Resolution! 2015: New Tapestry, Mara Vivas, .2Dot

Resolution! 2015, New Tapestry, Vivas, .2Dot, The Place, February 19

Hege Eriksdatter Østefjells in Potatoes & Sauce (photo: Andreas Bergmann)

Resolution! is The Place’s annual festival of new works presented by a range of diverse emerging dance artists…For every evening of the festival there are three short pieces where you get to see a snapshot of brand new work.

I put the above introduction from The Place website as a starting point for this piece because I am confused about the nature of Resolution! It seems less a ‘festival of new works’ than a festival of choreographic ideas in search of a work. On the other hand there are some works — like Hannah Buckley’s Woman with Eggs and .2Dot’s I’m sorry you’re leaving — that are not ‘snapshots of brand new work’ but the brand new work itself. So does Resolution! encourage the making of new works or the experimentation with choreographic ideas and form? If the former, not all the works on show appear complete, and if the latter, what is the difference between Resolution! and The Place Prize competition which is currently calling for choreographic ideas to be developed into new work?

But back to this evening: the more I think about New Tapestry’s Potatoes & Sauce the more complex I realise it is. It begins by concentrating our attention on the tactile sensation of skin on plastic as Hege Eriksdatter Østefjells’ feet and hands explore a rectangle of plastic sheet taped to the floor like an elongated entrance mat. This relates not only to Østefjells’ subsequent aerial work for which she uses a cascade of plastic tubing but also to the first section of (rather indistinct) recorded fragments that originate in coma dreams. There is thus a double suspension in which the dreams float in the air while Østefjells’ body appears to float and swim in a vertical current. The score by Tim Hecker adds another level of mystery to the eerie weightlessness of the whole that plays a gentle dance on the imagination. It is only the manipulation (and sound) of the tubes as Østefjells prepares a body or foothold that reminds us of the mechanics of aerial work but Potatoes & Sauce (the title is somewhere in the coma dream, too) is a welcome exploration of an under-appreciated dimension for dance.

Elisabeth Schilling, Julie Schmidt and Fabiola Santana in Triptych (photo: Karolina Bajda)

Mara Vivas’ Triptych uses memory rather than text as the driver and keeps the physical language unflinchingly minimal. The three women (Elisabeth Schilling, Julie Schmidt and Fabiola Santana) are standing in a single sidelight almost shoulder-to-shoulder with their backs to us as we return to our seats. An unintended consequence of the material and fit of the costumes (by Susanne Stangl) is that the nervous muscle activity of the women’s bodies as they wait to start sets up a trembling choreography of its own on the surface of the fabric (the slow gestural arm movements that begin this triptych of three graces seem huge by comparison). Not wanting to suggest any narrative or direction Vivas keeps our focus on the three bodies as one moving sculpture by keeping their gestures in a similar register but at the same time the three women are subtly playing with their spatial relation to one other; at first they remain united, but as the work progresses their gestures interact, touch, break off and follow individual paths. The gestural language is also related to time; it is as if Vivas has slowed down the heartbeat of the work to focus on the here and now but the women cannot keep from straying — be it to the past or the future — from the sculptural continuum. This is partly intentional and partly unintentional: the attention given to gesture does not always extend to the dancers’ eyes which at times are commenting on the performance rather than expressing the choreography. Nevertheless the choreographic idea remains valid and intact.

Angela Frampton, Roger Cox, Jill Connick and Gilly Hanna in I’m sorry you’re leaving (photo: Karolina Bajda)

I’m sorry you’re leaving by .2Dot (the duo of Antonio Branco and Riccardo Tarocco) is dance theatre with a rich — not to mention mature — imagination for four exceptional performers: Jill Connick, Roger Cox, Angela Frampton and Gilly Hanna. Based on their lives and stories, it builds on the celebration of the art of age that the Elixir Festival featured last year. The program note reads in part, ‘Real people, with real stories, doing real dances.’ The three ladies in I’m sorry you’re leaving hold nothing back in their embrace of their roles — even if they are telling their own stories — and I can’t help feeling they are giving a fuller account of themselves than they would off stage. As Hanna explains in her guide to introducing yourself, ‘Give an audience an insight into what excites you.’ Roger Cox is less demonstrative but his calm, sometimes diffident exterior and dry humour is a natural counterbalance to the ladies. The stories they each tell, both poignant and funny, have the immediacy of truth delivered in circumstances and (wonderful) costumes that are pure theatre, but their dances and songs are real: Connick’s tap routine, Hanna’s dance to Holding out for a hero, Frampton’s cover of Frank Sinatra’s Fly me to the moon and Cox’s tango with Hanna are highlights of a work that Branco and Tarocco have clearly had fun making. I’m sorry you’re leaving, too; it seems all too soon. Perhaps if the idea had come later you might have made the selection process for The Place Prize. What’s the difference again?

