Royal Ballet: Metamorphosis: Titian 2012

Royal Ballet in Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, broadcast live in Trafalgar Square, July 16

Minna More Ede, curator of the Metamorphosis: Titian 2012 exhibition at the National Gallery, had a clear idea of what she wanted – if not what to expect – when she suggested a collaborative project with the Royal Ballet, but I am not sure the Royal Ballet did: there are three paintings, three artists, three composers, three dances and seven choreographers.

The idea for contemporary artists together with a group of choreographers and composers to collaborate on three dances in response to three paintings by Titian was, as the French say, géniale. The three paintings – on display for the first time since the 18th century – are Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon, and the Death of Actaeon. The voluptuous, vengeful Diana, goddess of the hunt and of the moon, is common to all three.

The exhibition is a delight, full of colour, humour and poetry. Chris Ofili’s paintings on a theme of Ovid are stunning, and his stage setting for Diana and Actaeon is a forest of bright colour and luscious forms. Mark Wallinger’s voyeuristic meeting with the bathing Diana makes us all Actaeons peeking into forbidden territory, though this Diana cannot see us and is sufficiently constricted within her locked bathroom not to do us any harm; we survive the confrontation though not, perhaps, the stigma of peeping. Conrad Shawcross has refurbished an industrial robot once used in the manufacture of cars to be his Diana, with lightning rod eye carving out a pair of antlers. It takes a little adjustment to associate this with the Titian paintings, but that is the beauty of such an experiment: one never knows where it will lead. There is an excellent film of the dancers in rehearsal but apart from the piano excerpts in the film, we do not hear sufficiently from the composers – Nico Muhly, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Jonathan Dove (with librettist Alasdair Middleton) – to bring their contribution into equal focus.

So how does all this response to Titian, so enticingly displayed and suggested in the exhibition, translate into the choreographic works? Dance is an ephemeral medium, so the effect of choreography has to fuse all the elements together immediately. Whatever program notes there may be, or however volubly a choreographer may talk about his creative process, it is ultimately the completeness of what we see on stage that counts.

All three works focus on the story of Diana and Actaeon. Titian’s painting of the banishment by Diana of the pregnant Callisto was ignored, which has something to do, perhaps, with the all-male creative team. It’s a bit of a mystery how these fourteen artists were matched into three teams, and how they developed their collaborative ideas within those teams. The principal metamorphosis seems to have come from the visual artists, who ran with the idea and came up with four distinct ideas (Wallinger’s Diana locked in her bathroom was for the exhibition only). The composers provided a vital, expressive link between the artists and the choreographers, though it is not clear who was negotiating these interactions and at what point in the process they started. Since this is a choreographic project, however, it falls to the choreographers to bring together the various inputs and ideas in the final collaborative metamorphosis to be presented on the Royal Opera House stage. The seven choreographers are Will Tuckett, Jonathan Watkins, Liam Scarlett, Kim Brandstrup, Wayne McGregor, Alastair Marriott, and Christopher Wheeldon.

Only the Shawcross/Muhly/McGregor/Brandstrup collaboration on Machina offers a work that has a cohesion of elements from beginning to end. Muhly’s lovely score situates itself in Titian’s sixteenth century Venice, Shawcross’s robot is programmed to the movement of the dancers through data transmission – right up McGregor’s street – and in using Carlos Acosta, Leanne Benjamin, Edward Watson and Tamara Rojo, the two choreographers have an appropriately contrasting and expressive quartet of principals. Costa and Watson appear to represent two qualities of Actaeon, and Benjamin and Rojo two qualities of the goddess Diana. Costa’s opening duet with Benjamin is a sinuous and powerful coupling, with his bull-like body dominating her, his arms wrapping around her vulnerable form, sometimes gentle, sometimes forceful, but never forced. Their qualities contrast with the Shawcross Diana, though Rojo’s steely-black presence hints at that implacable, don’t-mess-with-me side. Watson’s Actaeon is more innocent that Costa’s, more inquisitive, and more likely to get into trouble. He wants to melt on Rojo’s Diana, but she won’t melt. Costa’s solo and his duet with Watson are other conspicuous moments, but there is a lot of movement from the ensemble that seems to escape both the music and the scope of the work.

Wallinger’s idea of surprising Diana in her bath was an idea worth pursuing, but for whatever reason, its challenge was not taken up. His analogy of the moon landing works well for the set, but the team of Wheeldon and Marriott don’t seem to have followed it through; they have rather superimposed their own interpretation of Titian’s paintings on the moon landing idea, as if trying to pull Wallinger into their own orbit. Trespass is thus a muddle of ideas and inputs with an interesting mirrored set, a jazzy score by Mark-Anthony Turnage and an all-too familiar vocabulary of contemporary classical ballet in body tights, pointe shoes and swept back hair. Nehemiah Kish and Stephen McRae are the two Actaeons, though they could be two squeaky-clean brothers, and the two Dianas – Sarah Lamb and Melissa Hamilton – look like twins. This narrowing of the dramatic possibilities inherent in Titian’s light and shade, his nuanced poses, the passion of the flesh and the destructive force of Diana’s fury are rather lost in this etiolated space drama.

The Ofili/Scarlett/Tuckett/Watkins/Dove/Middleton team’s Diana and Actaeon presents Marianella Nuñez as Diana and Federico Bonelli as Actaeon, though the mythological story of Titian’s couple has been reinterpreted here as an on-again-off-again love duet with a mordant ending. The Chris Ofili backdrop is beautiful, sensual and colourful: not a world of arabesques, extensions and classical mime – a point lost on the choreographers and, needless to say, an opportunity missed. As the curtain rises, Nuñez stands with her back to us in a long robe and red bonnet, almost unidentifiable, a cross between Carabosse and the Firebird. One painted root rises, Nuñez leaves, and Bonelli walks out in purple with a quintet of dancers as his pack of hounds, their puppet heads a little too small to be effective (but wonderful in filmed close-up). He commands them like servants, in classical mime: Go! And there in the giant, Freudian-symboled forest he performs a solo straight out of Royal Ballet’s book of princes. Where is the princess? Nuñez is in red, so we can see her in discreet abandon, bathing in blue light. Four lines of nymphs protect her (no such lines in Titian). Bonelli arrives, and Nuñez is not happy: she screams, then jumps into Bonelli’s arms. Titian is scratching his head. A pas de deux follows with a square of nymphs close by. Nuñez puts her hand to Bonelli’s eyes, then pushes him away and mimes No, then ends up in his arms being lifted: more partnering, a love duet. She bourrés, he runs off like a distraught prince. Nuñez has a brief respite with her nymphs, cogitating in the undergrowth with wrapped arms, looking sexy and disdainful. Arguably she is aroused by Actaeon’s uninvited gaze, but has to balance that with her role as keeper of the virgin nymphs. No double standards here, but inner confusion nevertheless. Her water nymphs are rippling in her defence. Bonelli returns. Who knows what he’s been doing amongst the steamy plants. Move aside, I see her, he commands. He lifts her on his shoulders, puts her down, slides her. No no, she says (lift). They are reaching their climax and embrace. Exit Bonelli, while Nunez walks around again with her nymphs, deliberating, arms crossed, hands either side of head, feet expressing a no no no bourrée (but so beautifully). No wonder Bonelli keeps coming back – as he does now – but that’s the danger. She backs up; she’s made up her mind: no no (hold me). More lifts; she is sitting on his shoulder. She is mad, there is one more lift and then she throws water in his eyes. The nymphs run in diagonals then a circle; he lifts her again, and pirouettes to the floor. His dogs come in. Bonelli looks worried. His dogs mistake him for a stag (though they have to have imagination because he has no antlers) and are at him. The pack jumps, kicks, swings. Bonelli jumps with them; part of his costume comes undone (flesh ripped and hanging off) and he falls. He gets up: arabesque! Turning his back, crumpling to the floor, he dies a dramatic death. Nuñez is triumphant, gesticulating and undulating over him, which momentarily wakes him up before he slumps to the ground for good. She turns in a perfect arabesque, and walks forward as in a funeral march, asking in a final gesture, what have I done?

It is a question the choreographers of the last two works should ask of themselves, for whatever metamorphosis had previously taken place has in their hands metamorphosed back into standard ballet vocabulary and gestures taken from the Giselles, Swan Lakes, Sleeping Beauties, Balanchines, from the princes and princesses, from the court and its attendants. It is as if the Royal Ballet has drawn Titian into their mould and squeezed him dry.

I saw the performance not at the Opera House but at the live broadcast in Trafalgar Square. The camera can get close up to the dancers, which is like having the best (if not the most comfortable) seat in the house, but you are subject to the eye of the cameraman, and if he wants to follow the women, then the men simply vanish from the stage. The broadcast is also susceptible to technological hiccups, of which there were one or two, but otherwise the performance transmitted really well.

At the end of the screening, the girl sitting next to me on a BP poncho offered me a glass of red wine (thank you), something that could never have happened in the Opera House. Cheers.

Royal Ballet’s Birthday Offering, minus the occasion

Royal Ballet: Birthday Offering, A Month in the Country and Les Noces, Royal Opera House, July 4.

Sitting in the stalls is a completely different experience from being on my usual perch in the top of the upper circle. The orchestra sound is emphatically full, and there is enough light from the stage to see the notes I am scribbling without overwriting them. When the curtain opens on Sir Frederick Ashton’s Birthday Offering, I feel I am on the stage; seven couples enter the ballroom to a Glazunov waltz in a grand elliptical curve. From here they are fourteen people dancing rather than the fourteen figures dancing one sees from the upper circle. The facial expressions are clear, too, and there is one face that is not smiling during this grand opening, standing out like the proverbial sore thumb. The ellipse becomes two lines, the men behind and the women in front – the cream of the Royal Ballet’s ballerinas, please note. At least, that was the idea behind Ashton’s ballet: a party piece for the leading ballerinas to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the company, and there were seven in the original cast: Elaine Fifield, Rowena Jackson, Svetlana Beriosova, Nadia Nerina, Violetta Elvin, Beryl Grey and Margot Fonteyn. The Royal Ballet as of this evening has ten principal women, with one on maternity leave. Nine into seven doesn’t go, and Zenaida Yanowsky is dancing the lead role of the next ballet, but there are four principals missing from the present lineup (Marianella Nuñez, Alina Cojocaru, Leanne Benjamin, and Lauren Cuthbertson), three of whom one might have expected to see in this particularly show-off work. Their places are taken by three first soloists, so the whole nature of the work has shifted: the proud party piece becomes a challenging exercise without a celebratory occasion.

The challenge for the dancers is not only in the steps. In creating Birthday Offering, Ashton worked closely with each of his ballerinas, moulding steps to their respective technical abilities and responding to their individual characteristics in order to show them off in their best light. It is effectively an intimate portrait of the seven ballerinas with whom Ashton worked in 1956; it is not a portrait of the seven ballerinas on stage this evening, who are dancing the portraits of the seven original ballerinas. So however well they dance the steps, they do not have the confidence that the variations are tailored for them; they can shine, but they cannot show off.

After the seven couples repeat the opening mazurka, the women leave and the men walk elegantly to the back of the stage to watch the variations, the very core of this work.

Yuhei Choe dances the first variation, originally created on Elaine Fifield. Choe has above all a refined, delicate quality, and an ability to turn, notably in a sequence of a quick turn to the left, then a turn to the right followed by a double. Laura Morera enters backwards on pointe to begin the second variation, created for Rowena Jackson, a vivacious and smiling performance, bright and fast. Sarah Lamb assimilates the qualities of Svetlana Beriosova in a generous offering of beats, balance and renversé turns ending with the lovely, expansive gesture of offering to the audience. Roberta Marquez, who stood out in the opening for her dynamic épaulement, is full of exuberance, shining in the spirit of Nadia Nerina’s fourth variation with ease and warmth. She finishes the variation calmly in arabesque. Hikaru Kobayashi has control over some difficult adage steps in Violetta Elvin’s tricky fifth variation, but lacks sufficient juice this evening to mould them together seamlessly. I sense Helen Crawford has an affinity with the spirit of Beryl Grey’s pizzicato variation: she has a strong, dramatic quality, a quiet jump, and executes the piqués and difficult beating steps brilliantly.

