JV2 consists of ten dancers from Europe and Asia who are studying for the Jasmin Vardimon Company Professional Development Certificate. Part of the course includes a series of seven performances that premiered at the Gulbenkian in Canterbury on March 19 and ends at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal on April 27. ‘Our aim,’ writes Vardimon, ‘is to train and develop well-rounded stage artists in a variety of performance disciplines and at the same time enable them to develop their own creativity. By blurring the definitions between art forms and encouraging collaboration they will be able to create and present work in a new and engaging light.’
Vardimon chose these dancers at an open audition, and they have been working alongside the professional company as part of their course. Seeing them on stage, it seems that any one of them could move seamlessly into the main company, which makes the course rather like a 25-week audition for which the students pay college-level fees. It is an inspired business model (unique in England), an inspired pedagogical model, but as a model for an evening of dance it proves less alluring.
JV2 is in part ‘an ideal opportunity for participants to deepen their knowledge of Vardimon’s methodology’ and there is no better way than to perform her works. Vardimon has designed this triple bill specifically for this tour, creating one of her own — a collage of extracts from previous works called paradoxically Tomorrow — and commissioning two others: Mafalda Deville’s Silence and Tim Casson’s Chapter One. Both choreographers have danced in the main company and Casson is the course leader for the JV2 Certificate, while Deville is the director of the company’s Education Project. One would expect a strong stylistic influence on their work from Vardimon, but Silence and Chapter One bear such a close resemblance to each other and to Tomorrow as to take their creative exploration to a level somewhere between plagiarism and sycophancy. While this may be stimulating and beneficial to the students, the effect of the triple bill over the course of the evening is one of predictable surprise.
On the positive side, Vardimon’s work is always witty, visually stimulating and musically eclectic and her dancers never give less than their all. On the distaff side, the wit, visual stimulus and musical eclecticism can be formulaic, like an overused refrain. All three works have a similar juxtaposition of unison movement and solos, narrative diversions, textual humour, surreal imagery, the use of voice, the overuse of the tucked-up fourth position and an overtly punishing tic of dancers having to hurl themselves to the floor (a dancer’s career is fragile enough as it is).
Deville’s Silence opens with a white sheet entering as a rectangle and turning into a sofa stuffed with dancers. The story of a first date on a dance floor (former ballroom dancer Lawrence James is a powerful and engaging presence) morphs into a crowd of hysterical fans at a Marilyn Manson concert giving us the full range of their voices (Noriko Nishidate’s hysterics indicate a performer with boundless resources). Tchaikovsky’s Only the Lonely Heart changes the mood to a mourning procession at the head of which Nishidate is pulled around the stage on the white sheet like a figurehead or an angel of mercy. In the background a couple is struggling in their embrace: a rag doll girl who can’t stand up and a violent partner who picks her up and lets her fall through his arms repeatedly. Silence is billed as an exploration of loss and longing, but it is loss and longing seen through the prism of Vardimon’s methodology; it is carefully crafted, has all the Vardimon attributes, but it lacks a unique voice.
At the very beginning of his work, Casson reminds us wryly of a dominant aspect of the Vardimon style when Joe Garbett flies prostrate from the wings on to the stage in his boxing gloves and shiny shorts as if ejected forcefully from the ring. Casson explores the music of the American folktronica duo, The Books, bringing out its quirky theatrical imagery in the wittily titled Chapter One. There’s a girl with a talking flower in a pot, a couple in clear plastic raincoats, Aleksandra Jakovic with her pet goat, Maria Doulgeri with a squid in a plastic bag and Connor Quill in a raccoon hat. In between The Books’ songs, Casson explores gestural correlation with both the speech of an incoherent drunk and with upper class conversational interjections. Casson’s strength is in his attention to detail, creating an intricate work — perhaps the most original of the evening — though it tends to default to the Vardimon style when it comes to broad phrases of movement and ensemble work. Although all ten dancers share equally in the details of gesture and voice Casson calls for, Cornelia Voglmayr is the one who is most herself in this work.
Vardimon’s Tomorrow is made up of the past; it is the art of making a retrospective look like an entirely new work. While three of the original works (Park, Justitia and 7734) were conceived with an integral vision — the fourth, Yesterday, is itself a collage of past works — their fragmentation and reconstitution into a new work raises the question of what we are seeing: without the integral vision, what is left is a visual and aural stimulus. It is as if we are seeing the building blocks of Vardimon’s creative process, the very methodology that is at the heart of the Certificate course. Interestingly, even though both Deville and Casson have created integral works, the form they use is heavily influenced by this building block concept, which in turn is facilitated by the eclectic choice of music: Tomorrow allows room for John Fahey, Sparklehorse, Brian Eno, Deathprod, Wagner, Mozart and Spiderbait. Deville’s Silence has a more restrained menu of Einstürzende Neubauten, Marilyn Manson, and Tchaikovsky.
The predominating image in Tomorrow is the vision of a moulting angel (Vogelmayr) in white with an armful of feathers. A flush of other angels swish crabwise like a blizzard back and forth across the stage, accenting their steps with their breathing. Vogelmayr gets caught up in their movement as she advances, losing feathers to the stampede despite her efforts to protect them: a sacrifice of purity and innocence to the passing of troubled times. This is where the redemptive music from Wagner’s Tannhauser swells the heartstrings along with Sparklehorse’s It’s a wonderful life and the Kyrie from Mozart’s Requiem. The feathers become the leitmotif, but Vardimon’s unison patterns and crashing fourth position dominate the choreography like an army on the rampage. It’s an unequal competition and the feathers remain scattered on the stage at the end, the ephemeral remnants of something alive and pure.