Resolution! 2015 : Red Tape Dance, Hannah Buckley & Rachel Burn

Resolution! 2015: RedTape Dance, Hannah Buckley & Rachel Burn, The Place, January 16

Hannah Buckley in Woman with Eggs (photo: Sara Teresa)

I’ll begin in the middle because Hannah Buckley’s Woman with Eggs — ‘a solo about women’s ability to be many things’ — is worth celebrating. It tackles what many women see as the social imperative of having children with a poignancy that is balanced by Buckley’s uncompromising argument for freedom from its tyranny.

I am not sure at the beginning where she is going to take us; she is crouched with her back to the audience scratching around on the floor, her hair covering her face that is following intently the actions of her hands. But very quickly Buckley transforms all these elements into one of the most intelligent works I have seen at The Place. By accumulating gestures and revealing clues as to where she is going, Buckley builds up over the course of the work a layered argument so complete and irreverent that by the end we can’t help but stand smiling with her and marvel at her accomplishment.

The first spoken clue is a quote from an Inuit folk story, Kakuarshuk: ‘Long ago women got their children by digging around in the ground…’: immediately all that intense scrabbling assumes meaning and from this point each element of her performance — her costume (courtesy of Lauren Reyhani), her hair, her voice, her angular way of moving with turned-in stance and the articulation of her arms — now uncannily combine to inform her subject. Having related the Inuit tale about a barren woman’s quest to find a child she introduces extracts from two interviews, one with a seven-year-old girl and one with her grandmother aged 90: two amusing and refreshing perspectives on ‘women’s ability to be many things’. Buckley dances in her own idiosyncratic way to an Alex Drewchin cover of Kate Bush’s Babooshka, and then suddenly changes tack, dragging herself to a floor microphone to give away her next clue: a refreshingly honest view of children by artist Sophie Calle: ‘…I don’t like the terrorism of children. I don’t like the lack of freedom it gives to the parents…’ She lies still to let the sense of her monologue filter into our consciousness and then takes two gold-painted eggs from a bowl and begins to groove to Grimes’ appropriately titled track, Oblivion, letting the eggs balance precariously in her open palms until she ramps up the rhythmic pulse to the point the eggs spill on to the ground and break. She nonchalantly picks up two more and repeats her dance until the dozen or so eggs lie splattered on the ground around her, a breathtakingly trenchant image of a tyranny overturned with Buckley in the unassuming role of liberator.

Fabio Filipe and Maria Cassar in Red Tape Dance Company’s Pensar é Destruir

Red Tape Dance’s Pensar é Destruir (thinking is destruction) courts the philosophical using the power of masks: Fabio Felipe as a dog and Maria Cassar as a cat enact the lines of the poem by Fernando Pessoa that inspired the work:

“Living life with a façade of a cat or dog,
is the only way that regular man can live life
…with the satisfaction of a dog or cat.”

In their masks, Felipe and Cassar carry on an animalistic social dance with the cat appearing the stronger of the two and not in the least afraid of the dog. After sequences of walking patterns, swings and lifts, they end up falling against each other mask to mask for the longest time, their expressions fixed. Masks have a particular power and Felipe and Cassar exploit them well. It is only when they take them off that Pensar é Destruir loses its force, becoming two people with some interesting but not compelling partnering (but isn’t that the sense of the three lines from Pessoa?). Strange, isn’t it, the power the face can have in dance. The unmasked section is accompanied by a Bach concerto (as opposed to Oli Newman and Anstam in the first section) which plays a parallel, playful role to the choreography rather than a structural one. Then just as the partnering gets going in rolling lifts across each other’s backs, both the music and choreography abruptly fade out. There’s more to be achieved with this idea, and I hope Red Tape Dance continues to explore.

Alejandra Baño and cast in Rachel Burn’s Happening (© Camilla Greenwell Photography)

The evening closes with Rachel Burn’s Happening, a piece inspired by the stories of twelve men and women that Burn has transformed into dance. The cast consists of only four women, so each interprets three stories across the two genders. Finding a common theme among the twelve stories is clearly one concern and finding a setting that can frame that theme is another; in fact the latter can only be explored following the success of the former. What Burn has done is the reverse: she has found a setting before finding the theme, and although her idea of transparent balloons tied with long strings to as many boots as there are story donors and performers may indeed be an intuitive response, it is not enough to make Happening coalesce. The other issue is that because there are only four in the cast, the work appears to consist of only four stories arranged as a collage. It is a shame, because the abstraction of the words into dance — the choreographic nucleus — is lovely and the performances by Helen Aschauer, Alejandra Baño, Marianna Mouaimi and Ana Mrdjanov emotionally strong. Perhaps adding a man or two to the cast would add more definition to the men’s voices, but finding the right form for all twelve stories remains Burn’s principal challenge.