The men now disappear, signaling the arrival of the ballerina of the ballerinas, Tamara Rojo, who bourrées in like a doll – a teasing reference by Ashton, according to Zoe Anderson’s program notes, to Margot Fonteyn’s weak feet. Rojo has the assurance of the prima ballerina, but is quite business-like, generous but constantly monitoring her own performance. We know if she is doing well, and we also know if she knows she is doing well. She takes an expansive bow and looks back at the audience as she walks off, her last classical variation for the Royal Ballet.

The men reemerge in a mazurka, with Federico Bonelli taking the lead once danced by Michael Soames. He is barely stretched by the series of double tours, pirouettes and beats.

In the grand pas de deux – a presentation within a presentation – Bonelli and Rojo begin with a shaky, almost nervous grip. The violin must have caught the same chill for one brief moment. Bonelli partners Rojo in barely supported bourrées on a diagonal. She has a perfect poise and balance, but looks this evening as if she is working at it, so the overall impression is not as open as one would like.

To the final music, the ballerinas arrive with their respective partners, first Choe and Morera, then Kobayashi and Marquez, Lamb and Crawford. Rojo enters on her own path from the back, like an entrance from one of the classic ballets, and joins Bonelli and the other six couples for a grand, smiling finale.

When the curtain opens on Ashton’s adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s play, A Month in the Country, Julia Trevelyan Oman’s wonderfully detailed period design, lit beautifully by William Bundy, sweeps us instantly, actively into the Yslaev home; the choreography has started before anyone has made a move (the effect is the same with Oman’s design for Enigma Variations). A footman (Sander Blommaert) serves drinks. On stage right, Natalia Petrovna’s husband, Yslaev (Christopher Saunders), is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper, and their son, Kolya (Ludovic Ondiviela), is sitting writing at a desk behind his father. On stage left, Petrovna’s admirer, Rakitin (Gary Avis), is lounging on a divan at her feet engaging her in idle conversation, and the Yslaev ward, Vera (Emma Maguire), is at the piano in an alcove. The music is by Chopin, admirably played throughout by Kate Shipway in the orchestra pit. As we look at the stage, the active protagonists of the story are on the right, and the passive victims on the left. All the introductions are made in those first moments and the scene is set: provincial life at the country house, languid, slightly bored. The maid (Sian Murphy) enters, and curtsies. She invites Yslaev out into the garden. He crosses the room to give his wife a kiss on the forehead and leaves by the patio doors at the back of the room. Petrovna (Zenaida Yanowsky) gets up from her divan impatiently, unable to contain her emotions, launching into a spirited, lyrical dance that is both flirtatious and sensual. Rakitin, unsettled and unsure of the source of her unfamiliar emotion, tries to forestall it by taking her hand and kissing it, bringing the dance to its conclusion. It is now Vera’s turn to dance her own emotions on the same musical variation, a young girl with huge spirits, on the verge of womanhood, with dreams of love. Maguire, who looks the part, and for whom the role seems tailored, expresses it all with natural grace and joie de vivre. Kolya watches her until she finishes sitting in Yslaev’s empty chair, dreaming, perhaps, of being mistress of her own house one day. Yslaev returns, fussing over having lost something. Everyone starts looking for whatever it is, roused by the physical contact, bumping into each other, stepping over Kolya who is on all fours, lifting each other out of the way. It is like a delightful game to relieve the building tensions. Only Petrovna and Rakitin seem uninterested but they soon join in and it is Petrovna who locates the keys and Yslaev leaves once again.

Kolya lets off steam, his boyish sense of fun expressed in a playful dance, juggling and bouncing a ball. The lace curtains flutter in the breeze as a premonition of the storm about to burst on the family: the entrance of the new tutor. Beliaev (Rupert Pennefather) appears at the open door with a kite he has built for Kolya. He is tall and elegant, with blonde hair and a moustache, but looks as if he has been over-exerting himself with the kite, as there is a weariness in his face and in his demeanour. He salutes Petrovna, Vera blushes, and Rakitin, who is still trying to piece together the puzzle of Petrovna’s recent capricious humours, eyes him with disdain. Petrovna engages Beliaev in conversation and the latter responds with dance language that has all the suppleness and romance that Rakitin lacks. The arabesque is used to beautiful effect, a purity of line emerging from the surrounding turmoil. Petrovna does not watch but notices every nuance. Rakitin leaves abruptly on some pretext, leaving Petrovna and Beliaev to dance together to a polonaise, evidently cherishing the moment. Vera comes in and immediately joins in the dance with Beliaev, while Petrovna disengages, collects herself and observes Vera’s innocent love bubbling over. Kolya joins in, making everyone laugh, and all four dance together, searching for the relationship each craves. Beliaev shows off in the heat of embarrassment and attention, while Petrovna is carried away by her feelings. All but Petrovna leave, and the applause is well deserved not only for the performance of the four characters, but for the clarity and emotional power of the choreography.

Rakitin returns, sees Petrovna alone in a flush of emotion and checks to see if the tutor is anywhere nearby. He takes her shoulders from behind, a gesture Petrovna misinterprets as that of the returning Beliaev. Her reaction encourages Rakitin to continue his amorous pursuit and to share in her aroused state, but once she realizes her mistake, she will have none of it. She goes through the movements, but without a trace of passion. She breaks off. Rakitin stubbornly or perhaps desperately redoubles his efforts, frustrating Petrovna more. On hearing the footsteps of Yslaev they break apart, but entering the room, Yslaev sees his wife out of sorts and wonders what is wrong. Rakitin reassures him it is nothing and escorts Yslaev into the garden. Petrovna leaves and Kolya, the one who is innocently unaware of the storm descending, runs in from the garden and rushes around the room with his kite and out again into the air, a beautifully eloquent choreographic moment. Vera arrives, evidently in love, and Beliaev, noticing Vera, quickly checks to see if Petrovna is around. Vera offers herself to him for a kiss. Dancing together, Beliaev tries to keep her occupied and happy, going through the actions as Petrovna had just done with Rakitin, but Vera sees his involvement as acquiescence to her wish. As the duet becomes more entwined, we know Petrovna is going to arrive at any minute. Vera gives Beliaev a hug, and he puts his arms tentatively around her.

Petrovna sees this as she enters in a serious, overwrought, dramatic state. She lectures Vera, but Vera is naive, and head over heels in love. She admits to Petrovna her love for Beliaev, kneeling in front of her and crying on her lap. Maguire’s emotional power here is utterly convincing, bringing tears to my eyes. Petrovna, however, is moved differently; she is aghast, and slaps Vera’s face. Vera runs out into Rakitin, who is clearly reeling from the events that have overtaken his tranquil, if slightly unusual way of life. Have some tea dear, no come for a walk, he seems to say to Petrovna: anything to get her out of the house. They step together – the Fred step – out into the garden. Beliaev appears, clearly exhausted. He sees Rakitin and Petrovna walking arm in arm in the garden, and sits in Yslaev’s seat, musing on his fate. Another complication is about to arrive in the form of the maid, Katia, with a basket of raspberries. We see her outside the window with the footman, who thinks he is on to a good thing, but once she sees Beliaev, the maid pushes the footman away and rushes to flirt with the tutor, feeding him raspberries one by one. They dance together, in more peasant mode, to a polonaise. Sian Murphy is ecstatic and shows it. Without any unwelcome interruptions, the dance finishes; she picks up her basket of raspberries and runs off, leaving a pensive tutor to dance his heartache, beautifully expressed in his body and arm movements. Petrovna arrives, unseen. She approaches Beliaev and pins a rose to his tunic, then backs away as if to leave. Now it is Beliaev who takes her hand to stop her. This is the beginning of their duet to the Andante spiniato, all emotion and interlocking arms, hands searching each other’s bodies, lifts with opening legs and skirt flying, elongated lines and willing submission. She melts in his embrace. She pulls away; she goes to kiss him, then changes her mind again and runs to the garden door. He stops her, gently bringing her back into the room in a series of gliding bourrées on shallow diagonals down stage. She responds and they embrace, his head resting lovingly on her chest when Vera rushes in and the dénouement begins, to Chopin’s Grande Polonaise.

She separates the couple, and calls everyone in, openly accusing Petrovna of leading on ‘her’ lover, Beliaev. Petrovna denies it: Vera must be crazy. Vera accuses her of lying, but Petrovna shrugs it off as fanciful, dancing distractedly between her husband and her admirer. Unable to contain her deception and anger, Vera rushes from the room, followed by everyone but Rakitin and Beliaev. Rakitin points to the flower in Beliaev’s lapel, at which Beliaev has nothing to say, and Rakitin understands what he has to do. It is the one moment in the ballet where Ashton resorts to conversational mime. They leave the room together and Petrovna returns alone, aware of the speed at which her life is unraveling. Yslaev comes in and tries to console his wife, partnering her briefly in her fraught steps until she faints in his arms. Rakitin and Beliaev return dressed in overcoats and with packed bags and say goodbye to a non-plussed Yslaev; Kolya is bewildered and angry at the imminent loss of his tutor. Beliaev looks back for Petrovna but she enters too late to see him go; she dances a final, anguished solo, powerful in its simple choreographic structure, but it proves the one weakness in Yanowsky’s performance: adept at masking her emotions in the presence of others, she is unable in this most private moment to let them go. As she cries on the back of the chair, Beliaev returns, unseen, takes her trailing dress ribbon and kisses it. She doesn’t notice. He wants to say something but can’t. He takes the flower from his tunic and casts it on to the floor beside her and rushes out. She sees the flower and picks it up, runs to the door, but too late. She lets drop the flower that once symbolized Rakitin’s love for her, then her love for Beliaev, as she walks forward lost in her own loss. “Surely it is possible to love two people at once?” she asks in the play. “… I don’t know, though . . . perhaps it only shows one doesn’t love either.”

Ashton’s choreographic action follows the structural pattern of the play: short lines of dialogue, full of detail. The only long passages are Beliaev’s four pas de deux with Petrovna, Vera and Katia. Ashton has cut from the play any characters and situations that are not essential for the telling of the story, and that cannot be translated clearly into choreographic language. Oman’s design and the music of Chopin complete this unity to perfection.

Bronislava Nijinska’s choreographic setting of Stravinsky’s Les Noces closes the program. Created in 1923 for Diaghilev’s company, the abstract, ritual wedding festivities make for a stark and rather incongruous contrast to A Month in the Country, but Les Noces is, in its own right, a powerful work. Its geometric construction and grounded, massed choreographic language, as well as its percussive score, make it unique in the ballet repertory. It is also an unemotional work for those dancing: Nijinska did not want expressive faces, but expressive body shapes, and the power of the work derives from the ensemble working rigorously and harmoniously together. The designs of Natalia Goncharova are simplified, abstracted architecture that serve to enhance the primitive rituals of the four tableaux: Consecration of the Bride, Consecration of the Bridegroom, Departure of the Bride, and the Wedding Feast. Ryoichi Hirano is the stoic bridegroom, and Christina Arestis as the bride has just the right enigmatic look that seems to convey the mystery and fear of what she experiences, without attempting to express it. Indeed, there is no room for personal expression apart from Nijinska’s calculated movement. There are some weaknesses in the performance. In the second tableau, none of the men seem quite sure where to look, so their ensemble work lacks its maximum force. There is also an unevenness in the men’s physical engagement with the grounded leaps: to keep on the music, the form in the air is sometimes incomplete, and the dynamics not sufficiently brutal to convey the primitive nature of the ceremony. There is one curly-haired dancer – I wish I could identify him – who is clearly giving it his all, and is a pleasure to see. Les Noces is a work that demands such total concentration and dedication from everyone. The third tableau is beautiful, and during the fourth the ensemble really begins to work as one, finishing the work on a magical high.

