Joss Arnott Dance: Dark Angel seeks light

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

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

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

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

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

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

HeadSpaceDance: Three & Four Quarters

HeadSpaceDance, Three and Four Quarters, Linbury Studio Theatre, September 11

There is a story of JMW Turner on varnishing day at the Royal Academy. In 1832, when Constable exhibited his painting, Opening of Waterloo Bridge, it was placed next to a seascape of Turner’s – a grey picture, beautiful in its own watery way, but with no positive color in any part of it. Constable’s Waterloo, by contrast, seemed as if painted with liquid gold and silver, and Turner came several times into the room while Constable was heightening with vermillion and lake the decorations of flags of the city barges. Turner stood beside him, looking from the Waterloo to his own picture, and at last brought his palette from another room. Putting a round daub of red lead, somewhat bigger than a shilling, on his grey sea, he then went away without saying a word. The intensity of the red lead, made more vivid by the coolness of his picture, caused even the vermilion and lake of Constable to look weak. ‘He has been here,’ said Constable to his colleagues after Turner had left ‘and fired a gun.’

I will come back to this.

HeadSpaceDance’s debut evening of premières, Three & Four Quarters, at the Linbury Studio Theatre, opens with Javier de Frutos’ Studies in M, with what appears to be three of the four cygnets from Swan Lake danced to the first movement of Bach’s concerto for oboe and violin which is repeated three times as the dancers regroup and embellish their disintegrating links. Christopher Akrill, Charlotte Broom and Clemmie Sveaas appear to know each other well; their performing history suggests it and there is a harmony and ease in their styles, a complicity rather than a familiarity. There is even a similarity in appearance, though this is possibly the softening effect of Fabrice Serafino’s androgynous nightdresses with tendril-like tassels and grey socks they each wear. The choreography also seems at ease, but this is the illusion of a performance that is timed and spaced to perfection; to repair the delicately absentminded breaching of their choreographic patterns is only an artful step away, a slight realignment of an errant arm or head. The structure of the trio follows Bach’s musical precision, though De Frutos takes advantage of the trio’s subtle, subversive humour and their quiet dramatic presence to keep them at times on the music’s lyrical path and at others insouciantly off it. At the end only Sveaas is left on stage, focusing intently on her movement phrases until Bach stops and she is left somewhere between the silence and the ticking of a clock. She walks half-way off, hesitates, then creeps quietly through the door at the back. There is applause, but no bows; the evening is programed as one work in several acts.

Akrill and Sveaas reappear from that same door carrying a roll of white, padded material that they unroll on the floor like a giant duvet. This is the bedroom setting of Didy Veldman’s insomniac In the skin I’m in 1, the first of his triptych of autobiographical portraits of each of the dancers. Veldman writes in his notes that in working with the dancers, he had set them a task of writing down their thoughts for five minutes. ‘This text was so interesting that it became the basis for what we’ve created together.’ Broom is recapping her to do list: teabags, phone Carole, tap: thoughts that punctuate this delightful watercolour sketch. The music, Alexander Balanescu’s Aria, is a perfect choice for Broom’s sleepless solo in which she uses the duvet as her stage, rolling in it, jumping on it, hiding her head under it, shuffling across it and pulling at a corner with her teeth. The advantage of watching from the balcony is that you can see the beautiful patterns she makes with the duvet. Broom has a childlike, playful quality that is infectious. Towards the end, as she throws herself again and again on the piled up duvet, she is laughing, and so are we. She suddenly remembers something she has to do, gathers up the duvet and drags it off.

Set to Satie’s Gymnopedies No. 3, Akrill’s portrait, In the skin I’m in 2, starts with watery images in a more outdoor, autumnal setting. Veldman accentuates Akrill’s long legs and arms, suggesting insecurity in his uncertain equilibrium. He has a secret that he wants to let out but can’t; he makes mistakes, but shrugs his shoulders or hides his head under his top. Like Broom’s portrait, it is dreamlike, punctuated not by verbal reminders but by some beautifully lyrical acrobatics, and at the end it is the element of air that prevails: inflating a plastic bag of nuts he has just finished, Akrill carefully ties it up. I think he is going to burst it, but instead he lies down next to it on the floor and blows it gently towards the wings.

For those who have not shuffled out to the bar, the interval is a continuation of the relaxed relationship the dancers have created with the audience and gives a sense of their ownership of the stage. Sveaas warms up while Broom brings in a chair and sweeps the stage; they chat, Sveaas puts down a centre mark and checks it with Akrill who has just arrived as if he is about to leave, in smart shirt and trousers with a backpack over his shoulder. There is some lighting focus, a consultation about a bump in the floor, and the three rehearse some moves. All is made clear after the interval with Luca Silvestrina’s After the Interval, ‘a piece about dance and dancers’ that makes a performance out of the dancers’ preparations. It starts ironically at the end with a parody of bows and works backwards, shining a light on rehearsals, the process of marking, the difficulty of talking through moves, the frustrations and contradictions of too many corrections, snatches of biography from an imaginary question-and-answer session and a run-through in the studio of a Brahms Intermezzo that is beautiful and beautifully danced (in relaxed studio mode, we are led to believe, without anybody watching). It is fun, it is light, it is cleverly put together but it is essentially introspective and as self-referencing as the previous works. We are getting to over three quarters of the way through the evening, and the introduction to the company has barely changed gear. Sveaas is still to come with her Veldman portrait, In the skin I’m in 3, set to another piece by Alexander Balanescu, Empty House Space. The pace increases, as this is more energetic than the other two portraits, more intense and serious, a balancing act between sunshine and shadow in the form of long horizontal bars of light across the stage. It is a fighting solo, with agitated arms and elbows and frenetic hands and fingers, Sveaas’ body falling and recovering, with both weight and a sense of being lost in space. The lighting (by Simon Bennison throughout the program) works closely with the choreography, removing one bar of light at a time until Sveaas (happily) walks off along the one remaining.

Broom then opens the door at the back of the stage and steps in, holding the door for Akrill to follow; light pours in and the colours of Broom’s skirt and blouse blast the stage with energy, light and emotion at the beginning of this extract from Light Beings, by Mats Ek. The music is the Andante Festivo by Jean Sibelius, a festive piece to which Ek adds an acutely colourful variety of gestures and steps that seem to overpower it to the point of mockery. There is a moment in this short piece when the dancers leave the stage for Sibelius to regain his composure, but when they return with shaking heads and hands and Akrill’s drunken, swaggering gait, the dancing once again puts an arm around Sibelius and leads him to the bar. Akrill’s extraordinary jeté with his supporting foot suspended in Broom’s hands is a climax of Ek’s daring and outrageously imaginative choreography.

Introductions finally over, this was the keynote moment, like Turner’s daub of red lead, that illuminates everything that has gone before, as if we have been watching the slow growth of a pale stem that suddenly opens in a glorious, pleated apricot and turquoise bloom and the vein of humour coursing through the evening finally bursts out in Ek’s broad, uplifting, joyous laugh. It is brilliant programming, and if the triumph of the evening’s dancing belongs to the company’s founders, Akrill and Broom, it could not have happened without the supporting role of Sveaas. All three (finally) take a (proper) bow and receive a well-deserved ovation.

Retina Dance Company: Layers of Skin

Layers of Skin, Retina Dance Company, Theatre Royal Nottingham, September 8

It is one of those cases where you shouldn’t read the program notes before seeing the performance. I did, and I spent some time looking on stage in vain for what I thought I was going to see. The painter, René Magritte, once said, “If one looks at a thing with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer seeing the thing itself, but thinking of the question that has been raised.” I was at Nottingham’s Theatre Royal to see Retina Dance Company’s Layers of Skin, choreographed by artistic director, Filip Van Huffel. In his notes for the work, Van Huffel suggests skin is not only what we see but what covers what we don’t see: our feelings, our characteristics. Magritte again: “Everything we see hides another thing; we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

Putting aside the ideas of skin, the intensity of conflict is closer to what I actually see in Layers of Skin. The explosive quality of the dancing is in a sense the development of conflict in choreographic form. Created on Retina’s core of six dancers and three apprentices, Layers of Skin also has a supporting cast of eighteen local dancers of differing ages and abilities who have been rehearsing intensively with the company for the last four days. It doesn’t sound like a formula for success, but it works. One could not have asked for a more complete performance in terms of its energy and drive. The six dancers are the heart of the matter, a fearless sextet that courses through the performance with unrelenting attack and endurance. The apprentices allay the tensions with beautiful, lyrical movement, and the local artists provide the balm. When they all come together, as in the final scene, the conflicts are seemingly resolved.

