Resolution 2026: Mia Segal, Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio, and Hui-Hsin Lu

Resolution 2026 : Mia Segal, Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio, Hui-Hsin Lu, January 15

This evening’s performance of Resolution 2026, the annual festival of new choreography at The Place, covers, as usual, a wide variety of subjects using the language of contemporary dance. It is a huge undertaking, showcasing 60 companies over 20 nights, with three performances a night. Trying to find a link between them — if there is one — is the preserve of The Place’s artistic staff, but for an audience the sometimes elusive discovery of coherence in the choreographic language can be very rewarding.

Hui-Hsin Lu’s Follow Me!! — with its two interjection marks — sets out to be a ‘playful dance and live music performance exploring the phenomenon of modern-day following, from social media trends to everyday conformity.’ Works that explore social media trends can too easily get carried away by the superficial interjection culture they are exploring without acknowledging their darker ramifications. Follow Me!! is no exception. With an impressive array on stage of three dancers (Lili Schroeder, Yu-Chen Chiu and Ka Ki Christina Lai) and four musicians (James Shing Mu Cheng, Sachin Beaman-Patel, Santi Lowe and Dom Fellows), the translation of important ideas — ‘how we move collectively and what it means to lose or rediscover individuality in a world of constant influence’ — into choreography takes on a comic-book simplicity that never gets beyond a caricatural treatment of the subject. Rather than approaching the subject comedically, it might be better to think of it seriously and let the audience decide where the humour and the darkness lie. 

Mia Segal’s A Human Touch begins with an open call to the members of the audience to hug the person next to them, or nearest to them. ‘Think of the last time you gave someone a hug’, urges Segal in the introduction to her work on the free sheet. ‘Was it today? Yesterday? Can you even remember?’ Having followed the suggestion and hugged someone I didn’t know in the row in front of me, I can’t say I was convinced by Segal’s thesis that ‘In a world defined by independence and isolation, we’ve forgotten how to touch.’ It wasn’t that I had forgotten how to touch but that the consensual agreement to touch (presumably the nature of touch Segal is suggesting) did not exist between me and the man in front of me prior to Segal’s invitation. That may also have been the case for dancers and co-creators Amanda Pang and Caitlin Macleod before they started rehearsing, but in A Human Touch they make a very convincing bond that merges the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of human intimacy. As theatre, their performance obviates the need for any verbal contextualisation, leaving the audience to ruminate on aspects of the human spirit Pang and Macleod so beautifully express. Their opening hug is memorable for its intensity and sincerity, and for much of the work these qualities remain. Segal’s choreography can, however, veer from the convincing to the contrived, but she and the performers always manage to bring our focus back to the power and intimacy of touch.

Greta Gauhe and Deborah DiMeglio’s intergenerational collaboration, Collapsing Into The Equilibrium,‘is inspired by glaciers — their struggle for existence and the inevitable collapse’. There are no glaciers on stage but they are represented by armfuls of white packing paper, either flat or scrunched up into crinkly forms. Gauhe and DiMeglio are the human, interactive, agency moving these paper glaciers and changing their shape. They are sometimes under the paper, sometimes on it, wrapped in it or carrying it. But in moments of silence, the qualities of the paper itself give it a life (and death) of its own. When we watch this intrinsic struggle of the paper as a living entity holding and releasing its form while we listen to Ludwig Berger’s audio recordings of dying glaciers, the overlapping effect is mesmerising. Gauhe and DiMeglio draw parallels to this struggle in their own empathetic interactions of equilibrium and support suggesting the fragile but vital unity of life and its environment. In their final pose they face the audience, leaning against each other in solidarity as if to pass on to us the enormous challenge they have so lucidly illustrated. Over the years Gauhe has developed similar calls to action, pointing out the hazards of allowing our human footprint to wander unthinkingly over the potentially devastating forces of nature. Collapsing Into The Equilibrium serves as an eloquent manifesto.