Dance GB: Olympic fever

Dance GB, Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich, July 6, 19:30

From the press release: The UK’s three national dance companies – Scottish Ballet, English National Ballet and National Dance Company Wales, will perform together for the first time in an Olympian inspired program featuring three specially commissioned works from leading contemporary choreographers.

In a parallel project with sixty young dancers from Scotland, England and Wales, three separate but related works involving both dance and parkour have been created in their respective countries and spliced into a heartwarming film by Nic Sandilands called Dancing Parallel which is shown at the beginning of the evening.

The setting in the big tent at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich is more like a large Punch and Judy show, with a faded blue velvet curtain drawn across the broad stage with a space above for a giant puppet master. In front of the tiered seating is a carpeted area for audience members to sit on pillows, blankets, inflatable mattresses or cushions. The tent flaps of the main entrance let in plenty of light, even when closed, but when the film starts it is just dark enough.

We see a hand reaching down to retrieve a partially submerged, wooden school chair out of the water and a young Welsh boy runs with it to a deserted building where he sets it down on a stone floor as a pommel horse and dancing partner. Welcome to the art of the sport of parkour. We see the boy’s legs, arms and torso arching over the chair during his routine, and when he finally sits, the camera pulls back to reveal his face. Cut to a windswept expanse of beach at low tide near Aberdeen. A boy gathers a chair from the wet sand and takes it to join his friends who have found similar chairs, which they form into a choreographic obstacle course on the beach. Cut to inside a dimly lit concrete basement, where these same friends put on a dance performance (choreographed by Emma-Jane McHenry and Lorraine Jamieson) for an audience of empty chairs. Cut to the same space with all the kids sitting in the chairs watching an empty space. Cut to an industrial, dockland warehouse in east London. The now familiar wooden chairs are bobbing in the water and a hand fishes them out one by one, passing them up a line of kids on a metal stairway into a vaulted brick space. We see the kids assimilating their dance movement phrases (choreographed by Laura Harvey, Danielle Jones and Hayley Arundel) then performing them all together for another audience of empty chairs, to the sounds of squeaking rubber soles. Cut to a close-up of an eye, that of the Welsh boy at the beginning. A fully expressed, sometimes wild and always poetic dance with chairs follows, choreographed by Jem Treays to street accordion continuum in the old NatWest Building in Cardiff. It begins with simple seated moves in unison, followed by a passage of movement around and over the chairs, then the kids lay them down, and a couple of boys dance with the equilibrium of the chairs on their feet. The performance is interrupted by the sound of an intruder; all the kids scatter to the recesses of the abandoned lobby. One hopes they will all have the courage to return to continue their dance.

I scoured the program for evidence of a clear mandate for the creation of the three commissioned works by Scottish Ballet, Dance Company Wales and English National Ballet, but if there is one, it is not elaborated. Christopher Bruce is unique in proposing to celebrate the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee together, and his Dream “is also a celebration of the sheer enjoyment of highly physical movement in all its forms.” For Martin Lawrance, choreographer of Run For It for Scottish Ballet, “The Olympics – like any live dance performance – challenges and celebrates an individual’s physicality and mindset. How do you just push that effort? How do you get to the next step, and the next, and the next? And if that ties into Einstein’s vision of dancers as God’s athletes, it also connects into our own lives whatever we do. You just have to get out there, run for it – and hope to win through on your journey.” Itzik Galili was more elusive when asked what the link was between the Olympics and his work for English National Ballet, And the Earth Shall Bear Again: “I feel like I am in the Olympic Games, just being in such a company!…2012 is a year of many beginnings, with potential for new world records…To me, it’s like the earth having its birth again.”

The work takes its title from one of the pieces for prepared piano by John Cage, composed in 1942, that Galili has used as his inspiration. There are various recordings, with a range of percussive tones, but the one used here by Boris Berman is more athletic than most and the amplification for this performance gives a particularly bass, almost distorted tone. Other works by John Cage used by Galili are Prelude for Meditation, The Perilous Night (4 & 6), Primitive, 3 Dances for prepared piano (excerpts), A Chance Operation, and Three Dances for Two Prepared Pianos, Dance #1.

Outgoing artistic director of English National Ballet, Wayne Eagling, intended to make Galili’s work the final offering on the program, as performed in Theatre Royal, Glasgow and Cardiff’s Wales Millenium Centre, but for technical reasons here in the tent it has been put first. Reading in the program how Galili uses light as a choreographic tool, I wonder where the lighting is going to come from as I don’t see any sophisticated lighting rig in the tent and there is evidently no fly tower. When the curtain slides open, the mystery is solved: designer Yaron Abulafia’s rig is an integral part of the stage design, some of the more sculptural elements being in plain view. I can see why you wouldn’t want to be setting this up during an intermission.

The stage is filled with atmospheric fog and we are immediately drawn into the murky darkness. What Abulafia has created is remarkable: a theatrical black hole from which dancers emerge into the light, or recede into latency at the will of the lighting designer and choreographer. As our eyes search for familiar form, we see the back of a dancer, too indistinct to know if it is male or female. This figure backs towards us into the diffused, triangular downlight, one fifth position at a time, the feet as closely spaced as the keys on a piano. The costume (designed by Natasja Lansen) is androgynous, worn by both male and female dancers: a black, transparent, sleeveless, net jerkin with its hem barely covering the buttocks. Legs and arms are bare, and reflect the light, while the torso absorbs it. The figure emerging from the mist is Esteban Berlanga. On the first brutally amplified note of Cage’s score, a girl walks across downstage from right to left. A line of dancers cross in the other direction, like a keyboard advancing across the stage, leaving a dancer in the centre with Berlanga, duplicating his movement. The line returns, sweeping away the first dancer and leaving another in her place. Others arrive; there are six on stage who are then joined by another twelve to complete the full complement of eighteen. The percussive nature of the score lends itself to fierce physicality and staccato movement. On two consecutive notes a girl jumps and is caught in the boy’s arms, like two pieces of a puzzle locking together, a movement repeated five times with five other couples. The limbs, because they reflect the light and are used in exaggerated extension, are the principal elements of the dance. Faces are not revealed as clearly, adding to the effect of a gesticulating forest of limbs emanating from mobile trunks. The girls are on point, accentuating the already attenuated lines. The movement is predominantly linear, launched in all directions, so when Nancy Osbaldeston pulls off a beautifully controlled multiple turn, sculpted to perfection in the light, its spiral form takes the breath away. If there is a sense of the title in the movement, it is this emergence of form from chaos.

If the energetic, athletic movement is a constant, Galili modulates it with a succession of male and female duets and trios – although the ultra-flexible movement of overextended legs and arms common to both male and female dancers blurs the sexual distinction – and with interesting dynamic juxtapositions: a mass of movement pauses leaving one girl dancing alone. Towards the end, Berlanga returns to a solo after which he is engulfed once more in the vapour from which he emerged, and a girl walks quickly from left to right across the stage. In the end is the beginning.

In Christopher Bruce’s Dream, the opening is all heart and amateur athletics from a bygone era: a tug of war, egg-and-spoon races, wheelbarrow races, leap-frog, three-legged races and sack races, overlaid with the sound of children’s excited voices. One couple takes a tumble and gets back up to continue the fun (they do it again later, so it’s not an accident). The backdrop is divided horizontally into two sections. The top three quarters is black and the bottom strip is white. All the races take place in front of it, giving the impression of an early home 8mm movie being spooled from one side of the stage to another. Guy Hoare’s lighting adds a touch of faded yellow to the action to complete the effect. This is Bruce looking back on his first memories of the celebrations and street parties for both the 1952 jubilee and coronation the following year, the only work on the program to anchor itself in a specific time and place. As the opening music finishes, one man is caught half way across the stage in his sack race; a poignant moment, as if the era had suddenly passed and he was unsure where he was going. After the festive events of the day, all the participants are standing in the street looking out at us – the future – dreaming of a better world.

The black backdrop descends, covering the white filmstrip: this is the real thing, set to the last movement of Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. Bruce takes simple body moves like stretching, running in place, rubbing shoulders, wave patterns and cartwheels as phrases that will be developed throughout the work. Four boys enter, good sports running around, practicing sprint starts, then joining together, arms around the waist, walking forward towards us. We hear a crowd roar at the scoring of a goal. The men run off, and Camille Giraudeau enters, her long red hair accentuated in the circle of light. To the rhythm of the introductory phrases of Ravel’s Boléro, Gaudreau shakes out her feet and legs. Such disarmingly natural movement makes this over-familiar music fresh again. Four other girls join, each performing a different exercise that develops into dance movement. Gaudreau, with Ravel, repeats the opening phrases, and the five girls dance together in a beautiful, musically precise, off-balance variation. The boys return; a duo of kicking and boxing morphs into wrestling and deliciously into a waltz before another boy breaks it up. Two girls are joined by a third in a bowling motif, after which they link arms and swing their hips as they sway upstage. Four boys play football; the girls lie on the ground in a circle kicking their legs in the crawl; two boys fence and shake hands; a basketball gesture becomes a dance phrase with more swinging hips, then a duo enters skating, in an inevitable reference to Torvill and Deane’s gold medal performance at the 1984 Olympics. Two boys sprint across the back to the trombone solo. A trio of two boys and a girl, then all six girls build the physical complexity of the dance with the music, though Bruce pulls back to repeat that opening phrase once again. The javelin throw is followed by a group of four men in a marathon walk, handkerchiefs on head, which develops into a brilliant canon of girls who then pose while the sparky Naomi Tadevossian performs a lightning solo, leading the girls into a line. Now four men jump and a team of oarsmen cross the stage, two girls spin, the four men hurdle and the crescendo culminates in a triple black flip to a rock solid gymnastic pose, arms raised in celebration. There is applause, as the Boléro has ended, but there is an epilogue, to Grace Williams’ upbeat second movement from her Penillion, Allegro (and how) con fuoco. The men and women return to the street sports, to the sack races, the egg and spoon races, the three-legged race (the couple falls again), wheelbarrow races, and leapfrogging. In a final fling, eggs are tossed – and caught – before the street party winds up and the participants resume their opening positions in the dusk, looking dreamily out and up at the audience. Dream is full of heart, infused with a sense of humour and a nostalgic sense of sportsmanship without being soppy, and not so literally sporty as to be imitative, but rather celebrating the proximity of sport and dance.

Martin Lawrance’s Run For It is aptly named and with a score like John Adams’ Son of Chamber Symphony the wind is behind the dancers, blowing them along relentlessly. There are apparently subtle quotations from the Olympic sports though I only noticed the swimming gestures. It is is a very musical piece, though because of Adams’ pace and because Lawrance seems to have choreographed most of the accents in the many layers of music, the dancers have to maintain an inexorable momentum to keep up. As in Galili’s work, the movements of men and women are equally athletic and supple, with the girls on pointe, though the speed-enhancing costumes (by Yumiko Takeshima) clearly differentiate the sexes. The slow movement provides a respite, musically and choreographically, with a series of duets and trios with swapping partners on contrasted sequences – one lifting, the other turning – to the same music. Arabesques and deep lunges flow nicely with lovely lines, the technique is clean and the rhythms bright, but aerial shapes are less interesting. When four men lift one of the women, she appears (perhaps understandably) more manhandled than partnered and her shape is lost. Once the men have put her down and left, she recovers in a solo to deserved applause before the finale kicks in. A man’s flying entrance heralds a succession of energetic entrances but the movement vocabulary begins to run low on inspiration and the energy seems to flag, though the dancers regain their control of the score supported by what sounds like an entire farmyard of instrumentation with an energizing dose of percussion. By the time the rapid marching band of cymbals starts up, all the dancers are on stage, finishing in a tight group, with one man circling around them and dancing off at a tangent into the wings; a winding down, as in the music.