There is also a transformation from initial research to final choreographic form through the score by the Belgian band, Aranis (www.aranis.be), consisting of two violins, a double bass, accordion, piano, flute, and guitar, which has an earthy, gypsy grounding that swings, syncopates, jumps and celebrates. The joy is in the music. The thrill is in the dancing.

The stage is set as an arena with three sides along which are ranged rows of chairs. In between their bouts of participation, the apprentices and local artists sit here (and sometimes the core sextet, though they have little respite), which provides a physical and spiritual continuity throughout the work, as if what is going on in the arena is of concern to everyone. The setting has the starkness of a Shaker Meeting House and the excitement of the circus. When the seven musicians play live on stage (for this performance the music was recorded, but played back with remarkable fidelity) they take up the rear wall, like a row of dancers. This would be the ideal staging, but since the band is based in Belgium (like Van Huffel himself), the cost of bringing it over is a serious financial consideration.

The performance begins in silence and the light reveals a pile of bodies, lots of layers of skin in imperceptible, slithering contact, though modest black underwear covers those areas of skin still uncommonly revealed in our theatres. Kristina Alleyne mounts the pile and backbends over the top, sliding down to the floor to begin a new one, like a replicating cell. The other contingent of dancers enters one by one and surrounds the now upright and dressing group, like a crowd of onlookers witnessing a commotion in the street. By the time the core sextet begins its first dance, the onlookers have taken their seats to watch this performance within a performance. And what a performance it is. Van Huffel’s movement vocabulary demands a total immersion in its volatile gesture, its flying, flipping and horizontal spinning, its daring partnering and its seemingly effortless recovery from high voltage falls to the floor. Contact between the dancers can appear quite violent were it not for the absence of any kind of struggle for dominance; the relationships are dispassionately physical rather than emotional, though the appearance can be ambiguous. Van Huffel is careful to counter the sextet’s surfeit of energy with a nicely balanced arrangement of solos, duets and trios and with passages of calm and balm involving the apprentices and local dancers. Kristina Alleyne, Erin Harty and Pauline De Laet are the three core women, and Steven Martin, David Michel and Matthew Slater the men. Of the three promising apprentices (Andrea Lund, Josefien Noske and Elín Ragnarsdóttir), Noske suddenly catches my eye during the performance as she takes control of her movement and gives it sinuous life. Van Huffel has an evident talent in attracting good dancers into his orbit and bringing out the best in them.

If skin is a form of boundary, these dancers are dancing outside their skin with a raw and transformative energy that effortlessly crosses the theatre’s fourth wall. In the final moments the entire cast walks slowly downstage performing a kind of mass reverence in balletic form with a decidedly expressionist flavour, but a reverence nevertheless. It is a powerful, cathartic moment.

And if you are still wondering what it is all about, I leave Magritte with the final word: “My painting is visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, “What does that mean?” It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.”

Candoco, Marc Brew, Claire Cunningham: Unlimited

Candoco Unlimited, Unlimited Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, September 6, supported by The Brazilian Embassy.

Unlimited is a project at the heart of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad that celebrates disability, arts and culture on an unprecedented scale. Twenty-nine new works were commissioned to encourage deaf and disabled artists to push boundaries, by creating work which opens doors, changes minds, and inspired new collaborations. (Arts Council England)

The Unlimited Festival at Southbank Centre is an encouraging, life-affirming project that parallels the sporting premise of the Paralympics, and it finds a fullness of expression in the two works commissioned by Unlimited and presented by Candoco Dance Company at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thursday evening: Parallel Lines by Marc Brew, and 12 by Claire Cunningham.

The motivating idea behind Brew’s Parallel Lines is the lines of communication between the 2012 Olympics host country, its predecessor, China, and its successor, Brazil, and it uses dancers from all three countries. The cables we see suspended and stretched across the stage are both the lines that unite by carrying this communication, and the lines – like race, physical ability or national borders – that can demarcate. Parallel Lines is thus an idea that works on an intellectual level as well as on stage, thanks to Brew’s creative, all-embracing magic. He has the dual experience of being an able-bodied dancer (he used to dance with Candoco) who now finds himself in a wheelchair, so he has a profoundly nuanced understanding of what it means to have unlimited movement and what it means to be physically constrained.

Another force that leads Parallel Lines forward is its score by Michael Galasso (Scenes), creating a series of delightful variations that allow space for the dancers to move in between its layers. Brew has caught the dynamics of the music beautifully in his own treatments of duet, trio, quartet and ensemble, mixing male and female, male and male, able and disabled, with an overarching theme of support, be it from the ground or from a partner. The duet with Darren Anderson and Edu stands out as an expression of courage, strength, caring and love, with a delightful sense of humour. Brew transforms disability into an emotional quality that imbues the partnerships he sets up with an equality and universality that is surely the summit of his achievement. The creative elements of set design (Sam Collins), costumes (Jo Paul) and lighting (Ben Pacey) complete the unity of this work.

Claire Cunningham takes a different tack in her creative process. She is used to choreographing work on her own body and drawing material from her own life, incorporating the crutches on which she relies. She said in a Q&A after the performance that the prospect of creating work on a group of dancers filled her with misgiving and fear. There was the double challenge of creating for both disabled and non-disabled dancers and of assigning the movement’s ownership to someone other than herself. Her solution to the first was, like Brew’s, an emotional one: finding in the crutch a symbol of our forms of dependence, something with which we can all associate. Cunningham’s answer to the second was to get the dancers to create autobiographical material of their own by giving them improvisation tasks in the studio, and taking from the movement what she and her assistant director and mentor, Gail Sneddon, felt was right for 12. The advantage of working in this way is that it has allowed Cunningham to break through a psychological barrier to realizing a much broader palette. The danger, however, is that the material escapes her creative control, as with Pandora’s box, and cannot be enticed back. 12 is thus uneven in its pace, abstruse at times, but never lacking in visually arresting imagery. Crutches are used as guns and as air guitars, and in a particularly oppressive scene, as elements of violent manipulation and submission: emotional dependence has a decidedly dark side. Crutches are also used in less sinister fashion as elements of an animated conversation between Welly O’Brien and Mickaella Dantas, and as puppet sticks in the scene with the bookish Ming Hei Wong and the voluptuous Annie Hanauer who dances around a candy cotton microphone to Mozart’s Laudate Dominum. Dan Daw, whose dramatic talent shines here, is mesmerising as he strives to control an errant arm while seated in a chair. Shanti Freed evidently had a lot of fun with the costumes, and Matthias Herrmann’s score hung on to Cunningham’s roller-coaster vision by the seat of its pants. Karsten Tinapp lit it all admirably through the billowing fog.

What Marc Brew and Claire Cunningham so convincingly affirmed on Thursday night is that there is no notion of disability in terms of artistic expression, and the dancers are all brilliant performers. Candoco’s reputation has been sufficiently established that it is perhaps time to quietly remove its label of disabled and non-disabled dancers. And where, oh where, are the designer crutches?

Dog Kennel Hill Project: Marks, Measures, Maps and Mind

Marks, Measures, Maps and Mind is a promenade performance created by Dog Kennel Hill Project, co-commissioned by South East Dance, Turner Contemporary and Stour Valley Arts as part of RELAY, and produced by South East Dance and Stour Valley Arts, August 27.

Marks, Measures, Maps and Mind celebrates the physical body through a range of sports-driven tasks, in a breathtaking natural setting. Sporting challenges and actions form the basis for a dance that showcases the human drive for precision and perfection within the wild and epic locations of the forest, rekindling the timeless relationship to our natural environment (from the program).

