pathos and comic timing. Roden is the dance side of New Art Club, so there is both a choreographic line and a smile that run through the work. Each biographical story is magnified and coloured with songs, text and dance enhanced by Nicole Bowden’s warm-coloured costumes. Roden reveals a company that is unique, varied in size and shape but working together as a regular (as opposed to idealised) social group. Unfortunately such companies don’t exist, but perhaps they should.

The final work is a challenge in its abstraction, its rhythms and its complexity. Even the title, Things Happen Just, is enigmatic, like the earlier Let in Fall. Choreographer Ori Flomin cites the American artist Frank Stella as his inspiration, in particular his ‘layering colours, texture and shapes in a chaotic yet organized way.’ This is exactly how Things Happen Just comes across. If the costumes by Frances Morris provide the colour on which Kyle Olson layers the musical texture, Flomin does the rest. Choreographic meaning is abstracted and form is eviscerated in favour of high voltage dancing and dynamic juxtapositions. Storms evolve out of stillness and gravity is overcome with a thrust that has been lacking all evening. Emma Farnell-Watson stands out but the entire cast manages to create a sense of beauty at the heart of Flomin’s chaos.

Rhiannon Faith, Scary Shit

Rhiannon Faith, Scary Shit, Venue 2, Rich Mix, February 20

Rhiannon Faith and Maddy Morgan in Scary Shit (photo: Tina Remiz)

Admittedly you might not invite your young children to a show called Scary Shit, but at first glance the brightly-coloured poster of Maddy Morgan and Rhiannon Faith cavorting on soft fuzzy cubes in an AstroTurf green field might indicate a fun romp for young audiences until you notice the tampon falling from the sky on a parachute and a recommended age limit of 16+ right under the venue and date. On the other hand, as a 16+ theatregoer you might not even consider attending Scary Shit just because the image appears to be aimed at young audiences. It’s a marketing conundrum, for while the image reveals the means by which Morgan and Faith arrive at their goal, it doesn’t prepare you for the goal itself. But that is the nature of Scary Shit: the comic naivety of Alice Barbero’s colours, costumes and props is a deliberate antidote to the maturity of the content about the shared phobias and insecurities of the two women. By the end you are wondering how they drew you so unsparingly into their innermost thoughts while play-acting with a pink telephone, a pink plastic poncho, a water pistol, and red inflatable boxing gloves. You go in the ‘Silly’ door and come out profoundly moved.

The context of Scary Shit is Faith and Morgan’s introduction to cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) through the psychologist Joy Griffiths ‘in order to learn more about themselves and maybe, just maybe, find a future free of fear.’ The focus at first is on Faith; she sits on a (pink) throne, her coronet emblem hanging on the (pink) Scary Shit heart above her head. She is holding an oxygen mask to her mouth as Morgan duly pumps air into it from a (pink) foot pump. Morgan has the mien of the put-upon, hard-pressed, underpaid, under-appreciated drudge of a royal hypochondriac, but Faith is too preoccupied by her phobias to entertain delusions of grandeur. She and Morgan recite some of the A-list phobias from Arachibutyrophobia (fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth) to Necrophobia (fear of dead people) but Faith’s real phobia is talking on the telephone with unknown people as a result of a traumatic telephone dumping. She relives the guided revisualization Griffiths (who happens to be Faith’s mother-in-law) suggested as therapy, starting with an introduction to CBT in a fight-or-flight sequence with Morgan that resembles an in-flight demonstration. Movements were suggested (so I learned later) by viewing body language filmed during the therapy sessions.

Morgan at this point begins to differentiate her phobia from Faith’s by marking out her own small square of red tape and standing in it; she has not intimated what her phobia is but she demonstrates innocently enough some of her father’s sailor’s knots. While continuing to act as Faith’s sidekick — helping her to illustrate a dry hump during Faith’s story of losing her virginity — we sense a frustration building up inside her as she tells her own story and dances her darkness behind a suspended balloon covered with tangled knots that bears an uncanny resemblance to a brain or a womb. As Faith’s self-confidence and her smutty-mouth returns, she takes on the topic of fertility but her attention (and ours) is drawn to Morgan’s predicament. Faith plays Puccini’s aria, O Mio Babbino Caro from Gianni Schicchi to calm her down but Morgan steps into her ring wearing the inflatable boxing gloves. At a loss, Faith tries everything from cock jokes to a funny dance get her to talk and after a while she does, reciting a bruisingly personal poem with the refrain, Baby Box Blood Bath, about her periods in which no blood is running. Griffiths’ calming voice returns, Morgan pops the knotted balloon, she and Faith wrap up the bloody remains in the pink poncho like garbage to be thrown out and do breathing exercises on the creaky throne. The audience is absolutely silent.