Resolution 2026: Westpfel Co., Ming Chin Hsieh, Wild Guess

Resolution 2026 : Westpfel Co., Ming Chin Hsieh, Wild Guess at The Place, January 14

Resolution is a festival of new choreography and on Wednesday it proved the perfect antidote to a damp evening in London. Behind the well-stocked bar at The Place is a warm, crowded theatre space where young choreographers can take risks in front of an audience that expects them. It’s a place where anything can happen, and this evening anything did.

Yo-Yo Ma once answered the question, ‘What is music to you?’ He replied very simply, ‘Music is energy; we are energy. Music is part of us.’ Watching Resolution on Wednesday leaves no doubt that dance, too, is palpable energy, but the three performances played with energy and passed on that energy to the audience in three very different ways.

Megan Westpfel’s Fracture immediately assails our bodies with a rush of raw energy wrapped in stylish costumes under rock concert lighting by David Street and fed by Jack Manley’s immersive, pulsing electronic score. In just 3 days of rehearsal, Westpfel drilled her six dancers — Sammy Consamti, Eden Law Gleen, Hannah Arbury, Deavion Brown, Emma Houston and Chris Vasileiadi — with an eye to detail that is so polished they shine with almost mechanical precision. That may be part of the scenario; the drilled precision and evening dress with ghoulish masks makes way for a more laid-back, laid bare aesthetic that underlies what Westpfel describes as a process that ‘delves into the process of embodying who you truly are before the world told you who to be.’ Fracture is a protest that is choreographically more convincing in its angry preamble than it is in its resolution but there is a cohesion to the work and a blast in its production values that belies its fast-track birth. The intense energy it produced was returned in full in the audience reaction.

The Resolution format of clearing the auditorium in between each work serves here as a necessary breathing space between Fracture and Ming Chin Hsieh’s Born, Never Asked. Hsieh’s solo has a soft yet powerful internal energy that is beguiling in its conception and performance, choreographed as a ‘tender exploration of what love requires, seen through the fragile bond between mother and daughter.’ Hsieh is already sitting on stage as we return to our seats, wearing a white mask and gathering up five identical masks in front of her inside one other, her expressive body shuddering and relaxing in turn as she appears to be communicating with a departed spirit. This is the choreographic premise that informs Born, Never Asked, from a mimed birth to a final veiled negotiation with her past that, as the title suggests, is never fully resolved. As well as the masks, Hsieh uses materials — her stretch fabric dress and a tulle veil — to suggest and diffuse her states of mind that range from affection to pain, from light to darkness. She combines a fluid dance style with a high degree of mime artistry that communicates a temporal and spatial distance between herself and her mother while keeping our imagination flowing with hers.

Returning from another intermission, the setup for Attention Economy by the performance collective Wild Guess gives the impression of an aleatory event with three performers and a sampling machine. Formally, it’s a ‘collaboration between poet and playwright Harry Walker, movement artist Margot Conde Arenas, and sound artist Robbie Hall’ but essentially what Wild Guess is proposing is ‘a cerebral collision of seemingly dissonant forms and ideas, a fitting representation of a liquid modernity.’ Hall lays down a track and manipulates it. He holds up a board on which is written ‘COLLAPSE’. Walker reads a poem from his notebook as he walks around the stage in his hooded anorak, but his words are inaudible. Arenas shines a flashlight on herself as she follows Walker round the stage while Hall holds up the second board, ‘CHANGE RELATIONS’. There are more boards, more messages punctuating Arenas’ somatic landscape and Walker’s intermittently audible lines of poetry that seem designed to avoid their mark. I pick out ‘thought without rhyme or reason’ and wonder if that is an appropriate epitaph for ‘liquid modernity’. Attention Economy is a brave new work, but the cerebral collision turns into a bit of a damp squib; by the time the trio of disparate characters finishes propped against each other in a gesture of yogic improbability even the energy in the theatre has seeped away.