I’ve seen some impressive theatres, but King’s Wood near Challock in Kent beats them all for size, natural beauty and lighting. The forest serves as Stour Valley Arts’ principal gallery for outdoor visual arts commissions, but this is the first time it has worked on a dance performance. With the Olympics looming over every aspect of our cultural life, Dan Howard-Birt, assistant curator at Stour Valley Arts, makes the analogy between the natural and improved in terms of sports training and the natural and improved in terms of the Forestry Commission’s management of King’s Wood. ‘Dog Kennel Hill Project approach the subject of the natural and the improved through dance and the human body…trained and scripted to enact movements and gestures of particular exactness, which when seen sequentially or en masse reveal the artists’ ordered design.’

King’s Wood is thus transformed from a vast gallery into a vast theatre. Front of house facilities are housed on the edge of the car park in a tent with cupcake bunting that is home to an enthusiastic team of production staff from South East Dance and Stour Valley Arts, while in an adjacent silver Airstream a filmed interview with Ben Ash and Henrietta Hale of Dog Kennel Hill Project – creators of this promenade performance – is showing on a screen. It’s not easy to hear the interview as there are children running up and down the ramp to the caravan and launching themselves off the steps with wild enthusiasm. What I do catch is Hale talking about absurdity in their work – ‘a purpose with lack of purpose’ – and according to Ash, there is an umbrella theme in Marks, Measures, Maps and Mind of progress and decline around the notion of work. They talk of the different textures of the forest, of the sense of order and repetition in nature. The theme of sport seems to have taken a back seat. The short interview finishes with an invitation to ‘feel the forest, feel the performance.’

Outside we are formed into two groups of thirty people, each with a guide. It is oversubscribed this evening for the last performance. After a briefing, the two groups merge into the forest like a straggle of pilgrims, some with staffs and walking sticks, some dressed for the theatre, some for hiking. We trek for fifteen minutes through King’s Wood, along a path through the meadow, past the beech trees, sweet chestnut trees, larch and shoulder-high ferns. Little Robin Hoods with their sticks run off into the undergrowth and back, birds sing, and the air becomes danker and cooler and the light more muted as we enter further into the forest. There is no fourth wall in this theatre; there is no wall at all.

After fifteen minutes, we turn right and climb a long and grassy path, the final ascent to the beginning of the performance. At a gateway of green string tied between two trees we divide into our groups and enter along the path. In the dappled light we encounter male and female dancers in groups of two or three, dressed in blue and yellow tops with black or white skirts, standing still among the trees on either side of the path, staring ahead, hands open as if we have come across a group of pagans in a solemn ritual. The figures stand out in the forest, sculpting the space with their bodies, though their costumes are too wooly to make their shapes precise. And then they overtake us, running to the next event in energetic disarray. Our groups stop in front of a dancer precariously wedged between the trunk and an outcropping stem of a tree, with two pieces of wood knotted to either end of a green string balanced over her head; as her head moves dreamily from side to side, she resembles the pendulum of a grandfather clock. We move on and the group splits into two, approaching the next event from two sides. In the clearing a dancer with a giant wooden measuring compass creates heroic geometric shapes, pointing up towards the tops of the trees, or at right angles to the ground, while the other two women jump and circle her as wild, dynamic satellites: images of some cosmic drama, a vestige, perhaps, of Oscar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus experiments.

We move off down a sloping, winding path of rare natural beauty beneath the forest that dwarfs our movement. We come to a ridge of back-lit trees where two dancers manipulate articulated, rectangular frames that make the clacking sound of folding deckchairs. This is more musical than measuring and insufficiently epic to influence the space. If you put small movement in a forest, it is the forest that dominates. Yet a figure standing still throughout the interlude who suddenly runs off down the hill – a tiny figure running amongst the monumental trees – takes our breath away.

We continue our path down, past two performers balancing sticks and come to a turning. A sign says ‘Do not play on the sculptures’, but the sculptures are so much a part of the forest’s natural forms that the sign is our only indication they exist. We are at the bottom of the valley and our guide turns us to look back up the incline to see an impressive array of figures like statues on this vast stage of sloping forest floor. On a shout – the first introduction of any human sound – the dancers run up and down within their delineated space and as suddenly come to rest, their arms marking slowly the four cardinal points. Only the muffled roar of jet engines far above the canopy of trees remind us of the world we have temporarily left. On another shout the dancers flee in all directions, rushing past us and on to the next event. We climb again, a fairly steep climb up the opposite slope and stop before a single introspective figure in white and blue, one knee anchored to the leafy forest floor as she turns slowly with angular arms and arching torso to a faint, watery score that we strain to hear over the brooding silence of the forest. We rustle off in search of our next sighting. Accustomed now to the stillness of the forest, it is easy to spot a running figure. He is circling round the rim of a crater (this is a sculpture) in which water has collected. A woman perches on the rim balancing a triangular construction of string and sticks, as if she is fishing. The man runs round and comes to a stop opposite her to watch.

We meet the other group at an intersection of paths where, in the clearing, two women perform with sticks as extensions of their arms and a giant crossbow-like structure strapped to their backs. They move their extensions like feelers, sensing and searching our invasive presence. They might also be, according to the program, ‘investigating a relationship with space and time through the marking and mapping of points in rhythmic sequences’, but the forest does not suggest such cerebral analysis: the dancers are more like giant insects, who retreat to safety under a canopy of trees. We follow like hunters on the trail of some exotic fauna, now trapped and buzzing, then let them go, and enter another opening off the path, to sit in the bowl of what may well be our second sculpture scooped out of the forest floor with an ordered arrangement of branches and the trunk of a tree. Bird song stands out from the ambient sound as the dancers surround us on the rim, watching us who are watching them. One by one the dancers begin to gyrate their shoulders and raise their heads and arms to the sky in a silent benediction, and then they are gone. As we regroup, we hear them chanting down the path, like a small crowd of victorious football supporters. It is as if the dancers emphasise the nature of the forest by what it is not: trained human shapes, human voices and social activity.

We move off again and come to a circle of trees and the sense of a finale. From the slope above us, the array of dancers descend closer to take up new shapes. One girl does a handstand against a tree. The sound of birdsong from the speakers seems extraneous. As they sweep past us to take up positions further down the slope, the dancers lay red sticks at the edges of our group, marking us. Standing with their backs to us they look out over the sloping forest below. We are once again a part of their ritual. Rain begins to fall, real rain; it sounds like distant applause from under the high canopy of leaves. It is the cue for the dancers to move off down the hill, disappearing over the ridge and leaving us with a tiny crescendo of rain that stops as magically as it began. The sound of our clapping in the forest is surreal, bringing us back to the conventions of a theatre. As we humans file back refreshed in mind and weary in body to the starting point, there is enthusiastic discussion of meaning and experience. I wonder what the forest was thinking as it observed the performance: small, animated figures rushing amongst the trees and gesturing, viewed by two groups of figures following at a different rate, but not doing anything: not feeding, not fighting, not sheltering, not growing. Scripted, ordered, unfathomable. Let’s see that again.

Nudity in dance: 40 years on

Benjamin Asriel, left, and Burr Johnson in “Fort Blossom revisited.” (photo: Andrea Mohin/The New York Times)

After reading Alastair Macaulay’s New York Times article Nakedness in Dance, Taken to Extremes, I came across a review of Glen Tetley’s Mutations written in 1970 by Alexander Bland, that husband and wife team of Nigel Gosling and Maude Lloyd who wrote about dance like proud and devoted parents, never sparing in praise but never letting any perceived impropriety or imperfection pass unnoticed. The review comes from a collection called Observer of the Dance 1958-1982, published by Dance Books (www.dancebooks.com). This was the final, fruitful period in Gosling’s life when he was both art and dance critic for The Observer.