XOXO is the written equivalent of kisses and hugs but there isn’t much time for the relationship to develop: Luca Silvestrini and his three dancers from Protein have just three weeks to create a work with specially picked students from The Quay School in Poole and Hamworthy. It is part of Protein’s Real Life Real Dance participatory program, supported by The Monument Trust, Pavilion Dance South West, wave arts education agency and The Quay School. The students, Jamie, Rhys, Jordan, Holly and Sarah are the second group this year, after a partnership between Protein and artsdepot in London in January.
Silvestrini has derived xoxo from LOL (Lots of Love), his company’s very successful work about love and communications in the online social media age. He adapts parts of it to the students, but keeps the thread of LOL going with his own dancers, Valentina Golfieri, Jon Beney and Parsifal James Hurst (PJ).
I arrive for the second week of rehearsals. The first week apparently went really well but week two begins slightly differently. The Quay School supports young people who are at risk of exclusion from mainstream schools. Some disruptive behavior manifests in the studio, so that at any one time there is a charge of both creativity and negativity among the students; when the latter cancels out the former, the two accompanying teachers take time out to encourage the students back in to the studio. This takes its toll, as one person’s outburst affects everyone else, and in the meantime choreography has to be learned. The atmosphere can be fragile on both sides, but the goal of performance remains, which is why the project is so important. Silvestrini and his dancers manage to keep the project on track with pep talks, encouragement, and vast amounts of patience and respect.
The second day I attend, the atmosphere has improved dramatically; the studio is full of energy and drive, although one of the students wasn’t able to come in on that day due to illness. One of the Protein dancers takes his place and new sections are learned. As well as choreography, the students are asked to talk about their online experiences, to offer their brand of chatter to be recorded and used in the performance. By the end of the day a lot has been accomplished and all seems well.
I return the following week to see the show, but am sad to learn that one of the students who had shown so much promise couldn’t be involved with the performance at the last minute. She cannot be replaced at short notice so Silvestrini adapts the piece again. I can’t imagine too many choreographers who can deal with this kind of instability and uncertainty, but he does, brilliantly, as do his dancers and the remaining students.
The theatre is full of family, friends and school staff. There is lots of chatter and laughter. PJ wanders on to the stage from the audience with a tangle of red and yellow computer cables over his shoulder. There is a loud short-circuit, a flash of light and all goes black. Out of the darkness each student appears on a screen at the back of the stage; they are each at a keyboard looking into the camera so it looks as if we are watching them from the screen. Rhys, Sarah, Jamie and Jordan gather in a group at the front of the stage as we hear Valentina’s voice reading their online messages, chats and status updates. They then watch PJ and Valentina’s keyboard duet from LOL. It is movement that communicates immediately, and with the score of computer and keyboard sounds (it’s clearly not a Mac), it’s witty and accessible. Online dating goes livid with Valentina having a fit in computer time when Jon intervenes between the two. Gradually the students shed their nerves and take their places with the company members in movement and text. There is a sofa at the back where Jamie takes a rest. A couple of teachers appear on the screen with anecdotes from a day in the life at school. Rhys and Sarah dance a duet, PJ runs fast around the stage with Valentina and Jon to form two teams with the students on either side of the stage. Jumping over each other (with PJ’s extraordinary elevation he could jump easily over two people at a time), the performers circle Jamie in the centre, while Jordan takes a moment to smile at his Mum. PJ brings more cables into the centre on which Jordan rests. His mother, who we see talking on screen, says she’s still on his friends list while Jordan mimes gaming on stage. Xoxo is all about communicating in the internet age, but is also about social values: the students agree they don’t want a friend that judges a book by its cover.
Very soon it is all over. Cheers and applause from a proud and appreciative audience. Jamie whistles his relief. PJ and Jon bring the sofa to the front of the stage on which the students relax as if they own it. Valentina brings flowers for each, and Luca a present. Sarah and Rhys look so confident: trust and confidence are the rewards of this project. Jordan has learned teamwork and more capabilities. Jamie puts what he has learned into one word: skillage.
At the backstage reception afterwards the sense of pride, achievement and relief is palpable. Sarah and Rhys want to continue dance classes. But more than that: in an age of online chatter, non-verbal dance has found a way to bring out the characters and personalities of these students. It has not always been easy, but Silvestrini and his dancers have showed what is possible with patience, persistence and the right kind of moves. xoxo
Tom Dale Company: Refugees of the Septic Heart, Pavilion Dance, March 28
Septic hearts, refugees, apocalyptic overtones and the universe; there’s enough here for a university course in philosophy but Tom Dale packs it all into a single performance of dance and you don’t need a student loan to get a ticket.
Dance collaborations with other arts disciplines have been around for a long time: narrative dance has a particular affinity for sets and costumes and a musical score. Dale’s artistic vision is no different, though he updates the media to electronic music and the digital arts. He also employs Rick Holland as creative consultant and dramaturge, for the massed forces in Refugees of the Septic Heart are considerable: the music of Sam Shackleton, projections by Barret Hodgson, lighting design by Liam Fahey, sets and costumes by Kate Unwin, and text by Vengeance Tenfold form an all-engulfing environment for a group of six dancers. For the most part Dale’s choreography manages to stand out from all this, though the dancers have strong competition. It is one of the drawbacks of projections that the more arresting they are, the more focus is drawn away from the dancers, and the more arresting the dancers are, the more focus is drawn away from the projections. Once the curtain opens on Swan Lake, you barely notice the sets, but here you can’t take in all the visual elements at the same time because they haven’t quite learned the manners of serving one another; they are more like siblings with a secret rivalry who are seen together in public but keep to their separate rooms at home. It is the same with Shackleton’s music and the texts by Tenfold: impossible to hear both clearly at the same time, which begs the question, why add a layer of text at all? It may be relevant, but if it can’t be heard, it would perhaps be better to print it in the program.