The sculptural stage design by the 2011 Turner Prize winner, Martin Boyce, incorporates a Greek column to remind us of the origin of the games. The column, which commands a good portion of the stage, supports a roof of interlocking, transparent forms like a collection of identical 1960’s white lampshades. Indeed, the lighting (by Charles Balfour) is diffused through this honeycomb ceiling, lending it various suffused shades of red and blue. Its height from the stage – perhaps a function of the tent’s limited vertical space – tends to press down on the dancers and Adams’ music belongs to another era and another kind of landscape: an odd contest in which there is no clear winner.  

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Palermo Palermo

Andrey Berezin as the boxer drag queen in Palermo Palermo (photo: Laurent Philippe)

It’s the wall. It’s the long-limbed elegant women in high heels and colourful printed summer dresses picking their way over the rubble and dust with handsome men in white shirts and black trousers attendant on their every whim (and there are many) carrying café tables and chairs like a corps of waiters. It’s the church bells and the power of black in the languid streets. It’s the figure of a boxer turned drag queen with a bloody eye who comperes the event from his dressing room just this side of a passageway between stage and wings. It’s the ripe tomatoes, and the sensuous hint of skin beneath the dresses. It’s the promise of spring when the cherry blossoms descend but may not last forever and the cycle of a feather blown across the stage and caught precisely in its fall. It’s the proud, dazzling machismo dancing in the streets. It’s the light of day flooding the scene, the glimpses in the sunlight of a life lived fully in the streets, passions flaunted and hung out to dry, and the shadows of taunts and twisted arms, drugs and jealousy (even the violence is funny and beautiful). It’s a (not so mangy) dog sniffing among the rubble to find his own picnic: movement of a very different kind. It’s the music: no formally-dressed classical choice, but songs of the street, love songs, songs of the people, of the heart, but it’s also Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto played by six pianists on six upright pianos side by side. It’s the irrational, the irascible, the overflowing of passionate argument like wine spilled from a glass and as unresolved as a revolver pointed at any number of human targets and never fired. It’s the rubbish pitched in the street with such beguiling charm by a cohort of dancers. It’s the beauty of every gesture, the refinement of every passion, the joie de vivre of every smile. It’s the arms, especially of the women, loose and long and supple, winding like tendrils around head and hair and body. What is it like to drown? What is the feeling of being buried? What is it like to be shaken from your passion by an earthquake?

Earthquake or psychological release, the breezeblock wall that fills the entire proscenium collapses in what must be one of the most dramatic openings of any dance theatre work. The beautiful Julie Shanahan stumbles over the rubble gesturing wildly while the sultry voice of Billy Holiday sings Why don’t you do right? Two men run in and lie Shanahan down. ”Pick me up.” “Damiano! Take my hand! No not like that! Hug me!” She pushes him away. Another man brings her a bag of earth that she tips over herself: burial, self-effacement, the promise of spring. “Bring me a chair!” (He does). “Take my hand!” “Fernando!” “Go!” (He does). Both men return with a bag of overripe tomatoes from the market. “Throw them at my face!” (They miss) “In my face, I said, in my face!” she screams. “Hug me. Take my hand”, but she pulls her hand away. “Take me off!” (They do). The tomatoes slide to the floor from her stained and clinging dress. She is smiling. Church bells ring and men are scrambling over the ruins as they begin to clean up.

While bodies are laid out and other victims reenact their escape, an elegant Jorge Puerta Armenta in a cross between a priestly red garment and butler’s tails brings in a table with wine and glasses. He rings a glass like an angelus bell and the victims rise again and walk off over the rubble: faith, resurrection, communion. The church bells ring for a full ten minutes; we are soaked in the cultural dominance of the Catholic faith.

If the mayor of Palermo asks you to create a work about his city and you insist on including the pervasive mafia and the drug trade, how do you do it? Dominique Mercy walks past a girl and stops, without turning round to face her. The girl kicks him up the backside twice, and he drops two packets of white powder on the floor. Not enough. She kicks him again, and Mercy reaches for another packet from his inside pocket and drops it. Not enough. Another kick, another packet, this time from inside his shirt. Two more kicks and two more packets from his right sock, then two more from his left sock. We all laugh, but the point is made.

Supported by her four sons, a widow dressed in black makes her way over the rubble towards a man. Stopping in front of him, she takes a bottle of water from one of her sons, opens it between her thighs and holding it there pisses the water on to the floor, waggling the end up and down with a bob and a hitch to finish. Keeping her eyes on the man, she gives the bottle to her son and the four men escort their mother back over the rubble.

Journalist, raconteur, cinematographer, choreographer; Pina Bausch is all these things, and her dancers are as much her material as they are the source of her information and imagery. During the initial, preparatory visit to Palermo Bausch and her dancers scraped away the superficial to discover the deeper urban strata, to develop an archaeology of the culture and mores, to collect impressions and sketches from daily life and to relate chance encounters. Bausch would then assimilate and sort these impressions by asking questions. Dominique Mercy, a dancer with the company for over 35 years and co-artistic director since Bausch’s death three years ago, explains the process to Sarah Crompton in the program: “What was important for Pina was to have our reactions and our impressions as soon as possible. It was sometimes a bit difficult for us because sometimes we thought we needed time to get more sensation and flavor from the place. But for her it was important to be confronted with things straightway.’ She would ask ‘complicated questions, or simple ones. And then we tried to respond with a little scene or with words. When she wanted movements out of the questions she would say so very clearly.’ It is this idiosyncratic questioning that is the catalyst for Bausch’s choreographic process and it is the answers that form its raw material. The answers are then filtered and distilled through the bodies and voices of her dancers on to the living stage, so by the time the work is complete, the initial reality of a scene may be four or five times removed. Palermo Palermo lasts two hours and twenty minutes, so there has been an enormous amount of distillation and filtering that gives the work not only a cubist – rather than surreal – quality, but its rapid transitions from one scene to the next, the torrent of impressions and images, the juxtaposed viewing angles and multi-faceted approach give it a distinctly cinematic flow. Bausch has this unerring ability to focus our attention on the smallest details as much as on the movement of the entire stage.

An elegant Japanese woman brings a chair on to the stage and sits at a café table. Palermo is a café society, so she is one of many taking an espresso in the morning overlooking the street, but we do not see the others for this is a close-up shot of a ritual divorce to the plucked strings of the koto. The woman removes her wedding ring and ceremoniously swallows it with a sip of coffee, then repeats with the engagement ring. A single espresso is all it takes.

The sonorous voice and powerful persona of Christiana Morganti with her wonderful monologue on the spaghetti that is hers and hers alone, effectively eliminates any other stage detail.

At other times the lens pulls back, revealing the entire scope of Peter Pabst’s inspired design. The collapsing wall at the beginning is an obvious and dramatic example, but later a line of girls do handstands against the back wall in their tee shirts and underwear, a colorful line of symmetry and grace, except for the one who can’t manage upside down at all. It is a delightful moment of pure farce. At another point the cast bombard the same wall with apples, extrapolating the dynamics of the body to that of projectiles.

If there is one overriding theme in Palermo Palermo, it is love: self-love, the need for love, the expression of love, the love of food and power. There is also an erotic charge in many of the scenes, heightened by the beauty of the dancers and the costumes. The statement in the program that costume designer Marion Cito ‘persistently explores the delicate balance between elegance and the everyday, and ensures that the company’s appearance remains colourful and sensuously rich’ is an understatement. The costumes clothe the body in a way that undresses it as much as dresses it. At the beginning of the second act, Regina Advento has a blue ball that she launches into the air from the lap of her red dress in which she catches it again as she runs, like a childrens’ game. The contrasted colours against her dark skin are already beautiful, but how free and erotic is the image as her dress rises into the air as she launches the ball. Advento then ups the erotic ante by changing into a tight-fitting black dress under her red one, hopping through this convoluted procedure with grace and knowing expertise.

Another woman takes out a pair of underpants from a plastic carrier bag and puts them on under her skirt then shakes a bottle of carbonated water and looks coyly at the audience as she twists the top. We can hear the fizz in the silence.

Waving a coloured boa, Andrey Berezin paces affectedly in his corner dressed in a fox stole, black trunks and high heels, while in the cleared space the dancers compete with one another in couples with total abandon, one idiosyncratic movement phrase at a time, replacing their competitor with the touch of a hand. The dresses move beautifully around the dancers, heightening the intensity and the men are on fire, especially Rainer Behr.

There are also elements of pure violence as when Berezin enters from his dressing room in a red silk boxing gown, sitting down to cut a piece of flesh from his forearm and cook it on the upturned iron. He eats it, and does it again. The audience is stirring uneasily. “C’est déguelasse,” I hear behind me. Shanahan in a stocking mask with a gun in her hand sits on the floor and points at whomever she wishes.

One can sense the end. The images and stories of Palermo give way to two processions, as if a travelling troupe is packing up after the show and rolling out. Cherry trees in blossom descend from the sky, slowly, beautifully. The stagehands take them down and undo the ropes that attach them. Two lines of dancers with an apple on their head gently sway towards us, arm in arm, to the sound of a village band playing Verdi. They exit and reappear crossing the stage from left to right in pairs, in a measured, repeated hopping phrase to a rousing finale of bagpipes. Red sand is cascading in streams against the sky. Once the procession has passed, a man tells the story of the fox and the geese. The fox has been fooled into allowing the geese to pray before he eats them. There is nothing he can do but wait until the geese are finished praying.  Ga, ga, ga, ga, ga. It is a story without end.

As we absorb the intricate layers of images and sounds, colours and senses, ideas and absurdities, we discover not so much Palermo but Bausch herself in all her mysterious, brilliant complexity.

Laïla Diallo: Hold everything dear

Hold everything dear, Laïla Diallo, ICIA Bath, May 26

The ability of the theatre to transport us somewhere else, the footloose, peripatetic lifestyle of artists, ideas of migration and dislocation, and the state of arts funding are all present in Laïla Diallo’s Hold everything dear, although it is not about any one of them: it is only framed by them, like a play within a play. The richness of the meaning is in the unity of the complete work.

Since March, when the initial work was presented at the Linbury Studio Theatre as a new dance commission, Diallo has been planning to extend the work into a full-length work but she and the dancers have only two weeks together at Bath University’s ICIA to stage those ideas and shape them. Why only two weeks? The tight schedule is partly to do with money – Diallo is stretching the grant money for the project as far as it can go – and partly to do with developments in the creative process that were not conceived at the time the initial grant was submitted. Nevertheless, Guy Hoare has been revising the lighting for the last four days, dramaturge Chris Fogg has been involved on and off for the last two weeks and the musicians arrive just the day before. Time may be condensed but there is clearly an experienced and brilliantly creative team on hand to deliver.

Diallo has said that she only choreographs what is close to her life, and Hold everything dear draws from her experiences of traveling as part of a dance company and in her own right as a dancer/choreographer and her learning about the effects of war zones on refugees and hearing stories of displacement. Given this background, it is no surprise that Diallo cites as a primary inspiration John Berger’s book of dispatches on survival and resistance, Hold Everything Dear – primarily its Ten Dispatches About Place. It gives the work a political undertone that is not evident in the performance, but has clearly influenced Diallo’s conception of the work:

Every day people follow signs pointing to some place that is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others for business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose. [1]

As people come into the theatre, they see the cast on stage in relaxed freeze frame: standing, sitting, or lying down, staring at the floor or into the distance, as if they finished in these positions at the end of the last show and are recharging for the next one. The heartbeat is a single note on an accordion, breathing in and out. The place is indeterminate, many places superimposed on each other:

I imagined, Diallo writes, a stage that could become the end of a pier for a moment, then a station, a void or a home – a stage that might suggest all those places at once maybe, a space where solitudes would find a heightened resonance and where individuals, their stories and emotional worlds might collide expressively.