Gosling must have liked dogs, as elsewhere in the book he compares the academic critic to a good retriever with the qualities of perseverance, concentration, patience and reliability, whereas the journalist critic is ‘like a hunting dog, alert, active, wide-ranging, with a good nose and a strong voice; he may follow some false scents, but he should keep our interest riveted on the chase…’

Which brings me back to the two articles. Both answer Macaulay’s opening question, ‘How do you react to the look of the naked body on stage?’ and go on to discuss the nature and merits of the work under review. That Macaulay’s subject attracted more attention than his regular reviews is notable, though he is writing about dance in New York, where Anna Halprin’s 1965 Parades and Changes was banned for twenty years for its nudity. One aspect of his article is that acceptance of nudity on the stage has moved to a concentration on genitalia, the ‘dark patch’ that Bland wrote about 42 years ago. It seems a slow progress indeed, especially compared to the development of nudity in the European theatre. What Bland came across in Mutations was for him a revelation, something to be celebrated, whereas Macaulay’s celebration is more tentative, as if revealing a secret.

However, my purpose is not to attempt an in-depth analysis of the approach of two critics to nudity in dance, but simply to offer a preamble to Alexander Bland’s delightful review that I reprint here in full with the permission of the publisher, David Leonard.

Mutations, Nederlands Dans Theater, Sadler’s Wells

Let’s face it fully and frontally, we are in the autumn of modesty. Fig leaves flutter down all around, scattered by the wind of change. Thirty years ago Ninette de Valois was showing the formidable founder of the Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Lilian Baylis, the backcloth for a new ballet. It was promptly censored on the grounds that the stomach of a female statue depicted on it was too large. ‘But it’s no bigger than my own,’ protested de Valois untruthfully. ‘Ah, my dear, but you have had an operation,’ replied Miss Baylis.

What would she have said last week? In her own theatre, in Mutations, a new ballet by Glen Tetley (with films by Hans van Manen), four young men and one young girl of the Netherlands Dans Theater dance naked for minutes in full spotlight, not to mention long film sequences in which one of the performers appeared enormously magnified and slow-motioned as if to prove that he was every inch a genitalman.

It has been widely reported that the effect was perfectly unremarkable and indeed irrelevant. Certainly dancers’ slim bodies suggest Bosch’s ‘Terrestrial Paradise’ rather than a Rubens orgy. But I must make an embarrassing confession. In the nudity field I am an outsider, a freak, perhaps even a ghoul which haunts the law courts where learned men fulminate on sex and censorship. Not only am I likely to be depraved; I probably am depraved already, for I find the spectacle of beautiful naked bodies exciting. Their introduction in this ballet induced a glow of added interest which it was painfully easy to analyse.

I comforted myself afterwards by reflecting that respectable authorities in other fields have admitted similar sensations. Lord Clark has even written that all good nude painting and sculpture is sexually stimulating. Sex assumes many disguises. On the stage we readily admit arousal by crafty costumes, lighting or posture, and I tried hard to think that the lack of all disguise was no more sinful than they. Exactly what is contributed – or lost – by the final fall of brassiere or jock-strap varies a great deal. Apart from the fact that some naked people look more naked than others, nudity can obviously be employed either innocently (as it was here) or for hard-core sensuality. The simple shock of seeing it on the stage at all comes largely from the surprise of finding it out of normal context. In my sheltered life it is still usually confined to bath or bed, but the probable spread of its use in the theatre will soon, alas, deaden its impact. What will be left will be more visual than psychological. From the formal point of view the costumed figure presents an image with a single focal-point – the head. By adding a dark patch in the centre of the image a second visual accent is introduced, and this is something choreographers will have to take into account.

These minor questions apart, nudity is used in this ballet as a stimulating but serious ingredient which completely justifies itself artistically. The scene is a kind of arena (by Nadine Baylis) into which white-clad figures gradually fight their way. Once arrived, the mood changes. A nude figure appears dancing on film, and this is followed by a nice trio for girls, a typical Tetley wrestling match, and some all-in applications of red paint suggesting violence. A couple dance, clad and unclad on screen and stage, to gently variegated electronic sounds by Stockhausen; more join in and the film triplicates, until some mysterious figures in transparent suits sweep the action off stage, leaving the couple – naked and strangely vulnerable – alone as the lights fade.

It is not perhaps the most completely successful ballet in the repertoire – the start is slow and the films not very imaginative – but it is sincere, shapely, rich in those plastic movements in which Tetley excels and works up to a fine climax. It was never trivial or titillating and was extremely well danced by the finely trained and good-looking company.     8.11.70

Dance Holland Park: emerging choreographers’ showcase

Dance Holland Park: Emerging Choreographers’ Showcase, July 7 at 1pm

Dance Holland Park is a joint project between English National Ballet and Opera Holland Park as part of Big Dance 2012. The mandate for each of the choreographers is to create a dance work on an opera theme. The setting is the same for each: a broad expanse of stage with Holland House as a natural backdrop and its dramatic porch as the principal entrance and exit.

Alice Gaspari in Hunted Devotion (photo: Nicholas Minns)

Romanian choreographer, Arcadie Rusu, opens the afternoon with his Hunted Devotion, based on Verdi’s opera, Falstaff, or, more accurately, based on the character of Falstaff himself. Rather than using Verdi’s own music, Rusu has chosen that of his compatriot, Alexander Balanescu, whose Aria, Life and Death, and New Beginning – like all the live music for this choreographic showcase – are beautifully played by Esther King Smith, Simeon Broom, Helen Sanders-Hewett and Carina Drury, conducted by Thomas Kemp.

A group of five dancers huddled together and holding on to each other peer out uncertainly through the grand porch of Holland House, under the taut tent-like structure, edging their way down the broad steps, looking around for signs of danger or distress. They are clearly on unfamiliar ground. A jester (Christian Coe) comes bounding from the side of the stage and offers his posy of flowers to whichever girl will take it. The girls run away, and the men keep their distance until the jester senses failure and runs off. Based on the distaff side of Falstaff, Rusu shows the many traits of this jovial figure through these six dancers. The jester is clearly Falstaff’s sense of humour, and the flowers are a symbol of his purity, in the sense that Falstaff is fully devoted to his desires and hunts them with the uncompromising desire of a hunter. The remaining two couples form duets, one energetic with Alessia Cutigni and Chris Knight, and the other lyrical with Alice Gaspari and Nuno Almeida, to the same music. Opposing desires do not end well, and Gaspari and Knight end up lying side by side, head to foot like corpses. Mattia Di Napoli, a bare-chested, manly figure in a full-length earthy-coloured skirt (Falstaff’s wisdom, perhaps), revives Gaspari, who begins an introverted, lyrical solo in silence. Where her head moves, her body sways in subservience, yet her guiding hand suggests a searching for the light in the darkness. In the meantime, the other five characters quarrel and make up, attract and reject each other in equal measure, as parts of a single conflicted psyche. Di Napoli is a grounded, powerful trait, Gaspari a poetic one. Knight is a clever schemer, quick to somersault and twist and turn, while Almeida is simplicity itself, and Cutigni a worldly muse. When all these meet together in different combinations, the drama of Falstaff is revealed. Later in the work, the men dance bare-chested, adding an air of passion and male pride, which is ready at any time for a fall. Falstaff’s dominant trait, his sense of humour, finally breaks down the differences in his character, and the six dancers make their way back through the doorway with more wisdom and understanding, we hope, than when they arrived. Such an approach to Falstaff is necessarily intimate, and the broad expanse of the Holland Park stage tends to dissipate the effect of this carefully wrought choreography. Fortunately there is a beautifully filmed trailer of Hunted Devotion that shows not only the sensitive camerawork of Takako Nakasu but the ability of Rusu to direct.  http://vimeo.com/43110678

This Wicked Desire © James O Jenkins

I had never thought of crossing classical Indian dance with Fiordiligi’s aria, Per Pieta, from Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, but Katie Ryan’s This Wicked Desire, a playful duet between Kali Chandrasegaram and Khavita Kaur, brought out the delicious spirit of the music as if they belonged together. The two dancers are a study in complementary opposites that is clear as soon as they make their entrance through the Holland House doorway, the voluptuous Kaur leading the way in her black-bodiced, high-waisted costume and the imposing Chandrasegaram a step behind in lyrical support. The program notes say the dance is a playful struggle between the opposing forces of desire and virtue, but it is difficult to know if Kaur is overflowing with desire or virtue, and Chandrasegaram, a dancer of strength and delicacy in equal measure, has a mischievous joy in all he does that is as irresistible as the music. Their duet is thus rightly ambiguous: desire and virtue are not such opposing forces after all. What Ryan does so well, and the two dancers embody, is to show the constant interplay between the two in a way that Mozart clearly understood.