Shackleton’s music has been described as ‘brooding atmospheres, intricate lattices of percussion and warm, embracing sub-bass lines’ and its driving force derives in part from its being played at high volume in a club atmosphere. In its theatre setting, the score for Refugees of the Septic Heart is not all dance music; there are sections of landscaping as well, but as one layer among many in the work, its complexity absorbs a considerable amount of energy and density.
Taking place on the fringes of society, the set resembles a small cove enclosing a tiny beach; the dancers climb over the geometrically shaped rocks for their entrances and exits, and they dance on the sand. This and the reptilian infighting and oppression in the choreography makes me think of Lord of the Flies, though this ‘island’ is more of a refuge on the outskirts of a city whose glinting skyscrapers we see in some of the projections. The dancers work incredibly hard with the spatial precision and timing that comes with endless rehearsal and not a few bruises. The costumes, however, tend to distract rather than enhance the figures: too much flapping about of pseudo rags on the one hand and too many costume changes on the other. An isolated, apocalyptic group with a wardrobe?
Barrett’s projections range from the galactic to the domestic, from a depiction of the universe of stars to a clock winding backwards, from arcane mandalas to media clips. The set as well as the costumes become the material on which the images are projected, so they move on different planes. Surprisingly for light, this layer, too, takes up a disproportionate amount of space. The concept of Fahey’s lighting for a Christmas nativity at a donkey sanctuary begins to appear attractive.
The dancers — four men and two women — are the core of the work. Their relationship is not defined, but they clearly know each other. Dale suggests they are the refugees of the title, a loose collective of like-minded souls escaping a septic, heartless society to keep the creative fires alight. Dale does not develop characters so much as fast-paced, physical relationships that give the impression of emotionless ties between the dancers that are nevertheless tightly defined by their movement. One opportunity for a warmer, almost comic exchange is between Ariadna Gironès Mata and Joshua Smith as they point at each other and out into the audience as if to ascribe some fault or condemnation. Another is Hugh Stainer as messianic jester carrying a worn piece of cardboard on which is written ‘Time’s Up’ which he repeatedly shows to John Ross, who rejects it. But these instances are isolated, with neither precedent nor development, and thus take on the quality of the absurd, which may or may not be deliberate.
Despite its initial promise, philosophy is perhaps the weakest layer in Refugees of the Septic Heart, yet it offers in its encouragement of creative independence in the face of an apocalyptic vision the one thread that can link all the layers. Its important voice, however, is overpowered by the others, one layer on top of the other, each with its separate identity that you may like (and grasp on to) or not (and reject). Perhaps it comes down to a question of time and resources: with such an ambitious task, eight weeks in production including choreography is insufficient to do justice to Dale’s integrated concept. Finding that balance and completion is to come.
Scottish Dance Theatre, Double Bill, The Place, March 8.
Lewis Wilkins and Eve Ganneau in Second Coming. Photo Maria Falconer
Joan Clevillé draws me so convincingly into his subterfuge that I can forgive Victor Quijada for the beginning of his Second Coming; I had checked the running time of the show and had booked a train that would give me just enough time between the end of the performance and the departure from Victoria station. When Clevillé, who is rehearsal director of the company as well as a dancer, announces that there will be a delay to the start of the show — he has an excellent command of English but his searching for a word and his roving accentuation underlines the hesitation and insecurity of his explanations — I feel my comfort zone shrink rapidly. Luckily I am sitting next to Chantal Guevara who surreptitiously checks online and reassured me that this is in fact the beginning of the show (but don’t tell anyone). It’s a forewarning that we will be kept in a constant state of unpreparedness throughout the evening as there is no clear demarcation between true and false, belief and non-belief. Even the score by Jasper Gahunia erases boundaries, seamlessly interpolating turntable riffs into classical music and vice versa. Quijada and Gahunia are clearly on the same wavelength.
Twenty minutes into the show, Clevillé admits to the dramatic subterfuge, and starts another, but we are now attuned: the choreographer has been fired. It is a harmless, self-deprecating put-down of choreographers as macho control freaks with anger management issues, but, as Clevillé states modestly, there is still some amazing dancing to come and he saves the best for last: his own solo. What follows is much more, for although it starts (after a false start) with his slow, deliberate, finger-tracing solo to a phrase of a Bach prelude, it develops with Mozartian richness into a confrontational duet with Jori Kerremans on a spirited phrase of Paganini, and then into a trio with Nicole Guarino on a phrase from Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 13 (Emma Jones’ must have been dancing along to get the cues so perfectly). It is as if Quijada has arranged an epic breaking battle for these three composers who then join forces to play variations on their respective themes and by the end we are all laughing and cheering so loudly because Quijada, Gahunia, the three dancers and Jones have it all down so perfectly.
Matthew Robinson cuts through the applause (he has to wait a while) to deliver his critique of this ‘performance-non-performance thing’ as ‘overworked pseudo-intellectual rubbish’, but he has to continue his defiant monologue in defense of dancers while being dragged slowly by his collar around the stage.
Quijada has reached the summit but there is no lessening of quality as the ensemble descends the mountainside climbing through and under each other in a grouping that leaves behind the opening images of birds and street gangs, flocks and individuals, suspicion and tension as it slips freely to the point of dispersal. Only Eve Ganneau and Lewis Wilkins are left to deliver a duet that is as magical as it is off balance, as heartfelt as it is artfully constructed and which ends on a mysterious note of inversion.