Like the therapy that underlies it, the superficial appearance of Scary Shit may be an unpalatable or unattractive prospect, but after seeing the performance you may well feel restored, patched up and grateful for the experiences of these two generous, unwitting clowns. Or you may prefer to keep everything knotted up inside like Morgan until it pops. Like all good theatre, Scary Shit offers a cathartic lift for the head and heart.

Scary Shit will be at The Pleasance on Friday 26 and Saturday 27 February at 7:30

Neon Dance, Empathy

Neon Dance, Empathy, The Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, February 13

Neon Dance in Empathy (screen shot from filmmaker Tom Schumann)

“The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much.” – Ira Glass

Empathy is a work that I have already danced with a little. I invited the artistic director of Neon Dance, Adrienne Hart, and dancer Annapaola Leso to Bournemouth in 2014 for two research residencies, saw snatches of a duet at Tony Adigun’s The Factory during Dance Umbrella in late 2015 and viewed the video series released in the run-up to the première of Empathy in 2016. This ensured a proximity to the ideas and flavours prior to stepping into the theatre and this exposure influenced my receipt of the work and not necessarily in a way I was expecting. Being closer to Empathy I felt partially blunted, encountered less discovery on the evening and it made me question whether I want my pre-information appetite dry, whetted or drowned.

Hart and her creative co-conspirators in sound (composers Mads Brauer, Casper Clausen, Shahzad Ismaily and Gyda Valtysdottir) and design (Numen and Ana Rajcevic) have deftly woven a seamless environment that sits equally between the choreographic, sonic and scenographic. Letting the performance grow over two years has imbued it with a depth and rigour that is missing in many works that are constrained by a 3-to-4 week rehearsal process. With five human performers and an insentient laser feeding our eyes, Empathy executes Hart’s aim of asking us to think about this state of being through an elaborate, dense and stimulating world. With a tight choreographic palette of amorphous floor-dwelling bodies, melting into each other and the floor, I found it hard to like and yet easy to admire – but the work is still resonating.

“Technology is making gestures precise and brutal, and with them men.”– Theodor Adorno

Hierarchies are consistently present: human vs. human and human vs. laser; the invisibility of power is enhanced through the (wo)man/machine battles. The behaviour of the laser oscillated between playfulness and brutality; ambushing movement and suffocating extensions whilst framing the dancers with an incisive clarity. I couldn’t help but project emotional narratives on these duets and at those moments I’m looking at the empathy spectrum and deciding who should I side with? The lasers acted as a metronome, carving the stage, dictating the pace and in its more flighty moments slowing down my perception of the dancers.

There were resonances for me on the tender spectrum; when Annapaola stepped slowly towards the laser wall and waited with the tips of her hairs brushing the edge of the light as her breath settled suggesting a possibility to move through and beyond. There was emotional dissonance too; Carys Staton (a glacial technician) during her glitching laser tunnel duet failed to connect as it narrowed, slowly constricting her space — I felt nothing. This spectrum of emotional attachment to and between the performers was a large part of the success of the work; however, there were two late arrivals into this cast who weren’t present throughout the making period and were (re)presenting movement that had been generated and embodied by other bodies and this lack of investment was telling.

“Empathy is the faculty to resonate with the feelings of others. When we meet someone who is joyful, we smile. When we witness someone in pain, we suffer in resonance with his or her suffering.” – Matthieu Ricard

Rajcevic’s costume pieces enhanced the notion of empathy; mouth pieces and masks disguised areas of the body that are usually used to convey emotion challenging the dancers to present alternatively through their bodies. The arm extensions worn by Annapaola affected her movement quality, masked the hands and helped attune her to her surroundings and other bodies in her orbit.