Naomi Deira’s Buoso is inspired by the story of Buoso Donati, the patriarch whose will is the contested event around which Puccini’s one-act opera Gianni Schicchi revolves. Deira’s cast is two women (Nicole Geertruida and Heli Latola) and two men (Eric Lamba and Kiraly Saint Claire), though any direct link between Puccini’s characters and Deira’s cast seems tenuous. Death and its effects, however, are central to the work. Deira makes this clear by beginning Buoso with music by Armand Amar from a film score to Hors La Loi, a pounding, haunting, percussive score that expresses the 1945 massacre of Algerians in Sétif. It is the way Saint Clair sneaks on to the stage, his lithe movement, arched back and disdainful manner that suggest a force of evil. The charismatic Lamba’s powerful physique, especially when he gets going, suggests a lion to Saint Claire’s cobra, both images of force and rivalry that are far removed from Schicchi’s cunning but kindly trickery. When we hear Puccini’s pleading aria O mio babbino caro, however, the healing begins. Lamba and Latola are like the young lovers in Puccini’s opera, while Geertruida and Saint Claire are Buoso’s quarreling relatives. At the end, Geertruda bends towards us from Saint Claire’s back as he mounts the steps, leaving the lovers in peace. Now that’s a happy ending.

A change in the order of the program means that Lucia is next, choreographed by Anne-Marie Smalldon, artistic director of Combination Dance Company. It is inspired by Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, a tragic tale of love between Lucia and Edgardo, of Lucia’s betrayal by her family and her ultimate madness. Smalldon approaches the opera’s story in a straightforward manner, choosing three scenes, but sharing the role of Lucia between her three women: Briar Adams, Julie Ann Minnai and Toni-Michelle Dent. Before the work begins, heaps of rose petals – a symbol of love as well as loss – are strewn on the steps and on the front of the stage. Lucia in white descends the steps, kneels in front of petals and bathes in their fragrance. Edgardo in kilt and pale lemon shirt joins her and tries to distract her, kneeling beside her, lying and rolling with her. They create beautiful lines between them in their steps and lifts. A second couple joins like a second musical theme, until the first couple reappears to form a quartet on the theme of love. The two Lucias dance briefly together before one leaves and Julie Ann Minnai is left alone with the two men (Thomas McCann and Travis Clausen-Knight), who are no longer the lovers but have morphed into rather manipulative members of her own family. The men manhandle Lucia, throwing her between them and sharing her in a decidedly unpleasant way. The program notes tell us that Lucia is forced to submit to a marriage against her will, though there is no way of knowing that from watching the dance. In the final scene, Lucia plays with the flowers and rose petals, watched by the other four characters. Her descent into madness is marked by a lovely arabesque line that Smalldon uses to emotional effect in an otherwise contemporary language of distress. Lucia runs from one figure to the next as they close in on her, throwing petals over her head. For a moment she remains still, grasping her flowers to her as they dance around her but she soon throws down her flowers and breaks away. The four characters follow her movements and close in for the last time, their hands all over her, covering her in petals before they retreat. The child sitting next to me understands everything and says ‘bye-bye’.

After the rose petals have been swept up, there’s more red in the form of a powder poured in a semi-circle around the front half of the stage, a bloody arena in which the two men, Richard Bermange and Daniel Hay-Gordon, enact a concentrated version of the doomed friendship between Lenski and Onegin from Tchaikovsky’s opera. ContraVersus, choreographed by English National Ballet’s James Streeter, is an intense miniature in which each movement is concise, reduced to its emotional essentials in the manner of a Schiele drawing. The figures are bare-chested and in black tights, at once masculine and vulnerable; the closeness of their friendship is expressed in an almost contorted vocabulary and Streeter keeps the steps to initial themes that repeat or change direction within the proscribed red circle, setting up a sense of foreboding. Lenski repeats Onegin’s opening steps, as one instrument might pick up a tune from another, and later they dance the same steps but in different directions. Both men look the part, drawn towards each other naturally as equals but tragically linked by an inability to compromise. After the duel, Onegin supports the dying Lenski to the floor and then repeats his opening steps as if nothing has changed. If Streeter’s choreography is impressive, the score by Janine Forrester – Onegin: the duel and death of Lenski – is equally so. A gem on both counts.

Tanja Liedtke: Life in Movement

Life in Movement, directed by Bryan Mason, produced by Closer Productions.

The news of Nigel Charnock’s untimely death has prompted me to finish writing about a film released last year in Australia about an artist who died too young to reach her full maturity: the German-born dancer and choreographer, Tanja Liedtke. Charnock and Liedtke perhaps knew each other, almost certainly knew of each other. They were in many ways kindred spirits: performance for both was a way of life and movement was their language. Coincidentally, each at one point in their lives found expression for their talents in DV8 Physical Theatre. The award-winning film, Life in Movement, directed by Bryan Mason for Closer Productions, is a memorial to Liedtke, who was at the time of her death about to take up the directorship of Sydney Dance Company. At the same time the film is about what remains: the lives of those closest to her, the dancers with whom she worked and the handful of works she created.

The film begins with one of Liedtke’s earliest memories: “People used to ask what do you want to be when you’re older? I was three at the time and I said I really want to be a flower. I didn’t understand that wasn’t possible. Then I went to see my neighbour in a school concert, a really little production of the Waltz of the Flowers and they had these tutus and things on their heads and they were flowers and they were dancing and I said, oh, all these adults telling me I can’t be a flower, but I can; I’ve seen it happen.”

She died at 29, hit by a garbage truck in the early hours of the morning near her home in Sydney.

The film cuts between performance clips of her works to reminiscences of her dancers, from her family to clips of her improvising and clowning in front of the camera in her living room, a hotel room, a bathroom or a studio. There is a beautifully sinuous and playful quality to her movement, but there can also be a ruthless self-criticism, as when she slaps her face repeatedly to the refrain of ‘pull yourself together’. Here is someone whose diary consisted of fragments she would haul up from somewhere deeply anchored in her life and express in movement. Life in Movement shows clearly how these fragments wove themselves into the fabric of her work, which gave it a unique quality that was – and remains – universal. There is a clip of Liedtke that recurs throughout the film: she has a bag on her head. She is talking through the bag: “So this is all about baggage. I’m wearing it at the moment. I’m right inside it. In fact I’m consumed by it. But I have hope.”

Liedtke was born in 1977 in Stuttgart. Her family moved to Spain where she started dance classes, then moved to the UK where she was accepted into Elmhurst Ballet School. Theo Clinkard, who met her at Elmhurst, said she was an outsider from the beginning, but some grainy clips from that time show an unusually bright and creative force. Once she knew she wanted to express herself in contemporary dance, she spent a year at the Rambert School before moving to Australia where she joined Australian Dance Theatre in 1999. In 2003 she returned to England to join DV8, for whom she appeared in Just for Show as the incomparable compere and in The Cost of Living. Lloyd Newson’s comment that ‘This woman was not going to say no to any challenge” was prophetic.

Returning to Australia to work on her own choreographic projects, she gathered around her a small, unified and dedicated group of dancers (Amelia McQueen, Kristina Chan, Anton, Paul White, Julian Crotti) for whom she created her two major works, Twelfth Floor and Construct. Twelfth Floor explores forced cohabitation, how people react and deal with it, based on the eight years Liedtke had spent in various boarding school establishments. Construct is about what we construct in our lives, a journey to find a dream place, though it may not be what you think it will be. It is a lovely insight into how we go about building our lives. For Liedtke, there was no differentiation between life and dance. “Whatever is happening, you put it into your work.”