It is rare to find a company with such a diverse range of qualities and a delight to see choreography that brings out those qualities to perfection. We are doubly fortunate this evening for it happens twice.
Lewis Wilkins, Giulia Montalbano, Julian Juárez, Jori Kerremans, Joan Clevillé, Nicole Guarino and Eve Ganneau in Jo Stromgren’s Winter, Again.
Jo Strømgren is as much a theatre director as a choreographer; in his Winter, Again he brings together both drama and dance in a fluent form that integrates visual imagery and choreography so well that the dancers could well be speaking. Strømgren’s text is the cold and bitter emotion of a selection of songs from Schubert’s Winterreise (played by fellow Norwegian Leif Ove Andsnes and sung by Ian Bostridge) though he can never take quite seriously the high romanticism of Wilhelm Müller’s verse. Instead he mischievously juxtaposes Schubert’s music with the bloodthirsty, churlish actions of an isolated hunting community dressed in shades of ghostly white (by Bregje van Balen) that lives its daily fight for survival with as little emotion as the winter itself. Echoes of Ibsen and Chekhov abound in the chilling screams, pistol shots, dead birds and other furry carcasses but Strømgren has us laughing helplessly from the beginning with his brand of dark, irreverent humour. Not even the fate of a young girl (Natalie Trewinnard) who spends the entire performance searching for her eyeballs that the pigtailed beauty Maria Hayday finds in a tin and mindlessly drops in the snow can prompt a sense of sympathy. Trewinnard finally finds her eyes and pops them back in, but her focal adjustment is so masterfully funny — and Strømgren’s dramatic sense so seasoned — that her subsequent suicide by pistol shot that brings the performance to an end is less of an emotional charge than a dramatic full stop.
This program is the parting gift of former artistic director Janet Smith. Fleur Darkin is in the seat now. In the evening’s program she writes that ‘contemporary dance is a form that lives by destroying its past’ and yet both of this evening’s remarkable works make creative use of the past to find new forms rather than destroying it. Scottish Dance Theatre is, in its present form, a gifted company and while it has such a rich repertoire may the only kind of destruction under discussion be creative destruction. And long may it last.
Giulio D’Anna: Parkin’son, The Sick! Festival, The Old Market, Hove, March 15
Stefano and Giulio D’Anna in Parkin’son
It is hard to forget Stefano D’Anna. He is not a big man, but he is a powerful man, a humble, passionate man in his 60s with big working hands and a twinkle in his dark eyes who smiles at us through his white mustache and short white beard. In his native Italian he recalls the stages of his early life: born in 1949; sent to a boarding school run by priests in 1957; first kiss in 1963; first car in 1969; Jimmy Fontana’s recording of Il Mondo in 1965 (which Stefano sings for us in a rich, defiant tenor voice); first job in 1971; marriage in 1973. His life is punctuated with the changing brands of car he buys and he remembers each one with a certain romance and pride. When he marries Anna Maria, he trades in his Audi for an Alpha Romeo Giulia. Three years ago he is diagnosed with Parkinson’s and in the same year his son Guilio, who is a dancer and choreographer, suggests to his father that they work together on a dance project. At first Stefano laughs in disbelief, but now the two are touring the world with Parkin’son, a duet unlike any other between son and father.
Over the past dozen years, a growing amount of medical research has shown the beneficial link between dance and Parkinson’s. Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinson’s Group pioneered Dance for PD in 2001 and a recent study co-sponsored by English National Ballet and Roehampton University suggests that dance temporarily relieves some symptoms of Parkinson’s and aids short-term mobility, as well as contributing to social inclusion and artistic expression.
There is no doubt that Stefano D’Anna’s symptoms benefit from performing, but the physical therapy is a side effect of Parkin’son; what Giulio sets out to discover in this duet is the man behind the father as well as the man behind the son. Giulio is gay (‘It is in 2000 that I kiss a boy for the first time’), which adds a layer of significance to the interaction between the two men. They fight and spar, physically punish each other in a series of sadistic pranks (shades of boarding school cruelty) until one cries ‘stop!’ But their closeness and the desire to unravel the taboos that separate them make them come back for more, delving ever deeper into each other’s memory and consciousness to arrive at an equality that leaves father and son as partners. This breaking down of barriers draws hoots of laughter from the audience mixed with disbelief. As the program notes succinctly explain, Parkin’son is ‘a memorial and a manifesto, an exorcism of that which haunts past, present and future.’
Stefano doesn’t have the advantage of a trained dancer’s body like his son; he moves as he is. Superficially we see Giulio partnering someone with no dance training, but it is Stefano who holds our attention because he is so physically and psychologically exposed. When he arrives at the front of the stage for the first time, he stands still at an angle to us, his right hand trembling involuntarily. He looks at us without an ounce of self-pity, anchoring himself and his audience in the present moment. When he drops his trousers to his ankles and shuffles about the stage with his son like a children’s game, they are both children. It is this freedom that allows each to find his own equilibrium and which strengthens the bond between them.
Towards the end, Stefano asks his son to tell him what he knows about Parkinson’s. Giulio dances his response while his father watches. His body, which is strong, angular and hyper flexible, transforms easily into contorted, dislocated forms that become more and more incapable of movement. Stefano eventually cries, ‘stop!’ It is a moment of truth for both. As if to underline what we have just seen, we hear a sober recap of the effects of Parkinson’s: tremors, a reduced ability to move, and postural instability. Life expectancy is 15 to 20 years from the diagnosis, and medication only delays the moment when the patient is forced to stay in bed. A recurring theme of Maarten Bokslag’s subtle soundscape (when Jimmy Fontana is not pounding out Il Mondo) is a heartbeat synchronized with a grandfather clock, a subtle timeline that reminds us just how fragile life is.