Hart is playing the long game and her extended practice and approach to collaboration, inquiry and audience ensures Empathy remains with you long after you’ve left the theatre. She’s an architect, commentator and conductor of an orchestra of empathy, with human instruments revelling in her excavations.

Resolution! 2016, Drishti Dance, Bridget Lappin, Laura Obiols

Resolution! 2016, Drishti Dance, Bridget Lappin, Laura Obiols

Anuradha Chaturvedi of Drishti Dance (photo: Sarah Jex)

This evening of Resolution! begins with an exposition of Kathak by Drishti Dance, a trio of choreographer Anuradha Chaturvedi and dancers Meena Anand and Shyam Patel. Antaraal is a work that weaves choreography with music and verse in which all three elements span two cultures: Chaturvedi is based in Reading but brings her knowledge and mastery of Kathak from Lucknow in India; the score is shared between Oxford-based Malcolm Atkins and Lucknow-based Ustad Gulshan Bharati, while the verse is from Mohan Rana, a Hindi poet living in Bath. Antaraal is thus a meditation on the diaspora life, rooted in tradition while adapting to a new cultural context, a place where ‘movement is caught between two worlds, one dead and the other yet to be born.’ To my Western eye, however, the elements of gesture, rhythm and costume in Antaraal speak of an unequivocal, and very much living, Indian experience, so it is difficult to know what is ‘dead’ and what is ‘yet to be born.’ Perhaps in placing Kathak in the service of both Eastern and Western musical rhythms Chaturvedi is suggesting a journey between the two, somewhere between departure and arrival. But what my memory retains are the floating, sinuous gestures of the three dancers, their poise, the clarity of their facial expressions and the rhythmical hand and footwork responding both intimately and animatedly to the music.

There we have stopped, while the world stands still,
and the endless days that were following us, too have stopped.
There we stand, meeting after a long time,
in a conversation that catches an unfinished past.
Having moved far, been lived, told, and retold
our story is now hand in hand with emptiness,
and we’re left
pondering an elusive end.

• Mohan Rana (translation: Mohan Rana & Georgina Tate)

Dressed in layers of black against a black backdrop on a black floor seems a paradoxical way of establishing the art of exposure but Bridget Lappin relishes the challenge, bringing her bright gaze to the darkness around her in The Art of Exposure. There is no credit for lighting but the timeless beginning — a very gradual sensitizing of our eyes to Lappin’s still, shadowy, spectral form — and her mysterious disappearance at the end are beautifully staged. Camouflage is central to the work, and Lappin refers in her program note to a 17th-century Ninja manual on the art of concealment, Shoninki, but she spends the entire performance shedding her camouflage just enough to establish it, teasing us with her ability to materialize out of the dark and leave an indelible image. She does this by taking on the disguise of first a ninja, then, by replacing her warrior mask with a touch of lipstick, a woman and finally (as in Young Galaxy’s track) ‘just a body’ — what she describes as ‘deceptions in an act of self-preservation against her environment.’ Her movements are at once assured and mysteriously quiet, clear and off-balance, her gestures fast and complex. In the half-light the outlines of her body are erased so all we see of her is bare hands and face, or, in the final stage, her bare back inside the v-shaped opening of her unitard. It is the art of exposure by stealth and suggestion and it is remarkably persuasive.

The final work, Laura Obiols’ Hourglass, is ‘a journey with Lilly to explore growing up in a society full of expectations and fear of taking risks, where time seems to be chasing you.’ Obiols pulls together elements of biography like a magician conjuring rabbits out of a hat: the talking shoes and boots setting up the family story at the beginning (set design by Michelle Bristow), Lilly’s transformation from young girl to a young woman and the appearance of characters one after the other from behind a sofa. We first see Lilly in the person of Betty Toogood Sayers sitting long-legged on the floor writing in a diary while her father, James Finnemore, is (so we learn from the voiceover) going through a bad phase. Lilly is unaware of his anxt-ridden, gravity-laden solo and runs to be picked up on his shoulders. By sleight of hand she grows into Léa Tirabasso but then things start to get fuzzy. Michael James Gilbert is someone she picks up (or he picks her up) at a club but it is not clear for whom he is performing. Rosie Terry makes an appearance as a friend and then Kieran Page dressed like Terry replaces her from behind the sofa to offer Lilly his hand. The three men in Lilly’s life bear an uncanny resemblance to each other, which is confusing; they are distinguished more by their respective dance genres than by their characters. Only Tirabasso remains her growing or shrinking self, and there is a tantalizing moment after the four adult characters manipulate her like a spinning compass when I thought for sure she would dance a trembling apotheosis but she is interrupted and never gets to express herself in maturity.