She and her partner, Sol Ulbrich, made these projects happen. Ulbrich was producer, stage manager, tour manager and rehearsal director, while Liedtke was the creative force and motivator. What the interviews with her dancers reveal is how Liedtke drew out the best in them, sometimes under duress, and how difficult it was for them to keep that sense of unity after her death. Chan, a beautiful dancer in her own right, said she had found the person with whom she had wanted to work for the rest of her life; how sad that she would never be able to work with her again. Crotti expressed the difficulty of going from someone whom he trusted with the final say to taking direction from a lot of people. He perhaps understated the case when he added it was an ‘interesting transition’. The film is honest enough to expose these and other tensions and fissures. As Ulbrich says, “What are you going to do when someone who formed the group, led the group, inspired the group and had vision for the group is no longer there?” An image, the film suggests, like a lighthouse that loses its light.

What is left is the work itself, which is still luminous. London audiences were privileged to see Liedtke perform in her own work in 2007, when her company performed Twelfth Floor at Southbank Centre (look for a wonderful clip of her performing on what looks like a small rectangle of green, her hands like hummingbirds, her body’s motion inexpressibly beautiful). Eighteen months after her death Ulbrich remounted Construct and Twelfth Floor for a final tour to share her work with those who hadn’t yet seen it. One stop was London in March 2009 and the final performance took place in Stuttgart, Liedtke’s birthplace.

Crotti said of Liedtke’s work: “As an artist, if you put all you have into everything you do, then you are in it, your story is in it. So when she left, there she was in the work. It was an amazing dedication, an amazing life that she was able to do that.” I would add that not only is she there in her work, but her dancers demonstrate to what extent her work is in them. To see the film is to be awed by the unity of inspiration and performance, of vision and execution. In the final clip from the final performance of Twelfth Floor, Chan comes back on stage through a door, climbs the wall and disappears over the top into the dark: it is a metaphor for Liedtke’s all too brief exit from a life of inspired movement.

Official trailer for the film

For information on when the film will be screened in the UK, follow the Facebook link: www.facebook.com/lifeinmovement

Matthew Bourne: Play Without Words

Matthew Bourne’s Play Without Words, Sadler’s Wells July 31

Anabel Kutay and Richard Winsor in Play Without Words (photo: Alastair Muir)

Being an avid film buff, Bourne took his inspiration for Play Without Words from a 1963 Joseph Losey film, The Servant (based on Robin Maugham’s novel of the same name), starring Dirk Bogarde as the manservant, Barrett; a young James Fox as the wealthy Peter; Wendy Craig as his fiancée, Susan; and Sarah Miles as the maid, Vera. It is a tightly structured drama with a screenplay by Harold Pinter that takes place almost entirely within Peter’s Chelsea house that is transformed in the course of the action from a damp shell into a comfortable home as Peter is transformed from its comfortable master into a decadent shell. It is a study of class barriers raped, values turned upside down and trust betrayed.

Bourne enters this territory like Barrett in the film: he knows what he wants, slowly assimilates the material and moulds it in his own image. For a start he changes the names: Barrett becomes Prentice, Peter becomes Anthony, Susan becomes Glenda and Vera becomes Sheila, but since this is a play without words, the names are not as important as the costumes (by Lez Brotherston) for identification purposes. There is however one interesting addition to the cast, the man called Speight (Jonathan Ollivier). He is listed in the program as ‘an old friend’, though whose friend is not clear. He doesn’t have a corresponding role in the film, but his function in Play Without Words appears to provide the emotional ballast (strong and assured, controlling, self-confident and charismatic) that Bourne does not invest in either Anthony or Prentice. As such Speight appears to be the one fleshed-out­ — if amoral — character in the play.

Bourne’s characters tend to be rather one-dimensional, bordering on caricature. That is part of his style. Losey’s Peter is a well-to-do, emotionally insecure apprentice of the old-boy network. Bourne’s Anthony by comparison is an emasculated character in nerdy glasses for whom we have no sense of past or present. The other characters, apart from Speight, are similarly insubstantial. Thus Bourne’s device of creating the four principal characters in triplicate multiplies but does not necessarily clarify or deepen them. Bourne had already tried this idea effectively with two groups of characters in the Brief Encounter section of Town & Country, where the only variation was in the conclusion, but with four characters multiplied by three facets, in constant but irregular orbit like thought bubbles in a comic strip, the problem is not only clarity but where to look. Nevertheless, it makes Play Without Words, choreographically, the most interesting work of Bourne’s I have seen. The first act, especially, has an integrity of its own. With the second act the thread begins to unravel and move off in other directions before it arrives at its conclusion.

Brotherston’s set looks like an illustrated London pop-up book that has not quite unfolded: squinty street perspectives with sixties’ iconic landmarks, including the Post-Office Tower and Centrepoint (plus Big Ben for good measure) rising above the horizon, three telephone boxes standing at rakish angles, a bus coming up the hill towards us, and two billboards, one for beer, the other for cigarettes. The landscape is more North London than Chelsea, but a street sign in the foreground reads Beaufort Street: at the heart of London’s swinging sixties. There are several stage levels accessed by curving staircases linked to Brotherston’s centerpiece, a revolving, see-through entrance unit that serves, among other things, as the front door to Anthony’s newly-acquired home. In front of this entrance, on the inside of the house, is a leather armchair partially covered in a white dust sheet. To the side of the stage, outside the house, is a café with more chairs and tables under covers. This functional setting, admirably lit by Paule Constable, thus seamlessly links inside, outside, upstairs, downstairs, down the road, and in the pub, keeping the various locations effectively in one place, as if we are watching a film being made on a Shepperton studio set. In terms of the play, the set effectively removes Pinter’s claustrophobic sense of space and allows Bourne to develop his own, lighter treatment of the story. The music is a jazz score by Terry Davies played with smoky intensity by Michael Haslam, Sarah Homer, Mark White, Steve Rossell and Justin Woodward.

In the dark as the show begins, we hear sounds of city life, street activity, and a lone trumpeter poses against the top railing of the staircase playing to the night sky, waking up the neighbourhood (it’s really Mark White in the orchestra pit). Downstairs a man lies across the arms of his armchair and two other men snap their fingers to the jazz. There are others too, though nobody is as yet defined. Someone arrives at the door; if you know the story, you might think it’s the new manservant, but it’s only the estate agent handing over the keys to Anthony who has by now identified himself as the new homeowner (Adam Maskell, Christopher Trenfield or Richard Winsor). There is activity, too, across the road at the café: the patterns of two men flirting with two girls at the tables.

A second Anthony has just had a shower and rushes into the living room girded in his towel. Glenda, his fiancée, arrives in tripartite glamour (Madaleine Brennan, Saranna Curtin and Anjali Mehra). The telephone rings. One Glenda plays with Anthony as he answers. What the other two were doing I didn’t notice. A third Anthony materializes, and all three Anthonys and their respective Glendas leave by the stairs and descend seamlessly into a sixties’ happening just around the corner. Speight, whom we recognize as the trumpet player, mocks and humiliates Anthony on the dance floor in front of his fiancée(s). Anthony is browned off but is incapable of responding. In rare unity of spirit, all three Anthonys put the coats on all three Glendas and return home to light each other’s cigarettes and dance three duets in which all Glendas are standing and two of the three Anthonys are engaged in floor play. After some elementary skirt groping and a goodnight kiss, the Glendas adjust their barely ruffled skirts, put on their shoes and earrings, and leave.

Anthony snoozes on the armchair and is woken by three men looking distinctly shady. It is the new manservant, Prentice, divided into three (Daniel Collins, Alastair Postlethwaite and Neil Westmoreland). Bourne makes fun of his own convention by making Anthony think he is hallucinating. Anthony is joined by his two alter egos and the three masters show the three prospective menservants around the house. To the striking of cymbals and a handshake, Prentice is hired.