Giulio is all too aware. He cradles his father like a child and imagines their future together: he will marry, he will adopt a child, he will work, he will build a house with his father’s help, he will retire and he will die peacefully in his father’s arms. In his son’s mind, Stefano is indestructible.
Parkin’son is presented by South East Dance and The Basement as part of the first ever Sick! International Arts Festival, ‘a cross-art form festival that seeks out new ways of talking about and dealing with the experience of sickness of all kinds: physical, mental, ethical and spiritual. It is about how our bodies and minds can act against us and against society’s expectations of what is normal. It is about understanding and taking back control.’
The performance is preceded by an introduction to Parkinson’s by Dr. Adam Harper, consultant geriatrician at the Royal Sussex County Hospital. Following the performance, Bobbie Farsides, professor of clinical and biomedical ethics at Brighton and Sussex Medical School chairs a discussion with Dr. Harper and Guilio D’Anna. Stefano is sitting in the front row listening to words he doesn’t understand, the unwitting focus of the entire evening. Bravissimo.
English National Ballet: Emerging Dancer 2013, Queen Elizabeth Hall, March 4
English National Ballet has an enterprising Learning program that encourages the public to engage in ballet through various interactive projects. This time last year I was drawn to their Dance in Focus, an opportunity to develop dance photography under the guidance of Chris Nash, and recently I joined their stimulating Dance is the Word workshop on critical dance writing with Donald Hutera. It was structured around ENB’s Emerging Dancer 2013, a platform that encourages promising artists within the company to step up to a new level. Each year six dancers — thee men and three women up to the rank of soloist (this year they are all Artists of the Company) — are chosen to prepare for this privilege on top of their demanding touring schedule. Unlike last year, where dancers were judged on two solos, the 2013 competition is based on a solo and a pas de deux, a framework that allows both individual expression and fine-tuning with a partner.
We watch the dancers in company class in the Festival Hall’s Clore Ballroom and later in dress rehearsal on stage in the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Neither of these preparatory processes is designed for public observation; they are places for each dancer to iron out technical, spatial, costume or lighting problems under the aegis of company teachers and directors, so the presence of even a small number of spectators can have an ambivalent effect on the artists. It is the performance on which the dancers are judged, after all, and that is the moment for which they summon all their powers.
It is the nature of competition to single out a winner and Nancy Osbaldeston rose to the challenge to carry off this year’s prize. John Neumeier’s fluid solo Bach Suite No. 2 is a perfect vehicle for her radiant turns and effortless ballon and in the pas de deux from Don Quixote with Ken Saruhashi she replaces Kitri’s dark vein of passion with her naturally bright ebullience. Osbaldeston doesn’t have the classical lines of Laurretta Summerscales or Alison McWhinney, but she has a star quality that makes her shine in whatever she does.
The award is made on the night by a jury of five (Tamara Rojo, Darcey Bussell, Luke Jennings, Tommy Franzén and Jude Kelly), but an additional prize is the result of audience votes over the previous season. In 2012 the jury and the public concurred, but this year’s People’s Choice recognized the qualities of Summerscales, whose wit and intelligence and swan-like ability to reveal beauty without any apparent effort are the mark of a great artist. For her solo, she danced the Calliope Rag from Sir Kenneth MacMillan’s Élite Syncopations; she could have brought out a more unctuously flirtatious quality, but her musicality and sense of fun were evident. My heart went out to McWhinney, whose ethereal tenderness in Giselle — she will save many a young man from an early death and will make them all eternally repentant — and her lovely line and poise in Victor Gsovsky’s Grand Pas Classique are a joy to watch.
It is fitting in the year Tamara Rojo becomes artistic director that the women feature so strongly in this competition. In a sense they have already emerged, showing a mature self-awareness in their choice of solo to complement their pas de deux. The men are not quite so astute: Saruhashi and Nathan Young choose solos that challenge their technical skills but that do little to enhance their stage presence, while Guilherme Menezes, whose enthusiasm and innocence draw us naturally into his confidence, has the right idea — a loose, clown-like solo by Nicky Ellis to contrast with the Black Swan pas de deux — but the choreography is not well enough developed to fully reveal his energies and qualities. Saruhashi has prodigious technical ability but wears his emotions close to the skin, giving an impeccable if somewhat inscrutable rendering of Don Quixote and unwinding only slightly in the all-too-brief Patrice Bart solo, Verdiana. Nathan Young gives full play to his romantic spirit and partnering ability in Giselle, but his style in Bournonville’s Napoli variation is too muscular to bring out the Danish charm and buoyancy.
It is worth noting that Osbaldeston and Summerscales were finalists in 2011 and 2012 respectively; it will be interesting to see which of this year’s three men will emerge in 2014.
Works by Robert Binet, Ludovic Ondiviela, Javier de Frutos, Christopher Marney
Full company in War Letters
I shouldn’t have read it before going to see Ballet Black on Tuesday. I dipped into a memoir of Isadora Duncan by Edward Gordon Craig. ‘She threw away ballet skirts and ballet thoughts. She discarded shoes and stockings too… She was speaking in her own language, not echoing any ballet master, and so she came to move as no one had ever seen anyone move before.’ As I walked to the Linbury Studio Theatre, this is what I had in mind: a new language of dance, free of conventions.