At a given moment, everyone except for the figure that remains covered with a raincoat on the floor changes into active state to prepare for the performance: Jules Maxwell pushes the piano into place and tunes it, Helka Kaski sweeps up the pile of polystyrene snow from the stage and scoops it into an old-fashioned suitcase; Seke Chimutengwende picks up his cards and puts them back in order. Theo Clinkard unwinds the string of lights from the porter’s trolley and stretches it across the front of the stage. Chimutengwende puts his suitcase on the empty trolley and wheels it away. Gabi Froden (of Foreign Slippers’ fame) is limping towards a chair in one high heel shoe to put on the other one, while Diallo takes the raincoat off the figure on the floor and puts it on herself. Chimutengwende begins a sales pitch about the benefits of a holiday in the sun, standing on his soapbox of a trolley, but his voice is in competition with an increasing volume of recorded music and we only see his mouth and gestures continue as Wu wheels him off. Finally the figure on the floor wakes up to find she is bound up in luggage tape, herself a piece of luggage. Letty Mitchell struggles out of the tape and stands up, but her knees give way and she falls to the floor. She tries to stand again but faints; Kaski is nurse, supporting her, wiping her brow, trying to keep her upright. This disparate group of people, joined by outer circumstance as much as by inner connection, is at once the performer and the performed. Over the course of the evening they reveal their individual selves in their dances and gestures, in their music, and in their relations with each other, but their presence here is dictated by forces beyond their control. As John Berger writes of the former Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte near Calais and the Channel Tunnel:

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear, and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof. [2]

Froden sings the first line of a song in her rich folksy voice, and the dancers begin to cross and re-cross the stage together like a broom, always leaving someone or something behind in their wake, to be swept up in the next time across. Through such images of displacement, temporary residence and the detritus it leaves behind, Diallo portrays her ideas, not to be read as in a book, but to be sensed: frailty, insecurity, a search for home. As she writes, ‘It is an attempt to convey something about leaving, arriving, letting go, holding dear – an attempt to say something about being forever in transit or in a state of waiting.’

Everything moves, in and out of the light, which also moves. People drop in and drop out of the group, form pairs and remain for a time in each other’s arms, then walk away. There are also moments of solitude and calm reflection, as when Diallo walks to the end of a makeshift pier carrying her shoes; you can almost feel the breeze in her face and hear the gulls. She breathes deeply and looks into the distance as Chimutengwende sings a hauntingly beautiful acapella version of I get along without you very well and Clinkard dances an intimate, introspective, inside out solo. Across the stage, four dancers offer their hands in a mutually supportive group; they lean on each other, pull, and counterbalance:

the pledge of offered arms, the single sheet that is our common walking
the map of the palm held
in a knot
but given as a torch [3]

Something disrupts the group; Diallo is the first to walk away. Mitchell and Chimutengwende follow her, leaving Clinkard by himself. Diallo dances a beautiful solo in two opposite directions not knowing which way to go and as she backs up into the piano, Maxwell plays a children’s tune. Everyone is drawn in to the music, accompanying with their own instruments: a band of traveling musicians. Even the piano is traveling. Dancers and musicians pair up, beginning a slow, intimate waltz. Chimutengwende breaks away; he is claiming his travel points and is on his way to Hawaii. Mitchell gives him a pair of sunglasses, places a lei lei around his neck and wheels him around the stage to the piano that doubles as a bar. He is relaxed and downs a cocktail, happy to have escaped his humdrum job and to be close to the beach: the illusion of a holiday when all that we wish to escape is still in our baggage. Mitchell, Diallo and Clinkard carry three muslin clouds suspended from fishing rods over Chimutengwende’s head and follow him around until he exits, we imagine, to the beach. The three forecasters sit down with their back to us, gently wafting their clouds up and down until the storm passes. On the other side of the stage, Kaski is nurse once again, trying to support and encourage a constantly shifting group, but she can’t manage to keep up their spirits or their bodies.  She herself succumbs as they fall one by one, leaving only Mitchell standing alone.

Meanwhile (and there is a lot of meanwhile in this environment), Froden begins to haul in the lights along the front of the stage until they are now wound round her arms, making her face radiant. Kaski’s group has recovered, puts on shoes and begins to dance a conversation, huddling together, clasping arms and hands, dispersing and then running into each other’s embrace. They all break off to sing their songs of homeland, and to reminisce. Kaski lays down polystyrene stones on an imaginary path so she can find her way back;

Our poems
like milestones
must line the road. [4]

Chimutengwende takes a plant from his suitcase and places earth around its roots, while Mitchell sits with her battered suitcase, lost in thought. In a beautiful light, Kaski launches into a precariously off-balance dance like a willow in the wind. We see her hands, her face and blonde hair as accents in the dance, as she sinks and rises up, retiring gently into a dimming light to sit on the floor with a bench behind her, staring into the distance. Diallo is the first to step up on the bench and open a suitcase of polystyrene snow on Kaski’s head, a blinding white light falling on her. Mitchell follows with another, then Clinkard with a third, as Kaski lies in the white pile of snow, yearning for the light of home.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance that separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience. [5]

The lights dim and a last waltz begins. Everyone dances the same movement sequences but at their own pace. Froden captures in her voice both the transience and the wistfulness of the moment: Hold everything dear till the sky is clear. The song disintegrates and the dancers disperse to the back of the stage. Clinkard walks to the front and passes Diallo circling in the opposite direction. In a flash of recognition they clasp hands and cling to each other, dancing a tango as their comrades approach and clap in accompaniment. The couple breaks apart and comes back together, pushing and shoving as if in the middle of an argument. Chimutengwende and Mitchell begin to dance a slow waltz together but the tensions between Diallo and Clinkard overpower their fragility. Clinkard leaves her on the bench, and immediately falls apart. He turns to Kaski and Mitchell who offer him faltering support. Chimutengwende reads his set of cards, one at a time: “For fear, for hope, for love…” answering the question of why we move around so constantly and what we hope to find. Mitchell is falling again, and as she rolls on the floor she becomes entangled in more tape, watched impassively by all the others. Wrapped up and waiting to be shipped off again…or preparing for the next performance?

the yearning to begin again together
animals keen inside the parliament of the world
the people in the room the people in the street the people
hold everything dear [6]

Diallo spent eight years in Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance, so you might expect her style of movement to have been influenced by his, but this is not immediately evident. What Diallo seems to have picked up from McGregor is more the creative approach to which she contributes her own issues and sense of movement. One might also expect each person in Hold everything dear to be quite distinctly delineated in such a diverse assembly, but there is a homogeneity in the choreographic language that suggests the hand of one person, Diallo herself, although the unity of the group is also a factor. The way Clinkard moves and Kaski moves is not dissimilar to the way Diallo moves, so their body language naturally forms a cohesive whole. I could imagine Mitchell having a different voice if left to her own devices, but her nature fits easily into this group, forming a unity in diversity. Chimutengwende is the extrovert declaimer of the crowd, a versatile performer and striking presence who can sing acapella sublimely with a minimum of vocal chords, and Froden’s rich voice provides in the songs much of the poignancy of the music, though she is backed up by a trio of expressive players: Grigory Tsyganov (violin), Semay Wu (cello) and Jules Maxwell (piano), who made all the musical arrangements. Clinkard contributed the subtle earthen colours of the set and costumes, which form another unifying element. The lighting of Guy Hoare is superb, telling the story as evocatively as the music and the choreographic images and Chris Fogg has had a decisive if unseen hand in shaping the finished work.

I like to think of dance,Diallo has said, as a way of communicating something of what it is to be human (Berger might well say the same about his writing)…The pleasure of being a choreographer is meeting people and discovering the route with them. What we see in Diallo’s Hold everything dear is the particular route she has taken with her fellow artists, and what emerges is a poetic celebration of the human spirit.

Hofesh Schechter dancers: In Good Company

In Good Company: New works by the dancers of Hofesh Schechter Company. The Place, June 23 at 8pm.

Last of his Act: Yeji Kim

In the dim opening light we see just Yeji Kim’s back, at the same level as the lamp, higher than we expect. As the light enlarges, we notice she is clutched to Sita Ostheimer’s torso, her arms tight around Ostheimer’s neck. We hear an electronically manipulated voice emitting globs of sound so guttural as to be close to choking or vomiting. It is the first of many disturbing juxtapositions in Kim’s Last of His Act that seem to derive from a divorce of experience and wisdom as articulated in her program notes: ‘We, women, can express our mind differently from what we really have in mind.’ This separation is expressed in a series of contrasted episodes. After a brief blackout we see the two women lying centre stage, the strong sensuous curve of Ostheimer’s hip highlighted in front of Kim’s concealed form. They embrace and mould themselves to each other along the musical line of a distorted cello migrating to synthesizer: Apocalyptica to early Pink Floyd. Joel Harries’ sound comes in thick layers, wrapping the movement in an almost suffocating embrace from which Kim and Ostheimer emerge as light to the sound’s shade or as waves to the sound’s depths; it is the sound that seems to release them or hold them in place. A powerful bass pulse shakes them free of each other and we see a dance of two frenetic, isolated individuals, their hands wide open like a Rodin sculpture. The guttural globs resume as the two women return to the front of the stage, breathless from exertion. Lit from the floor, they look out at us in the silence, prompting applause, but the women stand their ground until an ominous knock at a massive door focuses our attention once again. We hear the door creaking open on to a section of more antagonistic images and sounds: Kim gently raises the hem of her dress, peering at her sex, to applause or perhaps it is heavy rain, then portentous booted steps. Ostheimer performs the same ritual examination, placing her hands over her womb to the sound of a dog barking and snarling: fragility over violence, courage over intimidation, life over death. We hear fragments of a song in which the words ‘pain’ and ‘strain’ are distinct in the increasing cacophony that drives Kim and Ostheimer to a frenzied state. Never quite out of control – they are both consummate dancers – they manage to draw their movements closer to the body, held in tight like a seething anger. Exhausted, Ostheimer lies down in submission; Kim remains standing close to her in the dying light, but gravity and the dwindling sound undermine her will and release her finally to the floor.  ‘Sometimes’, writes Kim, ‘the free will of women can give us distance through cynicism. Conversely, this will can make us feel empathy for others’ lives, mistakenly. We question ourselves if we know them or not’.

Lukewarm and loving it: Philip Hulford

A lampstand upstage left glows faintly, barely revealing Hannah Shepherd standing next to it. A translation from Matthew 6.22-23 is projected on the backdrop: Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder, your body will fill up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and dishonesty your body is a dank cellar. There is for me an uncomfortable distinction here between advertising an idea for a performance and evangelising. The title of the work is the subject of a sermon by Francis Chan, an American Christian pastor, equating lukewarm with lack of faith, and in his program acknowledgements, Hulford cites the example and teaching of Jesus. Because there is so much ‘message’ before the dance begins, one wonders what role the dance has. Perhaps Hulford should have considered the first verse of Matthew 6, in the same translation, that contains the admonition: Be especially careful when you are trying to be good so that you don’t make a performance out of it. It might be good theater, but the God who made you won’t be applauding.

This is a rather long digression on a personal issue, but as Hulford has made it a primary element in his work, it asks to be addressed. The choreography juxtaposes the appropriately named and dreamy Shepherd, dressed blandly in jeans, a jacket and sneekers, against the dynamic duo of Frederic Despierre and Karima El Amrani, who quickly launch into a disco number fragmented by a strobe light, pushing their limits and swaying violently from side to side to a throbbing, high-decibel beat. Are they the squinty-eyed ones against Shepherd’s wide eyes, or are they the heat to Shepherd’s lukewarm? I tend towards the former interpretation, as Shepherd seems to develop confidence and conviction in the course of the work, culminating in a dynamic and assured solo to lyrics by Jars of Clay: The smile on the outside that never comes in…You break me open, turn on the light…Let the show begin. But if Shepherd develops, there is no corresponding growth for Despierre and El Amrani, which leaves the work rather one-sided and incomplete. Hence the ambiguity.