It is an analogy for Hourglass itself; with the exception of the two underused musicians — Nuria Sobrino on piano and Charlie Stock on viola — the talents of her cast and the input of her production team appear to have turned Obiols in different directions: beside some lovely symbolism and imagination there are elements of over-literal storytelling and patchwork dance: building blocks but not yet architecture.

Scottish Dance Theatre, Dreamers & Process Day

Scottish Dance Theatre, Dreamers & Process Day, Dundee Rep, February 12

Scottish Dance Theatre in Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Process Day (photo: Brian Hartley)

“Dreams have only one owner at a time. That’s why dreamers are lonely.” – Erma Bombeck

Anton Lachky’s Dreamers woke up last February in a Scottish Dance Theatre double bill with Jo Strømgren’s Winter, Again. Upon first viewing I struggled to see the fit as the pair were too similar — both showcasing lightness, comedy and a hyper-real quality. So I’ve come back to Dreamers to see how it has settled into the bodies of the dancers, into the company and how it sits with a new bedfellow, Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s Process Day.

Dreamers defines itself as “making sense from nonsense and exploring links between reality and surrealism” and over the course of 35 minutes it delivers its intention well. A police line-up forms the opening image where all nine performers face front and Aya Steigman erupts from the line, fizzes with skittish urgency and delivers a hiphop-laced solo that is startling in its ferocity. This is the opening minute and I wonder whether my eyes can contain or maintain the pace. The invisible energy passed between each of the solo performers is dialled down the further away from the original source we go until everyone has had a chance or two to show us their best moves.

Nothing lingers for too long and at the same time we’re not asked as an audience to invest much either; we see two or three playful examples of what the world might look like if the choreographic power is given over to Audrey Rogero and Francesco Ferrari. The strongest visual memory from my first Dreamers was the face-melting elasticity of Rogero and 12 months on, the malleability, facial contortions and impossibly extended neck stand out again as she out-Doyles Mrs Doyle. Slapstick, physical buffoonery and bodily control are re-employed again and again with Rogero manipulating the remainder of the company at her whim; spinning, flicking, and boot-camping them. As she discovers her power and ability to transform she gifts us one of the most infectious cackles heard on stage.

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” – Abraham Lincoln

When Ferrari emerges from the pack to take control, he’s barking orders ferociously in an unknown language and basking in the power of controlling the others — apart from when Amy Hollinshead marches out of the line like a rebellious tin soldier, frustrating Ferrari even more.

The lightness and humour shines alongside the musical choices of Bach, Verdi, Chopin and Haydn. Dreamers is a white, crisp, and frothy demonstration of personality, wild abandon and fine dancing.

“A man must dream a long time in order to act with grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness.” – Jean Genet

As night follows day, dark will follow light and Process Day now follows Dreamers.
Are we in Dundee or have we been transported to a Weimar Republic cabaret, a dark world filled with luscious, crepuscular creatures, a place where gender is dissolved and eyes linger on the smallest of details? Eyal and Behar, alongside Ori Lichtik (musician), Rebecca Hytting (assistant and co-costume designer) and Alon Cohen (lighting) create an unsettling environment that either repulses or embraces the eyes that rest on the stage.

Clad in black from foot to ribs and a neutral scrim from the chest upwards, the dancers exist in a quarter light giving the impression of a floating set of torsos and amplified arms which frame and isolate each other like a vogue ball. From the nine performers, Josh Wild (apprentice dancer from London Contemporary Dance School) is a choreographic leech, creeping onto other performers, intruding and creating a series of unwanted duets before blending back into the dark. The dancers seem almost extra human and there’s a striking motif of Matthew Robinson’s controlled head-butting of Jori Kerreman’s stomach – it fits perfectly in this world and is one of the many lingering frescoes which sit amongst the larger-scale ensemble moments.