Perhaps because the classical ballet language has its roots in the courts of Europe 350 years ago, it can come across in unimaginative hands as an esoteric, affected language that conjugates incongruously with contemporary life. Robert Binet, whose EGAL began Ballet Black’s program, bends and collapses his forms like a sculptor, taking full advantage of the pliant qualities of his two dancers, Cira Robinson and Jacob Wye, but I quickly lose interest when I see a pirouette here and an assemblé there like cryptic signposts dropped into everyday parlance — or worse, as lazy abbreviations of classical dance. Binet has a great talent — he choreographed the hauntingly beautiful solo for Daniela Neugebauer, Lake Maligne, at Bob Lockyer’s birthday celebration at The Place last year — but he might well take heed of his own program note as a metaphor for his relationship to his craft: ‘Both people being strong, but for moments unsure of their relative strength, can tip the relationship easily towards conflict. However, once the strength of each individual is harnessed…the two people are able to combine physical and emotional resources to go further than they imagined possible: to soar.’
In Dopamine (you make my levels go silly), Ludovic Ondiviela happily chooses a subject (attraction, love, lust) that dance can do really well (and we can easily understand), wrapping it in Fabio D’andrea’s music that is dripping with so much sentimentality that by the time the dancing starts we are like sponges at high tide. On top of that you can sense immediately that the abundantly sensual Sayaka Ichikawa is happy and impulsive and drawn to her man, and that Jazmon Voss is equally drawn to her. We thrive on their emotional involvement and Ondiviela is good at making his dancers talk without words while keeping the conversation colloquial.
The One Played Twice is once too much for me. Javier de Frutos is in love with the genre but the acapella male-voice Hawaiian Barbershop quartet just doesn’t do it for me. Nevertheless the two couples set off along the beach together, but the weather gets really humid and enervating, a balmy day without a wave, and there’s nothing to do and they seem to be going round in circles like a hoola-hoop, until Kanika Carr’s solo resembles Sarah Kundi’s and they’re back where they started. I have seen the imaginative heights to which de Frutos can rise but The One Played Twice is as low-flying as the bass in the barbershop quartet.
Glen Miller and Dmitri Shostakovich are strange bedfellows, though they never really get into the same bed in Christopher Marney’s War Letters. One goes out dancing while the other comes back from a dangerous sortie, and so it goes on. When the Glen Miller plays, the choreographic language finds its inspiration in social dancing, but when the Shostakovich plays the choreography falls back to the default classical pastiche. There is one moment that defies the trend: Ishikawa crawling away under the coat. But the facile patterns and thin characterisations wrapped in a pseudo romanticism about war all reek of Matthew Bourne’s influence: you know what’s coming and in no time it’s delivered.
What we do see throughout the evening, and what the audience rewards with such evident relish and pride, is a company of eight dancers who are a pleasure to watch, and who can dance as if there’s no tomorrow. All that is missing on this program is a language they can embrace with all the passion at their disposal. I was waiting for that Isadora moment when someone would come on stage and dance their words. Maybe I’m just going deaf.
Retina Dance Company, Corporalis, Nottingham Playhouse, February 19
Erin Harty in Corporalis photo: David Severn
As the final episode in Retina Dance Company’s trilogy about the relationship between the body and different art forms — text in Eleven Stories for the Body (2005) and visual art in This is not a Body (2007) — Artistic Director Filip Van Huffel’s Corporalis takes architecture as its point of departure. It sets out to ‘explore the relationship between personal space, architectural space and three-dimensional space.’ The 20-minute opening section of Corporalis — in which Van Huffel effectively sets up a quintet between dancers Matthew Slater and Erin Harty, set designer Ruimtevaarders’ steel wall unit, Andrew Hammond’s lighting and Marieke van de Ven’s soundscape — is so well crafted and its unity of elements so complete that it sets up a huge expectation for what follows. Van Huffel’s vocabulary finds full expression in these two dancers — Slater and Harty have a palpable chemistry that fills the stage (and what a great stage the Playhouse is for dance)— and an aural and visual setting that evidently inspires him. The problem is what to do afterwards? Interestingly, Van Huffel had not intended to open with this section but with the solo that follows. Perhaps a further re-calibration is required to balance the entire work, for in retrospect the brightness of the opening section leaves the remaining two thirds of the show — apart from two or three exceptions — in its shade.
Slater and Harty begin with their backs against the steely, reflective surface that is set at an acute angle to the audience; the two dancers create a smudge of colour on the metal as they begin a series of slow introductory arm and torso movements. There is a wisp of smoke in the air that adds an even softer focus to the diffused light, suggesting a dream, but the score pricks the couple into sharper, more thrusting movement in place, repeating the same gestures with increased vigour. The metal wall, which is a series of three mobile panels, rotates to face us and the light beats on it like an anvil, changing the illumination and the spatial quality. Slater and Harty repeat earlier motifs, separately and then together until the wall moves again to articulate a slight angle between two of the panels, the tiniest suggestion of an enclosing space. The dance begins to work up with jumps from a low position until the two dancers are flinging themselves to the floor before the rush of adrenalin recedes like a tide. At one point Slater’s body is reflected in the wall as he watches Harty, whose shadow is projected on to the wall next to him, a lovely play of light and form. Harty winds up into a fury, throwing herself into the air where she seems to hang effortlessly before landing on the side of her thighs.
Throughout this section, Van Huffel integrates imaginative and expressive gestures — Slater has a passage in which his pecking head and undulating back are reminiscent of a courting pigeon — into what could be the play of two teenagers leaning against a wall wondering how the evening is going to end. Van de Ven includes a section with children’s voices that matches the innocence of the action, and as the walls move back, the movement grammar opens up with it. Slater and Harty repeat the opening sequences but they are now quite different in the larger space. Slater disappears behind the wall and Harty delivers a beautiful solo that she continues into a blackout as if she never wants to stop.