Like Hofesh Schechter, Hulford is a musician and has composed the score in collaboration with Joe Ashwin of the progressive death metal band, Stone Circle (Ashwin also plays guitar in the Hofesh Schechter band). What sounds like the electronically manipulated buzzing of a bee breaks the opening silence followed incongruously by a stubborn starter motor. A pounding, reverberating pulse underlies the first duet with Despierre and El Amrani, and Shepherd is given a quieter, more pensive treatment, though the general tone of this layered sound leaves little room for subtle expression.

No way but down: Sam Coren

A thunderous rumbling introduces the soundscape by Alberto Ruiz. We see a painting hanging in an artist’s studio, a view of sky and clouds. Perhaps it is the one source of light on this rather seedy, unhealthy interior, designed with particular attention by Kasper Hansen. We see a bicycle on a stand and then the figure of Igor Urzelai get up from bed still covered in bed clothes. He offloads them in a heap. By the look of his costume (Sophie Bellin Hansen must have had fun putting this together – and got it just right) we are not expecting a virtuoso dance. In fact there is no dance at all, unless the furious pedaling can be considered a pure form. No matter. Urzelai pedals to generate electricity to light the room, an introduction to the refreshing but dark sense of humour that pervades No way but down. Urzelai is part pirate, part vagabond. He sorts his collection of cassettes and selects rather prophetically The Handsome Family’s The Lost Soul. What an awful day, when the judgement comes. And sinners hear their eternal doom but the volume is too high for such a crappy machine (perhaps the only instance in the work where production values are divorced from the ‘reality’ of the stage). He sings along, using a bicycle pump as microphone, then breaks off to lay his makeshift table with a plastic sheet, and a large spoon. He selects a can of beans from the collection stacked against the back wall and on his way back to the table changes the ambience by putting on a recorded sound of a restaurant buzzing with activity: clinking plates, teaspoons and conversation. Tucking a newspaper under his chin as a bib, he opens the can and savours the contents. One might be forgiven for thinking of the last supper without the disciples. The spoon then takes on a life of its own: food sprays up, Urzelai’s anger erupts and he throws the can’s contents in his face. To calm down he searches for another recording: a reading (by Ben Coren, read by Jason Jacobs). Chapter two. Companionship. When you are feeling frustrated or irritable with your partner, just remember you are lucky to have each other…Inspired, he puts a waste bin inside the hood of a jacket to shape a partner and performs a grim thé dansant. More music maestro, please; but he has to pedal first to generate more electricity. He plays Graham Lindsey’s Deathtrip Blues. And soon I will be dead…another self-fulfilling choice. Urzelai shines a torch at his partner’s face, then places the light on the table and sits down for a tête à tête. Smoke suddenly appears from under the door on stage left. Urzelai lies his partner on the floor and rushes over to fan the smoke away, peeling off his outer garments (there are many) to stuff under the door. He returns to his act of creation by stuffing another waste bin in another hooded jacket (there’s a pile at the back) and introduces this second figure to the first, laying them side by side on the floor. He pauses, then thoughtfully places the sleeve of one over the torso of the other. Pleased with his work, he removes the clothing from under the door and sits inhaling the bellowing smoke: hope and the light are snuffed out together, leaving that patch of painted sky and clouds above his make-believe lovers.

I don’t know if Sam Coren has direct experience of this condition, but he has created a portrait of despair with a masterly dose of sympathy and understanding unadorned by morality. It is a movingly nuanced portrait by Urzelai, too, who is utterly convincing.

The Age: James Finnemore

A couple stands on stage in the dark. We hear a repeated phrase of three words, like dark age heart, on a score by Joel Harries, followed by a deep pulsing bass track – a common musical feature in the scores this evening. The couple is still, their faces indistinct, with their legs illuminated by a bank of lights on the floor behind them, until the overheads come up and we see their intent look. Victoria Hoyland steps back and Philip Hulford reverentially takes her hand, kneels, lets her sit on his knee, then gently takes her weight as he stands. They dance a ballroom waltz, in very small and faltering steps before disengaging, taking hands and looking out again into the audience as if posing for a photograph. Hoyland takes another position on all fours, and Hulford sits on her back. They repeat their movement sequences but more rapidly. She is now like a wind-up doll in waltz position, with arms in place for an absent partner, turning half turns continuously while Hulford walks to the centre and looks out intently once again. While Hoyland turns, Hulford dances powerfully and mysteriously in the blue light, quick and dynamic, almost manic – one of the most searing images of the evening. The music develops into a heartbeat and finishes. Hulford regains his breath and tries to express something, but he cannot speak. He is on the point of walking away from us but turns to face us in silence. Hoyland and Hulford seem unsure they should be here, as does the audience, who applauds, but it is not the end. Hulford is evidently in discomfort as he begins a dance of shell-shocked fatigue. A blackout and a new pulsing bass line plumb the depths of his being and he begins to jump in place, passing through another blackout to appear standing next to Hoyland with his hands behind his back, she with hands in front. They both walk over to the bank of floor lights that has started up again and to an upbeat, rhythmic march they dance the same elastic, powerful movements, descending deeply to the floor and rising up, accelerating and morphing into an energetic bunny hop from which Hulford disengages and walks one last time towards us with his intense gaze. The Age is a rather bleak work, but full of almost dream-like images, both still and moving, that Hoyland and Hulford so effectively portray.

Accompany: Sita Ostheimer and Christopher Evans

After visiting some of the more profound life states for much of the evening, it is a relief to bubble to the surface with Sita Ostheimer and Christopher Evans in their Accompany. The program note says simply that Sita and Chris are a couple. Onstage, they definitely are, in which case the description is redundant; so presumably it refers to their offstage status. Certainly there is a naturalness in their antics and banter, most of which is recorded. So here is a couple playing themselves with their recorded voices, performing the process of creating the work you are now seeing that finishes with its starting point like Escher’s famous hand drawing itself. It is refreshingly relaxed but its craft is not to be underestimated. We have already seen Ostheimer dance in the first piece, so it is good to see and hear her sense of fun. We see tantalizingly little dancing from Evans but what do you expect in a performance of unrealized expectations? There is no music either, as Ostheimer explains; just background sound, for which the program credits Charlie, Lawry and Ed. They have dressed the silence with layers of recorded voice, distorted voice, snatches of song and conversational snippets between Ostheimer and Evans that unify the conceptual nature of the work. There are songs listed in the credits – Damien Rice, Stephan Micus and Meret Becker – but they seem to have shared the fate of the African idea, the highway idea, the pulling-people-out-of-the-front-row idea and the speaker idea. The best idea is the idea of the work itself.

I recently attended a choreographic evening by Rambert Dance Company and it is interesting to compare the two. Both companies are giving opportunities for aspiring choreographers to hone their choreographic skills and gain experience in a performance setting with full production values. The differences arise from the nature of the two companies: Rambert has a varied repertoire by different choreographers, whereas Schechter is the sole creator, both of music and dance. Rambert has a policy for their choreographers of working with commissioned scores played live – for the most part – by an orchestra. Schechter’s dancers used three scores from two of the company’s own musicians, Joel Harries and Joe Ashwin, and there is a clear influence of the engulfing Schechtian sound on all five works. The works at Rambert were varied between narrative, abstract and psychological, whereas Schechter’s group was surprisingly narrowly focused on expressing (however well) the somber-bordering-on-depressing psychological states, notwithstanding the lighthearted bounce at the end. It would be interesting to see what the Schechter choreographers would do with an orchestral score, and what the Rambert dancers would do with a Joel Harries soundscape. Perhaps it is simply the natural process of young choreographers expressing the dominant influence of their respective companies, but I had the feeling that the young Rambert choreographers were creating in a more open environment than those in Schechter’s. What is important, however, is that these choreographic evenings continue to be supported, and that the choreographers who choose to develop their ideas will find their own voices.

Noé Soulier, Frauke Requardt, Freddie Opoku-Addaie: Existential ballet and popcorn

Noé Soulier, Freddie Opoku-Addaie and Frauke Requardt: Mixed Bill, Lilian Baylis Studio, May 29

What else to expect from a dancer trained at the Paris Conservatoire, a graduate of PARTS (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) in Brussels, with a master’s in Philosophy from the Sorbonne but an existential guide to ballet?

Noé Soulier wanders on stage in practice clothes and explains what he is about to do. The piece is called Le Royaume des Ombres (The Kingdom of the Shades), commonly associated with the most famous scene in the ballet La Bayadère, but Soulier plays on the meaning for his proposal: what is generally unseen in the ballet lexicon, divided into five experiments. “In the first, I took all the ballet steps I could find and I put them in alphabetical order, from arabesque to waltz. The second sequence is based on a distinction you can make in ballet between preparation steps and the steps these preparations allow you to do, like jumps or pirouettes. The next sequence is based on the same principle, but I applied it to an existing variation, Solor’s from La Bayadère. And then I took the same variation and changed the order of the steps. For the last sequence, I took excerpts from all the ballets of the 19th century that I could find and put them in chronological order, men’s roles and women’s roles mixed with some fabulous creatures.”

His technique is clean and precise; it has to be to carry this off. It may be conceptual work, but his body is working hard. There is no musical accompaniment that corresponds to Soulier’s balletic lexicon, so we feel as much in the lecture hall as in the theatre, and the silence heightens our attention. In between sequences he allows his ideas to sink into our consciousness, saying nothing but wandering to the side to take a drink of water. He evidently enjoys being provocative, combining a haughty intellectual rigour with a mischievous sense of humour. He goes through the sequence of preparation steps like a dancer meticulously preparing a variation, stopping at just the place where the step is about to happen. One preparation then morphs incongruously into another. He adjusts his shoe elastics: every detail is intensified in this calm dissection of the classical vocabulary. For the Solor variation, and the concise synopsis of both male and female roles in all the 19th century ballets, Soulier nonchalantly sings the tunes under his breath, dancing with such panache that we believe in the absurdity of what he is doing.

His second piece, D’un pays lointain (From another land) involves a similarly subversive approach, but his focus is the language of 19th century ballet mime. Soulier uses four dancers from the Ballet de l’Opéra du Rhin: Vera Kvarcakova, Sandra Ehrensperger, Alexandre Van Hoorde and Stéphanie Madec. If they are listed in order of appearance, the first is Kvarcakova, who demonstrates close to a hundred phrases of mime in alphabetical order from angry, afraid, baby, beautiful, to why, wicked, woman, you, without explanation or context, then again with recorded explanations. The purpose of ballet mime is of course to avoid speech, but Soulier is interested in this interaction.

Hearing this vocabulary one is inescapably drawn into the nature of the stories and fairy tales from which they derive their meaning, as if from another land. While the individual words are known today, the worldview and social context are of another era and mindset. Death by bow and arrow is a case in point. Soulier now goes a step further: Alexandre Van Hoorde joins Kvarcakova and a male voice is added to the recorded explanations, Van Hoorde following the male voice, Kvarcakova continuing to follow the female voice. Soulier also changes the order of the phrases for each voice, so there are two ‘conversations’ that sometimes overlap or comically contradict each other: ‘come, go away’. After a brief pause, the process starts again with increasing complexity: a trio, (Ehrensperger), then a quartet (Madec), with the addition of respective recorded voices. Soulier thus constructs consecutive words and phrases along the animated line of dancers, like a sentence on a page: ‘welcome, baby, I beg you, to love’ with the delicious irony between the mimed ‘baby’ and the contemporary meaning of the spoken word. Soulier now filters this vocabulary of conversation into snippets of recognizable, historical mime from Sleeping Beauty, though still with the recorded explanation: ‘Why did you forget me?.. She will grow up to be beautiful and graceful, but she will prick her finger and die… The princess will indeed prick her finger with a spindle but instead of dying she will fall into a deep slumber that will last a hundred years at the end of which a prince will come to awaken her.’ In the context of Soulier’s cerebral treatment so far, seeing and hearing this suggests the delightful absurdity of classical mime itself.