Bourne now adds to the already complex patterns by introducing the new maid, Sheila (played in duplicate by Anabel Kutay and Hannah Vassallo), who is actually the sidekick and lover of Prentice. The music picks up a few beats with her arrival, as she is a live wire. Speight seems to pick up too and assaults the stairs with the agility of an acrobat attacking an obstacle course, slides down the bannister, grabs his trumpet and kicks the furniture on his way out.

Anthony enters in his underwear to a Davies/Bach air. The juxtaposition makes it sound and look like an advertisement (Y-fronts and classical music were a seminal combination in Bourne’s early Spitfire). Bourne makes a symmetrical vignette of two tailors dressing two of the Anthonys in bespoke suits, one being dressed on the same musical rhythm as the other is being undressed. This is what Bourne does so well: abstracting action into its component parts and putting them back together in comic combination. A similar vignette in which Prentice hands the newspaper to Anthony in his armchair and puts on his slippers becomes a slick acrobatic routine, impeccably carried out.

Meanwhile, the third Anthony is having a shower and arrives in his towel as Sheila makes an entrance. In the Losey film, there is sexual tension in the scene where Sarah Miles brings the bare-chested James Fox his breakfast in bed. Bourne defuses the sexual tension by having Anthony cover his nipples. Everyone laughs. This is also trademark Bourne: the urge to giggle when the sexual temperature rises, as if the spirit of Kenneth Williams is on hand to send up the moment. We see it again in the second act seduction of Anthony by Sheila on the dining-room table. In Losey’s film it is an erotically charged moment; in Bourne’s version, Sheila’s foot inches along the table toward Anthony’s hand like a famished caterpillar.

One of the maids sits on the trolley and is wheeled off; another is sorting the washing as Glenda marches in imperiously. She is refurbishing the new home but her haughty manner has evidently raised the hackles of both manservant and maid. Whatever Glenda brings into the house, Prentice or Sheila moves or removes behind her back. Sheila puts on a record: ironically, the theme music to Housewives’ Choice by Eric Coates. Prentice sets about cleaning the house as Sheila wraps streamers around the bannisters in preparation for the forthcoming house-warming party. Prentice dances a Hollywood number over the furniture until Glenda reappears and abruptly changes the music. She is in a foul, condescending mood. She drops her coat impetuously on the floor, pointedly places a vase of fresh flowers on a table and complains about the dust. Anthony appears in his new suit, and tries to calm Glenda’s nerves. The guests arrive, with drinks served all round. Anthony reappears in a dinner jacket, out of place amongst the ultra-trendy guests; everyone ignores him. Speight arrives and slaps everyone heartily on the back and starts dancing with the girls. Anthony is about to make a speech but nobody wants to hear him. He has a funny dance with a woman who seems to have a fixation on him, and then makes a fool of himself by launching into a seriously uninhibited sixties’ number. Someone organizes a game of charades and then blind man’s buff in which Anthony, of course, is blindfolded. It is the one poignant moment of the evening as he follows the rules of the game that his guests play at his expense. While Anthony feels his way around the room all the guests leave quietly by the stairs, Speight seduces Glenda, and only Sheila is left on duty, whom Anthony finally finds and gropes. Glenda is outraged and leaves the house to the sound of a cat’s hiss and followed by the trajectory of her vase of flowers. The audience shuffles out for a drink.

On our return, the television is on. It is an episode of the Avengers. There have been eleven murders in six months…Prentice descends the stairs with a drink in his hand, smoking, looking at photos with the relaxed air of the new master of the house. He switches the channel to the horse racing. Glenda rings the doorbell, but Prentice doesn’t move. She rings again and he goes angrily to the door and sends Glenda packing. The location changes to a bar in The Salisbury. Bourne creates a digression here, using Losey’s scene in which Peter considers picking up a pretty girl in a pub as an opportunity to comment on the sixties’ gay scene, with reference to Basil Dearden’s 1961 film, Victim, in which Bogarde also stars.

Back at home, Sheila in an oversized tennis sweater and Anthony in pajamas are eyeing each other around the dining room table. We see Glenda call from the phone box outside, but Anthony doesn’t pick up. A thunderstorm breaks as Glenda leaves the phone box and bumps into Speight. Three Speights seduce three Glendas while the two Sheilas – one now lying on the dining room table and the other on the stairs – prepare to seduce Anthony, who pours a glass of water and leaves the tap dripping (as in the film). The drip becomes a musical motif accompanying the smooth saxophone line throughout the seduction. Anthony is clearly in two minds, but Sheila is not. This is the moment her foot reaches out to his hand on the table, which makes everyone laugh. He places his hand on her leg; her arm is like a serpent reaching for his face. Anthony submits, while the other Sheila descends the stairs and another Anthony appears. As the first couple reach climax, the second couple starts their lovemaking, watched by the first Anthony. The second Anthony throws his glasses away but then can’t see his Sheila very well and breaks off to search for them on the floor (laughter). At the moment of climax the first Sheila returns.

It all gets a little confusing here. Everyone is making love in a raucous, rhythmic turmoil punctuated by climactic trumpet blasts, and then silence. A trumpet solo, like a reveille, follows the silence and Speight is the first to wake up; he has been sleeping with Glenda on a mattress on the floor. He gets up, gets dressed and leaves. Glenda wakes up. Two Anthonys run in chasing after the two Sheilas. Prentice appears and sees with some satisfaction what he has unleashed. Anthony, in shock, thinks he is still in control and orders Prentice to do something, but the latter doesn’t react. Instead he lies down on the recently vacated mattress and reads. Anthony is incensed but ill equipped to reestablish his authority. Class revolution breaks out on the stairs to an appropriately swashbuckling music. Bourne turns this into a comic rout until a truce is declared. The three Prentices are now in control above stairs and, as the entrance/stair unit revolves, we see the three Anthonys cringing below. The doorbell rings. It is Glenda. She puts her arm round Anthony but he breaks away when he sees Prentice together with Sheila and then sees Speight (where did he come from?) kissing Glenda. Prentice is now sitting in the master’s seat. The Sheilas arrive with bags. Everyone is running, but are they coming or going? The trumpeter returns to his initial spot and blasts a tune to the sky while Anthony remains inert on the soiled mattress.

By Bourne’s own admission, Play Without Words is one of his ‘most unique and unusual pieces’. It is also unusual in that it was commissioned by Trevor Nunn at the National Theatre for a season that encouraged experiment: Bourne allowed himself to take risks, to try something new. ‘Unlike any other dance company in this country’, he states rather disingenuously in the program, ‘everything else I’ve done has had to make its money back.’ Is there perhaps a part of Bourne ‒ one of his tripartite souls ‒ that admires his accomplishment in Play Without Words and senses his commercial success might have moved him further away from what he had shown he was capable of doing? And what might that individuated soul be thinking on the opening night of Bourne’s new Sleeping Beauty?

Lost Dog: Circus diptych at the Almeida Festival

Lost Dog, It Needs Horses and Home for Broken Turns, Almeida Theatre July 28

Anna Finkel and Chris Evans in It Needs Horses (photo: Benedict Johnson)

The Almeida Theatre has a stage like the apse of an old, disused church with stripped plaster walls that adapts perfectly to the circus ring of Lost Dog’s It Needs Horses with its wooden boarding in a semi-circle around the perimeter, beautifully lit by Jackie Shemesh. A rudimentary trapeze hangs to one side. Because of a last minute injury, Sita Ostheimer is replacing Anna Finkel. She has had only one day to learn it all, but at least she knows her partner, Chris Evans. Only weeks before they were performing as a couple in search of an idea in a lighthearted work, Accompany, for the Hofesh Schechter evening, In Good Company.