A very different, extended solo follows, demonstrating not only the effect of architecture on the body, but of the body on architecture. The wall is the same, but Steven Martin has a different energy and a more introverted dance that has its ticks and drama but feels like a rather long monologue that has been seamlessly dropped into the place of a vibrant conversation. The tone softens, and the space diminishes. We first see his bearded figure lying on the floor as if shipwrecked in a blue light, floating on the water’s edge. When he stands he seems very tall, wearing an open jacket (whose flapping competes with his own movement) over his naked torso and with a rapid frisking of his body signals he is trapped in a painful place, a prisoner in his own cell. There is an oppressive buzzing sound of an electrified fence in the score, underlining some malaise. Towards the end of his solo, Martin covers his eyes as if he is about to die, but just as he stands, Pauline De Laet arrives on the other side of the stage in the same pose and to a deep trumpet motif swims towards him like an angel. He watches his saviour getting closer, and as soon as she is within reach begins to manipulate her, sitting her finally on his shoulders like a prizefighter carrying his victor.
Harty returns to form a trio and then Slater to make a quartet, repeating phrases in canon, but it is immediately apparent that the two couples, who are now meeting for the first time, are quite different and their spaces clash. At this point, Van Huffel offers them a jewel: in the violin introduction to Handel’s aria Cara Sposa from Rinaldo that van de Ven has woven into the score, the quartet of dancers stands reverently still against the wall in a white light. The harpsichord continuo resonates with the metal wall, the counter tenor with the light, and again there is this remarkable unity between the theatrical elements. When the dancers move with the emergence of the voice, their backs leave a damp stain on the wall from which the music seems to arise.
In the closing sections of Corporalis, in which there is still plenty of action in various convolutions, Van Huffel has one surprise and a treat. When the two boys carry De Laet off, Harty is left to dance alone, but now the wall is moved all the way to the side, so the stage recedes all the way to the back of the theatre in black. At the same time van de Ven introduces the sound of traffic, as if we have just opened the door to go outside into the street. Harty repeats earlier phrases, but interestingly the change of stage size engulfs her; we begin to lose the sense of what she is doing: a reminder of the effect of three-dimensional space on our actions. When the wall comes back there is a brief opportunity to gather back the momentum, a moment in which De Laet dances alone, a bright and sparkling juxtaposition of outward reflection and internal process. It is as if we are seeing her for the first time, but it is tantalizingly brief. She tries to break through the wall but we hear the return of the electrified fence. The lovely light on her and in her fades too quickly to black.
The Royal Ballet, La Valse, ‘Meditation’ from Thais, Voices of Spring, Monotones I and II, Marguerite and Armand: Royal Opera House, February 13
Zenaida Yanowski and Federico Bonelli in Marguerite and Armand (photo: Tristram Kenton)
The beauty of line in Sir Frederick Ashton’s ballets is one of the defining characteristics of his work, even if the steps can be excruciatingly complex. What goes on in the feet is one thing, but in The Royal Ballet’s evening of six works by Ashton, there is ample opportunity — particularly in Monotones I and II — to see the lines of the body beautifully expressed with grace and precision. Unfortunately those qualities were not always in evidence the night I went, though the stretch body suits may have had something to do with it, deforming rather than streamlining the natural joints of the body. The real problem lies elsewhere, however.
Geraldine Morris, in her book, Frederick Ashton’s Ballets: Style, Performance, Choreography, spends some time discussing the ballet training Ashton would have received, particularly the Cecchetti system that was the basis of his technique. She quotes Cecchetti scholar, Toby Bennett: ‘Cecchetti-trained dancers not only have strength and flexibility in the torso, they also have an appreciation of the subtle rhythmic variations between different steps, coupled with a profound understanding of épaulement.’ Épaulement is not an intellectual concept that needs profound understanding; its profundity is in its manifestation in the body: it is as fundamental to classical form as the double helix is to the structure of DNA. In ballets like Monotones I and II, dancers who do not have ‘a profound understanding of épaulement’ — or who sacrifice it to flexibility — will not be able to maintain the purity of line Ashton’s choreography demands. Romany Pajdak possibly had an off night, but her difficulty in maintaining equilibrium in certain passages of Monotones I may have had its source in a failure to implement Ashton’s — and Cecchetti’s — indispensable ingredient. Mark Monahan in his discussion of Ashton in the evening’s program describes épaulement as ‘that irresistibly feminine angling of the head and shoulders.’ It is not; he is mistaking the flower for the stem.
A few pages further on in her book, Morris discusses the differences she sees in the way Ashton’s original casts performed his works compared with today’s. ‘What stands out is the speed at which the dances are performed. Today’s slightly slower tempo gives rise to an alteration of the choreography. While the steps are ostensibly the same, their appearance is not. What is lost is the sense of dancing. The poses, moments of stillness and turnout are emphasized in the later version but the sense of motion is absent and the dances are seen more as a set of links between positions.’ I cannot agree or disagree with Morris as I have not seen footage of the original casts, and she is not necessarily referring to any of the ballets on this evening’s bill, but her comparison turned a light on my own reaction to the evening’s middle section, which included ‘Meditation’ from Thais, Voices of Spring, as well as Monotones I and II. In ‘Meditation’ from Thais, Sarah Lamb and Rupert Pennefather had a rather bloodless quality that put precision ahead of expression, shape ahead of form, position ahead of flow. The juice remained in the music under the direction of Emmanuel Plasson with concert master Vasko Vassilev playing the violin solo. The highlight of this middle section, however, was seeing Alexander Campbell and Yuhui Choe in Voices of Spring. With their sensitivity, exuberance and evident joy in dancing together, they were as close to spring as one could wish at this time of year.