In the next sequence, Soulier removes any trace of context, and focuses on abstraction by giving his quartet a series of random phrases, which creates a line of semaphoric choreography, on top of which we hear the odd explanatory term: mother, to die, to kiss, to speak, afraid, to listen, there, to imprison, to die, to give, why? The quartet is reduced to a duet, in which the two speak the mime themselves, then Van Hoorde is left alone: ‘Protect me, come! Thank you, go away! To kill, two, go away, to protect.’ He continues in silence to the end, performing two gestures at the same time with increasing intensity, the movements taking on an individuated life of their own, beyond any recognizable meaning: an existential fate.

For those who enjoy Soulier’s subversive and thought-provoking treatment of dance, he will be back in London with his Idéographie, a discourse about the relation between thought and movement, at Dance Umbrella later this year.

While the house lights are still up after the intermission, Freddie Opoku-Addaie enters with a microphone as if he is a stagehand with a last-minute task before the show; except that Opoku-Addaie is too recognizable and too brightly clad in his red shoes and suspenders (thanks to designs by Justin Arienti) to be mistaken for a stagehand. His hair rises in front into a permanent exclamation mark, so even with his deadpan expression, you know that something unexpected is about to happen. Then Frauke Requardt enters pushing a popcorn stand, placing it downstage right. Opoku-Addaie opens the perspex hood and inserts the microphone. Then the fun begins.

Peter Hall has written that children at play have a concentration – and thus a belief – which is absolute. The only sin is to break the concentration by not believing – by not playing. Fidelity Project, commissioned for last year’s Place prize, has the air of an inspired improvisation, and neither Opoku-Addaie nor Requardt can be accused of lacking concentration and belief in what they are doing from the moment they arrive on stage; that is what is so attractive about their performance. Much of Opoku-Addaie’s work consists of game-playing and risk-taking with a large dose of cunning. Out of the blue, Requardt delivers a backhander to him, but he parries in lightning speed. She turns to hit him again, but he ducks. A tentative embrace leads quickly into a sequence where Requardt pushes Opoku-Addaie’s head down, spins him around and lifts him out of the way, placing him on the floor where he remains in shape while she wanders off to turn on the popcorn machine. There is no story to speak of in Fidelity Project, but fidelity is about trust and the work is all about the trust between these two quite dissimilar artists that is incredibly strong and precise. They perform a dance equivalent of the game of rock-paper-scissors, involving a similar skill in one partner being able to predict the moves of the other in order to gain the advantage. It is difficult to know if the sequences are choreographed or not but there is such split-second timing in some of their antics that the point is moot. It is the kind of precision that gives a thrill and hilarity to the performance. They take movement where you least expect it to go, as when Requardt grabs on to Opoku-Addaie’s wide open mouth to counterbalance his backbend to the floor. Their interaction never develops into a closeness of emotion, but remains a constant testing of these two characters who reveal the freedom with each other to perform intimately, yet with a constant deadpan distance, demonstrating the sheer pleasure of being together. And they are equally matched; she doesn’t pull punches, and he is respectful of her force. At one point she throws him, and he rolls in pain, screeching like a wounded animal, while she goes to serve the popcorn. A moment later they get back together again, and she throws him a second time, with identical results. She turns to the back wall, and when he reaches her he pins her against it above his head. She seems to be trying to strangle him from up there. He lets her down, they kiss, and she blows out her stored popcorn, rubbing his nose: the gestures of two lovers who have developed their own language and intolerance. She points to something; he looks, then she serves him a left hook. Opoku-Addaie is out for the count, as is the popcorn machine, and then the lights. Like two contestants in a tournament, Opoku-Addaie and Requardt take their bows, though there are no winners. Nevertheless, Requardt raises a triumphant arm.

CoisCéim Dance Theatre: Swimming with my Mother

Choreographed by David Bolger, artistic director of CoisCéim Dance Theatre, with his mother Madge. Lighting Design: Eamon Fox, Sound Design: Ivan Birthistle & Vincent Doherty, Video Artist: Jym Daly.

Pavilion Theatre, Brighton Festival, May 18

A green wooden bench stands centre stage with a red towel rolled up like a pillow at one end, the kind of wooden bench you might find at any municipal swimming pool, but the story begins at the seaside. White gulls are flying on a black screen and the moon rises slowly up the screen from the rolling surf of the stage while Madge and David, mother and son, arrive in the dark, he dancing at the end of her hand as if he will never stop. As they swim together on the bench, Madge’s recorded voice, as sonorous and rolling as the waves, begins her story: I helped him to swim in the sea. I was always in the water. Naturally when I had children I wanted them to swim too. They swim the crawl. David went to the pool when he was two. They thought he looked like a fish. When you’re in the water you can clear your mind of any worries you may have.

David improvises a dance on a swimming theme, watched by his mother as if she is making sure he is safe in the water, then they both lie on the bench, agelessly kicking their legs while behind them on the screen the water is splashing. A whistle blows and the indefatigable boy finally takes a break. Madge gives him a banana and wipes his hair and face, not forgetting his ears. He is in playful mood and partners his mother, wrapping her in the red towel. Madge continues: I went to dance school so I learnt a few little steps. I got the part of a little bunny rabbit but I got stage fright and couldn’t go on.

We hear a big splash, then the sound of bubbles under water. Mother and son appear like fish in slow motion dancing to the Aquarium section of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. He partners her gently by the arm, keeping a filial distance. I think of partnering my mother and it would be just like that. They come up for air and dry off, looking in the mirror to make sure the hair is just right. I continued dancing until I had babies, then my dancing days came to a little halt. David and Madge are now on the ballroom floor. They look together at something off stage, then he dances for her with an imaginary partner, abandons himself to a little tap routine in his bare feet, then offers her his hand. They dance together as he mimes the Nat King Cole song, It’s Only A Paper Moon: “It’s only a paper moon, stretched over a canvas sea, but it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” Perhaps this is what she and her husband had danced to before David’s birth. He lets her rest, does another little routine by himself and sits on the bench looking at the moon. Mother and son take hands, then move to opposite ends of the bench, facing out into the night. Some kind of rupture is in the air. He repeats a movement he did earlier, fishtailing along the bench closer to his mother. He puts his head on her shoulder and ends up lying lifeless in her arms. She stretches him out on the bench and gives him artificial respiration. Caught in the undertow for too long, perhaps, but now they are swimming again, now treading water. David’s voice: Madge took me swimming in the night, looking at all the lights in the distance. We were out quite a while, but you always felt safe with Mum. “I think I still do,” he adds with a smile. Madge has set the bench in the other direction, like a diving board, ready for his lesson. He steps up and she pushes him in. The sea scares me, he says. I get panicked about fish. I feel I’m in their world and the water freaks me out. He looks wet now with perspiration; she wipes him down. I was determined they were going to swim properly, she recollects. The wave took me way out. My husband swam but he wasn’t a great swimmer. David’s in the undertow. My husband had a problem with his lungs. He’s been dead 16 years and had emphysema at the end of his life, so maybe he didn’t enjoy swimming as much as we did. She gives David the rolled-up red towel in which she has hidden a gold medal. He finds it; one of his perhaps, but he puts it around his mother’s neck. Nat King Cole sings Unforgettable and he dances with her. It is her music but their dance: time is stretched over two lives, wrapping them up together. “Never before has someone been more unforgettable in every way.” He dances all around her; she moves in swimming gestures that he copies, keeping close to her. He lays out the red towel on the bench. She sits and takes off her shoes: It was my father who taught me to dance. Now they are both in their bare feet, just sitting together, watching the sea and listening to the sound of the gulls.

After the warm applause David talks about a commission he received to make a solo and he thought of the story of how his mother got him to swim. His teachers had demonstrated how to swim on dry ground, so he decided to make a film of dancing in the water. Madge speaks: “Thank you for the applause and all that.” She talks about the film, Deep End Dance, directed by Conor Horgan with original music by Michael Fleming and filmed by Richard Kendrick in the pool where she taught David to swim. We see the film. David appears at the poolside in a suit; he is given a nose plug and goggles and Madge pushes him into the pool fully dressed. The rest is shot underwater. He dances like a fish, somersaults, does handstands, pirouettes, pushes himself up from the floor to the surface, sinks back down and lies on his side as if on an underwater couch. He is in his natural element. Madge plunges in to join him in a beautiful, watery duet after which he sinks to the bottom again, as if to rest, and she returns to the surface. Not for long. She dives down again, grabs him by the hair and heaves him up to the surface. The mother will not allow the element that has united her with her son for so long to separate them now.

Matthew Bourne: Early Adventures

Celebrating 25 Years: Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures at Sadler’s Wells, May 21

Matthew Bourne’s Early Adventures (photo: Chris Nash)

Having seen Dorian Gray a couple of years ago, I was not, I admit, much inclined to see another work by Matthew Bourne. I am not that drawn to Oscar Wilde’s rather dark and overwrought gothic tale either, but there is in it a psychology that I felt Bourne had treated superficially for his own production purposes – Edinburgh Festival hype notwithstanding. The message I got soon afterwards from the director of Adventures in Motion Pictures, Robert Noble, was that critics who didn’t like Dorian Grey clearly didn’t get it. I was obviously in that bracket (though I didn’t admit it at the time) but I was nevertheless intrigued by the idea of Early Adventures at Sadler’s Wells to mark the 25th anniversary of Bourne’s company.

Was Bourne’s a precocious talent at the outset that Dorian Gray had not lived up to? Would these early works, like the draughtsmanship in early Picasso, show a side of his work that is difficult to discern later on? Sometimes early work, like a band’s first album, is so good its success is difficult to repeat.

It was Chris Nash’s images on the poster that overcame my initial resistance. They are lovely black and white studio shots that give a sense these are old but classic works. I also found a copy of Alastair Macaulay’s extended interview with Bourne in Faber and Faber’s 1999 publication. It’s a great introduction to the choreographer and it was reassuring for me to hear his essentially shy but self-aware voice talking about his work: ‘There were certainly some promoters who thought we were very lightweight – and possibly juvenile. Ours wasn’t considered to be serious work. We certainly wouldn’t have gone down very well at the Bagnolet New Choreography Festival – where all the other new British choreographers of that time were presenting work – or anything like that.” He discusses his training, his way of working, his dancers and talks of such influences as Sir Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as well as contemporary choreographer Lea Anderson and filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock.

Once at Sadler’s Wells, a glance at the printed program gave me my first cause for concern. There are the same classic photographs, but accompanied by a bewildering and artless array of mismatched typography, hyperbolic text and performance images (thanks, but I’ve already bought my ticket) highlighting the 25th anniversary celebrations of the company.

Macaulay had taught Bourne the history of dance at Laban, so there are historical references throughout his works. Spitfire, the first work on the program, is drenched in them. “It was based on the idea of men posing. Partly it was about the poses men do in underwear adverts…And it was also about the way dancers, especially male dancers strike poses in ballet: sometimes they’re poses at the end of a solo, but sometimes they’re poses right in the middle of a dance. And they’re audience-oriented in the way that the underwear ads are camera-oriented. Then, because I had had the idea of making a dance like this for four men posing in underwear, I thought of the most famous dance for four women in nineteenth century ballet, the 1845 Pas de Quatre. So the four men do groupings from the famous lithographs.” Such juxtapositions are designed for comic effect; one of Dudley Moore’s compositions for Beyond The Fringe, was a brilliant variation of the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth symphony on a theme of Colonel Bogey. Bourne’s Spitfire is more complex: he has transposed men for women, male underwear models for romantic ballerinas in tutus, and Leon Minkus’ music – know particularly for the virtuoso ballet variations in Don Quixote – for Cesare Pugni’s romantic score. The original Pas de Quatre was choreographed for the four leading ballerinas of the age, so there would no doubt have been an element of technical and artistic competition at the heart of it, a feature that Bourne reduces to parody without the artistry. What saves Spitfire is the clever contrasting of ideas and the irreverent confounding of our expectations, but only just; it finishes as the novelty begins to fade.