“So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” – T. S. Eliot

Cohen’s lighting design aligns well with the choreographic intention; despite the lights being so dim I am noticing the slightest of movements: twitches, ankle rotations and shoulder snaps were pulling my eyes all over the stage as a thin film of haze weighs heavily on the stage.

Classical strings, abrasive bass and relentless synths offer a sonic realm that promotes difficulty. Choreographic difficulty is also on show as not all the dancers are comfortable with this hard, sinewy performance style. Eyal and Behar are a brave choice from Artistic Director Fleur Darkin as they’re asking the dancers a completely different set of choreographic questions from those of Damien Jalet’s Yama, Darkin’s own Miann or Strømgren’s Winter, Again.

“Androgyny is not trying to manage the relationship between the opposites; it is simply flowing between them.” – June Singer

I am sucked into the world of Process Day by the scenographic control that Eyal, Behar and their collaborators have over me. It is satisfying to spend 40 minutes with them in their world of heavy and dark; but if the company does with Process Day what they did with Yama — extending it from an original half bill to a full-length work — now that would be a 30th birthday present worth unwrapping.

(Dreamers and Process Day are on Scottish Dance Theatre’s double bill tonight and tomorrow at Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh)

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, “…como el musguito en la piedra…”

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, “…como el musguito…”, Sadler’s Wells, February 13

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in “…como el musguito…” (photo: Laurent Philippe)

To judge…como el musguito en la pedra, ay, si, si, si… as the last work of Pina Bausch would be to take advantage of history. Bausch was not aware this was going to be her last work; she died on June 30, 2009, five days after being diagnosed with cancer and just 18 days after its première. “…como el musguito…” is a continuation of a series of works Bausch made in response to the culture of a particular city or country to which she and her company had been invited; this one is based on a visit to Chile. It is a happy, smiling work that touches on a joie de vivre that is lighter in tone than many of Bausch’s previous works. Peter Pabst’s conception of the stage as a large expanse of white floor curtained in black provides a vast, uncluttered space of light in which the vibrant colours of Marion Cito’s costumes for the women create a joyous vitality. The memories of Chile and its music seem to have suggested more tanz than theater; each of the sixteen members of the cast reveals him or herself through a solo though there are similarities between them, hints of gesture in boneless arms wrapping enigmatically around a liquid torso. The women’s long hair is integral to their dance, blurring and extending body lines in unimaginably sensual ways; Ditta Miranda Jasfi is the consummate example and her ebullience pops up undiminished throughout the work. This brightness and play is offset by symbolic reminders of the darker elements of Chile’s political past, through men chasing each other across the stage or hurtling around it, by the use of ropes for aerial escape as well as for restraint, and a rape scene where a women in white is passed roughly between seven men. But the underlying menace has an aesthetic overlay that plays shock on a minor scale. The result is a work that has all the visual elements of Bausch that run together a little too easily. I have never subscribed to the notion of a Bausch work being too long or needing editing; each is rich in detail that has been distilled within her imagination from a multitude of impressions and connections and extracted through the bodies and minds of her dancers. That is not a formula for conciseness and it is not the problem with “…como el musguito…”. The problem is a gradual but inevitable dilution of the work because that extraordinary imagination is no longer present.

Bausch famously stated in an interview with Jochen Schmidt that she was not interested in how people move but in what moves them. The unique reputation of her company rests not only on her choreographic and theatrical imagination but on the quality of the artists she has trained. She built up the stature of her dancers from the inside out so they could convey even the smallest gestures with the exaggerated clarity of thought and feeling. This is her legacy as much as the choreography she or her dancers produced, but it is a legacy that, unlike the steps, cannot be maintained in its entirety without her alchemic presence and guidance. This is both the strength and the weakness of Tanztheater Wuppertal: the genius who produced such great work also produced a company of artists dependent on her genius.

This evening’s cast of “…como el musguito…” is, with one exception, the original, so the dilution I sense in the work is not a question of new artists taking over others’ roles, though this is what is happening in the company for older productions in the repertoire. One of the strengths of the company — and what has allowed it to continue performing Bausch’s works — is that many dancers who worked closely with Bausch (there was evidently no other way to work) have remained in the company either as performers or as rehearsal directors. But however experienced, they are interpreters rather than the inspiration and interpreters need the constant probing and the gaze of the creator for their artistry to evolve.