The evening opened with La Valse and closed with Marguerite and Armand. After Ashton had choreographed the latter on Margot Fonteyn and Rudolph Nureyev, it remained, as David Vaughan writes in the program, the ‘exclusive property of Fonteyn and Nureyev for many years.’ It is a flawed ballet that can only be saved from a whimpering melodrama by the passionate interpretation and charisma of its two protagonists. But the sparks were simply not flying between Zenaida Yanowski and Federico Bonelli, if there were sparks at all. It is not a ballet in which there can be any notion of pretense. Bonelli’s passion needs unlocking so that Yanowski has a chance to spar. I wanted to shout out to him, Embrace her as if you really love her! Compare the photographs in the program: Bonelli and Yanowski are beautifully captured by Tristram Kenton, with foreheads passionately furrowed, but then look at the photograph by Anthony Crickmay of Fonteyn and Nureyev in rehearsal and you see a world in which the entire body explodes in passion. Marguerite and Armand — and its creator — demand no less.
Deborah Light, HIDE, Chapter, Cardiff, February 22
Rosalind Hâf Brooks in HIDE photo: John Collingswood
Since she left Laban in 2001, Deborah Light has been researching the notions of inside and outside, what is revealed about a person and what is hidden. She would have agreed with the painter René Magritte that ‘There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us.’ Using the body and mind as material, Light is concerned with the deeper layers of the human psyche; the program note for HIDE says it ‘delves beneath our outer shell, revealing internal worlds, and exposing the multiplicity of human nature.’ The three performers (Jo Fong, Rosalind Hâf Brooks and Eddie Ladd) have already marked out significant journeys in dance theatre and their experience is a vital ingredient in HIDE. They work close to that boundary of fearful and fearless, following the notion of abandonment of inhibition as a way forward.
The three meanings of ‘hide’ are printed in the program and become immediately apparent in the auditorium: Fong stands naked on a pedestal on stage as we file into our seats. From our darkened hide in the audience we see her hide that she cannot hide. She may be shivering from the cold air, but she is definitely out of her comfort zone, and we witness her struggle as she experiences that psychological barrier between clothed and unclothed, private and public. If she cannot hide her body, what is she revealing? That metaphysical question — and its obverse — is a central theme in the work. While Fong is on her pedestal, Ladd is kneeling with her back to us writing on the floor something we cannot read (and which she later rubs out) and Brooks is facing the back corner crouching in her underwear on a loudspeaker. All three women are materially visible, but their internal worlds are obscured. In the course of HIDE these three charged characters collide like atoms in an accelerator releasing in the process facets of their own inner worlds that interact and reform as new layers of experience.
There is an element of Huis Clos here: three characters confined in one space without the possibility of leaving. The stage (designed by Neil Davies with lighting supplied by five mobile studio lamps manipulated by the performers) is their cell, and over the course of HIDE their initial detachment breaks down into a mutual dependence (as in climbing into each other’s clothes) that is broken only when Fong abruptly announces ‘I’m off’ and leaves. Unlike the Sartre scenario, there is a way out of eternity.
The soundscape by Sion Orgon is a driving, frenetic electronic score with a quality of crossed wires that weaves in recorded sounds of children in a playground, distorted voices, dream-like fragments, birdsong, cavernous Morse code, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Given its non-narrative, almost random nature, it is all the more remarkable when the score, the choreography and the characters suddenly coalesce to create a moment of extraordinary power and beauty like an ascending mountain path that suddenly opens on to a breathtaking vista. Ladd is describing, with appropriate sounds and words, the cutting up of a carcass, hanging from its two back legs, while we hear repeated snatches of Bach’s Crucifixus from the B Minor Mass that Fong seems to control as she swoons and sings, twitches and falls. Brooks, to whom reality is revealed through her olfactory sense, is endlessly sniffing around like a fly around the carcass. Magical.
Ladd puts in a powerful performance, acting as the central narrator (in both official languages); perhaps it is her personality, or the force of her presence, but she anchors the dramatic action. She weaves aspects of her life story through the work, from the length of her hair over the past decades, to changing her name to learning how to walk like a man — all strategies for hiding, it seems, but she carves her way through the performance with blinding confidence. As she says at the end with quiet determination, ‘I am a Welsh speaking female. I should not hide.’ Fong has a fluid quality — like water to Ladd’s fire — that flows from wild abandon to introspection and Brooks is air, breathing out animal exhalations like a dragon when she is not taking in the scents around her.
Some of HIDE’s material comes from Light’s solo work: one can recognize idioms from Cortex in Brooks’ crazed scrabbling on the floor, her fluttering hands in a gesture of abandon, in the references to animal behaviour, and the flirting with nakedness. In HIDE Light has taken her research to another level, an original voice with a stark, uncompromising vision and the ability to coax out of her performers the material they need for their long journey — one that is never quite finished because, as Magritte points out, ‘Everything we see hides another thing.’
Fong finally turns the performance on its head, demurring that ‘It’s not me you came to see. You came to see a show.’ She leaves and Brooks disguises herself as a powerful inert image in black (see the photo above), part animal in platform hoofs and part hooded human. With no further interaction possible, Ladd is left to turn out the remaining lights, one by one, clothing us all in darkness. And with nothing left to see, we leave our hide.
What a lovely printed program: well designed by Marc Heatley, with no hype, lovely photography by John Collingswood and just enough text…even if the proof reader missed the printing schedule.