Drum roll. Cymbals. Lights up. Nothing. Ostheimer is standing on the trapeze as if she has been left there overnight, dressed in a rather seedy grey body suit with shiny, silver embroidered breastplates and crotch, a feather headdress and a rather mangy tail. Her face is painted white, her haunted eyes smudged black by tears, and her mouth enlarged by more than one application of lipstick. Evans, the ringmaster, in slightly better state, stands below her in the ring in yellow and red jester tights, white tee shirt and bowler hat (both costumes pulled lovingly out of an old circus bin by Holly Waddington) looking at his partner with a measure of contempt and futility, his shoulders bowed by impending defeat. His bearded, white face and expressive black eyes urge her to perform. Her eyes plead with the audience: she can’t get down. She whimpers a few notes of a song and Evans takes off his hat for contributions. Laughter, but no money from the crowd. He puts his bowler back on and helps Ostheimer slither down from her perch. The band starts up, and they begin a surprisingly energetic music hall routine as if on automatic, playing off each other’s rundown state until she falls. He continues dancing, trying to heave her back into action as part of the routine, kicks her to the music, pulls her, but she’s out for the count. Rushing to fill the ever-widening gap between expectation and fulfillment, the grim Evans tries juggling his pirate knives and apples, bungling both. He mimes in quick succession smoking a cigarette, fishing for the big one and steering a car, which he drives, and then reverses, over Ostheimer’s body, still to no effect. His last fragment is swimming, but the game is up. He offers his hat. Nothing.

Turning his attention back to Ostheimer, he runs his finger down her tail and miouws. He sits her up and feels her zipper. He unzips her enough to pull off one shoulder of her costume. As excited as he is inspired, he sits behind her and manipulates her hands like a puppet to caress her own breasts and thighs, then gets carried away by rubbing her crotch with animal passion. Aroused, she wakes up and hits him in the chest and then as they both get up, kicks him in the backside. All kinds of energy are beginning to flow. They struggle, the band strikes up again and they vaguely remember where they are. Continuing their routine to a crackly, slow foxtrot, she jumps in his arms but he tries to undress her more. She hits him again, knees him; he has his arms round her neck: a real catfight. She pulls his tee shirt off and thinking this might be the moment he pulls his tights down to his knees. His white Y-fronts look as if they have been washed rather too recently. Both parties catch their breath as they take stock of the situation. Whatever is going on has less and less to do with a desperately failing circus act and more to do with laying bare the emotions coursing behind the makeup and costumes: the frustration, the sexual energy, the passion, the madness, the fading dream.

Ostheimer takes the initiative, coyly slipping off her tail and launching into a sinuous display of unbridled libido as Evans remains rooted to the spot playing a muted mouth trumpet to her undulations. Her act really gets going, mouth wide open in animal abandon with associated guttural sounds, hands all over her body, her tongue on fire. She pulls Evans down on all fours and energetically humps him from behind with appropriate vocals. Ever the opportunist, Evans offers his hat for contributions. Nothing. He knocks her over, picks up one of his knives and puts it to her throat. He must regain control of his act, but she is all he has. To a simple musical theme that grows in emotional intensity and orchestration, he gets her running around the ring like a horse, to which he responds as ringmaster cracking his whip and whistling. He launches into a solo of excitement bordering on abandon, then joins Ostheimer jumping exuberantly around the ring though she is beginning to look and sound exhausted. She stops and won’t continue. He threatens her with the knife, but she is beyond being threatened. She walks off and he remains in the centre of the ring, letting the knife drop at the beginning of a final fitful dance of frustration leading inexorably to collapse.

It Needs Horses, conceived and directed by Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer, won the 2011 Place Prize. It is performed here as part of the Almeida Festival with a second, consecutive work, Home for Broken Turns, which is conceived, directed and choreographed by Duke himself. It is, in Duke’s own words, a work in progress, though more advanced than the day before.

There is no program for the evening, so we are left to figure it out. First is the transition: a trio of girls (Lise Manavit, Ino Riga and Solène Weinachter) clean up the knives and apples and assorted clothes from the ring to an ethereal banjo score (by James Keane); they dismantle the perimeter boards, stacking them neatly at the back. On a bare stage a fourth girl (Laura Pena), dressed to look older in country clothes of a distinctly Latin American flavor, plants herself authoritatively centre stage, legs apart, cigar in mouth, calling incessantly and distraughtly for ‘Anna’. The other three girls, similarly dressed, unfold two sun chairs and seat a skeleton in one with a bottle of wine. They then unroll a black road with a white-painted centre line along the front of the stage. This is the link to the outside world. Ostheimer stumbles along this road like a ghost, still in her costume. Perhaps she was making her way here at the end of It Needs Horses, but she doesn’t seem to recognize the place and passes unnoticed: the three girls are too involved in their wild harvest dance to look up. She returns from the other direction, crosses the stage and is gone again. The sound of an approaching bus catches the girls’ attention, bringing them expectantly to the side of the road with a begging bowl, speaking French and Spanish. No luck. The girls berate their imaginary customers, asking one after the other for money, a bus ticket, or a pen, while the cigar-smoking, gap-toothed matriarch – we’ll call her Mama – at the back keeps a constant eye on the proceedings. A gentleman evidently asks one of the girls if Anna lives there. No, désolée. One girl expresses frustration bordering on madness, the second girl comforts her, and the third is just pulsing with pent-up emotion. After the bus has gone, Ostheimer walks by again. Is she Anna? It is not clear, but we will assume so. There is a cockerel on a tall pole in the yard to which Mama prays in forcefully pious Spanish. One girl plays distractedly at riding a horse, a second drives a car that crashes. Another bus stops, but nobody gets off. Mama says life is like a shit biscuit and each day we eat a little bit of it, then she collapses from lack of food and a loss of hope; two of her girls try to revive her, turning her upside down and throwing her to the third, but Mama slides down her body to the floor. Anna drifts back along the road like a vision, and this time the girls grab her and throw her in the direction of the matriarch, who has a catatonic fit in voluble Spanish and the vision is carried off just before another bus arrives – this is a busy thoroughfare. Mama says I’m sorry, Papito veni, but with a gesture of resignation, picks up a chair and the bottle of wine and settles at the back. One of the girls barks, which sets off the pack of girls barking at passers by (where did they all come from?), and when they aren’t barking they’re smiling and begging for coca-cola, a fag or bubble gum, raising their skirts, and offering their favours. Two of the girls dance a desperate duo while the third moves sensuously, practicing the tongue gymnastics we saw in the ring earlier. This is evidently where it is all learned, the school of desperate performance. The girls monitor each other’s progress and success, both of which seem limited. Mama is now drunk and breaks up the party. The girls pretend to ply the skeleton with drink and wrap its bony arms around Mama: a macabre variation on the dance of the dead to a ghostly piano variation on the Pink Panther theme. The skeleton’s arms smack her backside then grab her from behind, doggy position – another image we have seen earlier in the ring – until a roaring, throaty climax. One of the girls removes the skeleton and takes Mama back to her chair; a second rehearses another dance of seduction while a third, hands gripped and fingers tense, dances on one leg. Anna is back again, and this time the three girls follow her in a reverential line on their knees, hand to ankle, but they can’t keep up. On Anna’s return Mama finally greets her, kisses her, hugs her. “Anna?”, she asks. Anna kisses her and retreats. The girls look to where Anna left, then gather up Mama for a ritual peasant dance to an earthy drum rhythm.

Graduation time has arrived, and one of the girls is chosen to dress up. She puts on her headdress, and slips out of her jeans and top into a costume exactly like Anna’s. How do I look?, she seems to ask, proudly. She leaves along the fateful road, another graduate on her way into an uncertain world, and meets Anna coming in the other direction. They stare at each other. The desperate cycle is completed, and repeats.

After seeing It Needs Horses, there is a sense that Home for Broken Turns is related (if only because the Ostheimer character reappears in it) but the stylistic relation is more difficult to see. Going from one to the other is like going from the structural tautness and poetry of a Beckett play to a narrative in a nineteenth century novel, of which most is in a foreign language with a high level of emotional distortion. The first has coalesced as a form, has found its particular place and character, and is complete in itself, while the second is still searching for its identity, like the characters themselves. Home for Broken Turns is for now an emotional outpouring of an imaginary precedent for an uncertain future, a bringing together of past, present and future in an inflammable alliance of passion and despair: a vibrant, gutsy performance in search of its true form.