Inevitably Bausch’s works will suffer further from the impossibility of maintaining their former brilliance and balance despite the fact that audiences will still want to see them and tours will remain financially viable. In a Financial Times podcast in 2012, at the time of the landmark Ten Cities project, Sadler’s Wells artistic director, Alistair Spalding, thought the company could survive in its present form ‘another 5 or 10 years’. Tanztheater Wuppertal has evidently been thinking along the same timeline. Next year, eight years after Bausch’s death, a new ‘intendant’ appointed from the outside, Adolphe Binder, will take over the reins of the company. Her unenviable but vital task will be to safeguard the integrity of Bausch’s performance legacy and to engage this extraordinary artist-led collaborative in new repertoire.

Peut-Être Theatre, Shh…Bang!

Peut-Être Theatre, Shh…Bang!, The Blue Room, Southbank Centre, February 10

Maya Politaki and Anna Woolhouse in Shh…Bang! (photo: Ludovic des Cognets)

“Words cannot express quite a lot of feelings, whereas a noise or tone or drone or sound, an accordion falling down a staircase, can somehow capture an emotion much better.” – John Lydon

In this world I am a space invader. Shh…Bang! has been designed not for people like me but for those who are 3+ (a set of people with a different and playful response to visual and auditory stimulation) who demonstrate little fear in sharing their thoughts with fellow theatre goers and provide an uncensored reaction to work whether it engages them or not. Here they are absolutely rapt.

Artistic director Daphna Attias has carefully crafted four colourful quarters where the performers (Maya Politaki and Anna Woolhouse) discover noises, explore what their bodies sound like and encourage gentle interaction with the audience. With several collaborations in the research and creation process (Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Institute of Acoustics and Vibrations in Southampton University), the company has fine-tuned its findings and demonstrates an audience acumen; the visual and aural stimulus from the Shh…Bang! palette is never dull and always surprising. There are swift changes in the choreographic and sonic dynamic, multiple set and prop shifts, a keen awareness of pace and the performers never let a new discovery outstay its welcome.

“I frequently hear music in the very heart of noise.” – George Gershwin

Sound adds a different stickiness to memory and ensures that images linger longer; the moments that reverberate most are when unusual noises mesh with movement in scenographic harmony. When Maya bounces on her haunches like a basketball frog to the harmonica or Anna is casting high-pitched invisible spells from a thin, rosin-oiled metal tube, these were moments of pure invention. Like grains of rice ricocheting on a tight drum skin, delivering 45-minute performances (nine across three days) with an infectious curiosity for sound, energy and movement Anna and Maya were a joy to watch.

With a performance that is so entwined with sound and vision, the relationship between technician and dancers has to be sharp as isolated bodily movement triggers farting nose buttons, creaking shoulder locks and other noise eruptions. However, on more than one occasion there is some slight discrepancy between the two, although the more forgiving little eyes in the room didn’t seem to mind.

“Just the other day, it seems, the kids were running through the house, slamming doors, breaking glass, making noise. Time goes by so quickly. Sometimes everything seems so fleeting.” – Perry Como

There is a paradox in work made for young people as it has to appeal (through language, imagery and ideology) to adults — the guardians of cultural experience for young people — and they’ll only encounter work that passes their own taste and perceived risk barriers.

In the Shh…Bang! audience you already see the different audience personalities in development, even at 3+: those who having been charmed by the performers are happy to go on stage unaccompanied and will bounce, revel and embrace this personal encounter; those who will not leave the lap of the parents, who tuck their head under arms despite an unthreatening invitation to engage, and those who want to bring their adults on stage and enjoy the environment with them in a communal celebration.

Peut-Être ensure all types of audience are welcome to engage with the performance at a level at which they are comfortable. At the end there is playtime aplenty on stage with feathers, family and an ear-worm of a soundtrack; with so many noises on parade, it feels fitting to finish with something onomatopoeic:

Two fizzing popcorn kernels
Sploshing in a hot puddle
Munching a rainbow orchestra

Resolution! 2016, performances on January 28

Resolution! 2016, M Contemporary Dance, Konstantina Skalionta, Friction Dance

Konstantina Skalionta in Be My Home (photo: Jonathon Vines)

The Place’s Resolution! 2016 platform programs 78 works over three weeks, with three performances each night so the likelihood of finding a similar theme on a particular evening is small. But each of the three works this evening dealt with changing, clinging to or abandoning some form of clothing as symbols, respectively, of self-worth, home or humanity.