Macaulay comments to Bourne in 1999: “I think now that some people felt uneasy and unsure how to take your early work because, while the dancers were often showing innocence, youthfulness, lightness they were also looking out front at the same time. The mixture of calculation, or knowingness, in address with the innocent lightness of what was going on on stage left some people in the audience thinking, ‘Is this serious? Is this light? What is it?” Bourne answers, “Good point. My view now, with humorous things, is that, if you look as though you think you’re funny, it’s not funny. If you look to the audience as though you’re asking for a response, it doesn’t work. My lesson to performers is: Show what it is that you’re trying to show, but don’t be too obvious about it, and don’t ask for laughs.”

But what if the choreographer himself is too obviously asking for laughs? This seems to be the trajectory of the last two works, Town & Country and The Infernal Gallop. The program note for Town & Country says it is remembered as ‘the piece that most crystallised the Bourne style: gloriously witty and ironic, but also strangely moving and heartfelt.’ It was nominated for outstanding achievement in dance in 1992 and has never been performed since.

Town & Country is set to English light music of the 30s and 40s (Percy Grainger, Eric Coates, Jack Strachey and Noel Coward). Two pieces are well known to English radio audiences as the theme tunes to Desert Island Discs and Housewives’ Choice (we hear the Desert Island Discs theme on a radio in the set’s hotel lobby), so there is a definite aural heritage which may be why Town & Country is billed as ‘a look at notions of national character and identity from a bygone era.’ The Infernal Gallop is set to French light music of the 30s and 40s (the most iconic of which are Edith Piaf’s Hymne à l’Amour and Charles Trenet’s La Mer) and is described as a ‘characteristically witty and astute satire of English perceptions of the French,’ though the subtle difference between a satire of English perceptions of the French and a satire of the French by an English choreographer is lost in Bourne’s gallop for laughs. I think he was wise not to take this to Bagnolet.

Macaulay suggests that perhaps Bourne is embarrassed by the prospect of handling serious emotion: that he’d rather get through emotion by giving it an entirely comic emphasis. Bourne’s answer is illustrative of these early works. “I always go into a piece with serious intent…But I get very pulled in the direction of humour, either by ideas of my own that make me laugh or by hilarious suggestions made by people within the company.” The effect of his hilarious distractions in Town & Country and The Infernal Gallop is to distance himself (and us) from the very characteristics he sets out to portray (if we can take him seriously) and the result is these two works appear as insulated from their national environment as Damien Hirst’s shark from the ocean. The only vestige of national identity is in the music itself which operates, as it were, on an emotional track of its own: close your eyes and you can sense the national characteristics in the music; open them and there is an emotional double take, as with Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march played on a ukulele by a butler in a chintzy hotel lobby at the beginning of Town & Country, or with Trenet’s La Mer interpreted by ‘an effetely dressing-gowned merman, serenaded by a trio of sailors (exclamation mark)’ in The Infernal Gallop. It is significant that for Swan Lake, in which Bourne is widely thought to have reached creative maturity, he tells Macaulay he resisted the humorous distractions, from whatever the source: “Whenever that came up with Swan Lake, I pulled back and said, ‘No, this isn’t the place to do that. We’re not going to do that here.’ Often I would get quite a lot of opposition. People would say, ‘Look, this is going to be really funny. This is really going to work.’ Obviously Swan Lake does have its funny moments; but I was far more rigorous than before in deciding where humour could and couldn’t occur.”

There are nevertheless two vignettes in Town & Country in which Bourne gets close to emotional expression: his duet to Noel Coward’s song, Dearest Love, and his setting of the song by Percy Grainger, Shallow Brown, at the end of which there is an uncomfortable realization in the audience that a moment of seriousness has just passed; there is neither laughter nor applause. But perhaps the most emotional moment, one in which the audience fully engages, is the accidental death of the hedgehog by an errant clog. The tragic last moments of the little puppet figure and the actions of the mourning rabbit come across with surprising pathos. Is there a clue here to Bourne’s work? Is it possible that his choreographic form is inadequate to express emotion or is form in these early works constantly sabotaged by a preference for overplayed style and comedy? I can’t help feeling it’s a mixture of the two. Although there may well be something in Bourne’s imagination and sense of theatre that is temperamentally suited to the expressive world of the marionette, the problem is more basic. In Peter Hall’s exploration of form and language in drama, compiled in ‘Exposed by the Mask’, he comes to the conclusion that ‘performance always has to have the equivalent of a mask in order to transmit an emotion. It must have a mask, even if it is not a literal mask. It needs the equivalent if it is to deal with primal passions. It demands form – either in its text, or its physical life, or its music. All these can act like a Greek mask. Only then can strong feeling be dealt with.’

In Apart from a lovely flowing episode of entrances and exits for the dancers on scooters – Ashton’s Les Patineurs on wheels – one of the most effective scenes in Town & Country is a choreographed version of the station meeting between Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard in David Lean’s film, Brief Encounter. Instead of one couple, there are two, which gives Bourne the opportunity to play them in unison to great effect until the very end, when one woman finds herself unexpectedly alone. It also explains why the slow movement of Sergei Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto finds itself on the list of English music: it accompanies the original film soundtrack.

When a choreographer is already over the top, what happens in a finale? Over the top on speed. But at the very end of The Infernal Gallop as we are about to relish the energy of Offenbach’s Gaité Parisienne, Bourne catches us unawares and beautifully understates the cancan: a masterful stroke that ironically brings the house down.

Abingdon Dance Project

ICONS, Amey Theatre, Abingdon School, April 29

Abingdon School is where I spent some very enjoyable years in the late 60s, playing lots of sport, having a good social life and studying, though not always in that order. I also had the opportunity to perform in the school play, which was presented once a year in the town’s Abbey Theatre along with students from the local girls’ school, St. Helen’s. Today aspiring thespians have at their disposal the fully equipped, 470-seat Amey theatre that was built on the site of the school’s music rooms where I tried in vain to learn the piano. In addition, an impressive sports complex on Waste Court field incorporates a stunning dance studio that has a ballet barre and mirrors along one wall and floor to ceiling windows along another. I am not sure if the architects of this studio had in mind the development of dance at Abingdon School, but the idea has nevertheless come to fruition in the Abingdon Dance Project under the guidance of Jeremy Taylor, Head of Drama at the school since 1997. In his first years he established his ambition with productions of Jesus Christ Superstar and Sweeney Todd, which went to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2000. The role of Anthony in Sweeney Todd was played by Matthew Hawksworth, who graduated in 2000 and went on to study at Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts. When Jeremy and his colleague Alison Quick wanted some movement choreographed for their 2005 production of Pericles, they offered Matthew the opportunity, which proved fruitful. In the winter of 2009, when Jeremy and Matthew were working on a school production of West Side Story, they realized how much natural dance ability the students had, at which point the Abingdon Dance Project was conceived. Now in its third year, this is only the second public performance as Jeremy was on sabbatical in 2011. Jeremy continues to direct the school’s regular theatre productions at the Amey Theatre. Mike Bartlett, another Abingdon graduate, came to see the first amateur production of his National Theatre début play, Earthquakes in London at the Amey Theatre in 2010, which took the standard of the annual senior production to a new level, and a production of Cabaret followed in 2011. Both productions were choreographed by Matthew. This year’s ADP performance is the first to have a themed program. Matthew eventually came up with icons: who are our icons and why? How has their work in music, dance, politics, history and literature affected us? Icons became a thread throughout the creative process as well as the title of the show. Matthew was also keen to bring in other professional practitioners so that the students would have access to a range of dance and physical theatre styles. Jeremy had met Sachiko Kimura while on sabbatical at the Actor’s Centre in London and subsequently invited her and her production company, Flying Eye, to perform at Abingdon. Matthew loved her style of work, so they met to discuss collaborating on the present ADP show. Matthew also invited some professional colleagues from London to learn with, and inspire the students.

The school might be well advised to make an inventory of its classroom wastepaper bins, as there are a number used in the opening piece, Sweet Dreams are made of this, choreographed by Matthew. From this first moment on stage, the students from Abingdon and St. Helen’s project a sense of confidence, a vibrant energy and a generous dose of swing. Among the girls, only a handful has any knowledge of ballet, and among the boys, only one; so the transformation of this group into a cohesive dance ensemble is a remarkable achievement.

There is a total of six works on the program, and in between each one is a projection of a dance clip, selected at the last minute and with great ingenuity by stage manager, Rory Fraser-Mackenzie. By means of these clips, the audience is introduced to works by such dance icons as Pina Bausch, Gene Kelly, Patrick Swayze, and Michael Jackson.

For the second work, Matthew has choreographed the theme music to the film Schindler’s List. On the stage is Schindler’s battered suitcase out of which Clara Moschetta pulls a long list of names. She dances a poignant solo as a young woman grateful for the gift of life that Schindler had granted her by saving her grandparents, whose names are on the list. After this, the other dancers gather around the suitcase, as if at a memorial for Schindler. There is a reverence in their movement and a sense of unity. As the dancers leave the stage, they each place a stone of the suitcase, which has become Schindler’s grave.

For the third work, David McMullan, a colleague of Matthew’s, has staged Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, based on original choreography by Stephen Mear and Matthew Bourne. Clearly the dancers are having a good time and it is all they can do to stop their voices joining in the exuberance and fun of the music and dance.

The fourth work underlines an important aspect of the Abingdon Dance Project. It is a solo devised and performed by Othman Mirzan to Jay Z and Kanye West’s Paris/Goldigger/Touch The Sky. In the first three works, we see the students performing what others have created on them or re-created for them, but here Othman has the opportunity, the confidence and the courage to perform his own hip hop-inspired dance. I don’t know if he created it in front of a mirror, but there is a suggestion the mirror is still there. If he can just focus out into the audience, making a gift of what he has created, he will find a new power within that will stand him in good stead whatever he chooses to do after leaving school.

I had watched the first rehearsal of Sachiko Kimura’s work, Our Path, a couple of months before. It was a workshop situation in which she sought to discover the individual qualities of each dancer through verbal interaction, the use of movement phrases, and silent, spatial explorations. In this way Sachiko collected material for the dance from the dancers themselves. By the time this material has been transformed into a theatre work, all the students appear to have made the theatre their natural environment. Each student has chosen someone they respect – a personal icon – with a corresponding quote. One girl, for whom Marilyn Monroe was an icon, chooses, ‘Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition.’ Other icons include Oscar Wilde, Clint Eastwood, Stephen Fry, Charlotte Bronte, and Elizabeth 1. At one point the students all reach in a circle as if they are coming together with a common aspiration. Sachiko has managed to imbue in this work a stillness in which each character is brought into focus in turn, and then merges back into the group. By the end we see eight individuals who have the confidence to express in their bodies what they feel in their heads.

The final romp is choreographed by Matthew and, as in any finale, provides everyone the chance to let go. To the song Born This Way by Lady Gaga, the feeling is that of a West End musical. Matthew’s colleagues are dancing as well and it is interesting to compare them with the students. The enthusiasm and energy are the same, but the difference lies in how that enthusiasm and energy are projected. Through the experience of the professionals, each intention spreads throughout the body, past the tips of the fingers, through the floor and out the eyes. Each dancer makes every movement his or her own, assimilates it, owns it and then uses every pore and muscle to express it. It is the emotional body that dances.

Under Jeremy Taylor’s guidance, judiciously juggling exam schedules with dance rehearsals, academic studies with choreography, and Matthew’s expertise in crafting a show with one rehearsal a week, the ADP is a stunning success, offering students from both schools a unique opportunity to develop the three ‘C’s to complement the three ‘R’s: character, confidence and comportment. At the heart of Abingdon School’s philosophy is the desire to inspire achievement through challenge and opportunity; each boy is encouraged to make the most of their talent and to give something back. Through the ADP they have achieved this in ways they had perhaps never imagined.