Entrances and exits are difficult to achieve without appearing to be a utilitarian means of getting performers on and off stage. Before the audience enters M Contemporary Dance Theatre solved the problem by burying its four young women (Maud Brambach, Tabatha Longdoz, Sara MacQueen and Chloe Zambon) under a significant heap of garments. In its lengthy stillness the heap takes on an ambiguity — whether it will act or be acted upon — until it starts to breath with the life underneath. Brambach’s Sous Influence is an underworld of identity in which underwear rather than the body is the structure on which the sartorial self-image of each woman is built. The influence of the title is the effect of consumer advertising on the notion of self-image. The work has no particular shape other than the putting on and taking off of clothes and the influence this has on the independent behaviour of each woman and on the relationship between them. It is a choreography of social commonplace with a chic sensuality, showing a disaffection with dance but a desire to transpose a contentious social issue on to the stage with raw physical energy. As Brambach notes, the women ‘do not act but present themselves as they are…They do not try to tell you something but to make you reflect.’ There is a little je m’en fous in this slice of life, modeled with broad strokes but lacking in the finer detail that would make it a really engaging portrait of a contemporary phenomenon. The text in French, for example, which is partly translated into English by MacQueen, is hard to reflect on because partially inaudible. Nevertheless Brambach, who is Belgian and graduated from the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, has a strong voice and if she keeps going in this direction she will give form to something that has the force of Sous Influence with more clarity and shape.

Konstantina Skalionta’s covering is less clothing than a sculptural life belt (conceived and made by Laura Elias), a material shell she wears over a black unitard. We first see her reclining comfortably within it on a small island of salt. The shell is made of four padded, freeform, interlocking sections resembling the abdominal structure of an insect, that move freely up and down Skalionta’s body. From the moment she leaves her island ‘home’ she takes her shell on a journey around and across the barren black floor, her feet shuffling and skittering in a constant state of indecision as to whether to step out or remain attached. She forms and reforms the sections of shell around her, pulling them over her shoulders and head but never quite taking them off. It is a single poetic idea that Skalionta has the courage to maintain to the very end. Be My Home takes 20 minutes to perform and in its simplicity gains a timeless quality — reflected in Peter Broderick’s aptly named music Floating/Sinking — that extends beyond the prescribed limit for the performance. One senses Skalionta’s meditation on home could continue for a lot longer.

Hannah Wade’s concept for the dancers’ costumes in Friction Dance Theatre’s Smirk involves hiding the face in bandages and the body in two layers of stretched plastic covering. The eerie glow from the plastic and the eyeless, featureless heads make for strange beings that Ben Logan’s choreography turns into a band of prowling, infighting predators. Taking as its starting point the social phenomenon of deindividuation — a group mentality in which anonymity encourages anti-social behaviour — Smirk aims to reverse the trend. The problem is it’s all rather predictable, which translates as having few qualities beyond its description. The concept is an interesting social phenomenon and diverse in its manifestations but Logan and Wade smother it in a singular, ghoulish image. The five dancers (Suzannah Dessau, Jade Franklin, George Jennings, Jack Parry and Daisy Winstanley) group and regroup in jarring, fitful movements, crossing the stage in waves of post-apocalyptic distress from which a violent solo or duet emerges. Occasionally the dancers stare quietly into the audience with their blind eyes before returning to the fray until one of the girls signals a truce by taking off her outer carapace and undulates softly in the light and silence. She evidently influences the others and they spend the final section of Smirk struggling to strip away the layers of plastic wrap to reveal their naked torsos as a symbol of individual identity. Friction Dance Theatre is a new company and I believe Smirk is Logan’s first group work. He needs to dig deeper to find what it is he can offer that will make it stand out in a competitive choreographic world just as the dancers disassociate themselves from the group at the end of Smirk to assert their individuality.

Resolution! 2016, performances on January 20

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

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

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

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

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