Mmm… yeah…

Mmm…. Stravinsky Project Part 2
Dance Umbrella 2006 (III)
Barbican, 30 October 2006

 

A punter coming to a Michael Clark performance with no prior knowledge or inkling of what they were in for would be pretty intrigued by the programme cover. Naked female dancer arched backwards, breasts bared skywards, with slicked down painted on additional black hair and a Hitler mustache.

It’s not going to be Swan Lake.

The dancer is in fact, barely recognisably, Amy Hollingsworth; until recently the darling of Rambert and a key member of Bonachela’s new venture. She’s joyously right at home with Clark. Annoyingly, Clark doesn’t do pics with his dancers’ bios so I’m sticking my neck out after a google search that it’s Melissa Hetherington, but I was mesmerised by her. Fabulously massive eyes topping an incredibly strong, agile and beautiful tiny body – she was particularly stunning during “Rite..” in a vagina defying split leg catsuit. Tit tape at work or Bodymap magic? You decide.

The show opens with four pieces set to music by Wire, PiL, Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns and Sex Pistols’ Submission. Clark is famous for his beautiful lines and here they cut subtly and deliberately through the raw rock basslines. The costuming is integral to the performance, black catsuits and wigs uniformly emphasising the dancers’ classical training and utter control. The second piece is particularly wonderful. Hardly anything happens. Long, slow walks in fawn and black catsuits with arched bodies and impossibly extended legs. The soundtrack screeches “I wish I could die” as the dancers calmly, pervertedly patrol the stage. “Bored” flashes up on the backscreen, challenging the audience’s reaction; impossible to be bored entranced by this.

Already coined by someone else, “the muff dance“, the third movement sees the entire company audaciously naked, bar purple arm muffs which reach from elbow to elbow, the dancers’ arms demurely held obscuring their genitals. For once, the nudity doesn’t distract from the dance. The sculptured bodies are a pleasure to watch and their slow progress is incredibly beautiful. On the backdrop the Mona Lisa slowly transforms into Elizabeth Taylor. Back to the rock and a clip of the wonderfully posh singing teacher that tried to tackle Sid Vicious. Then an orange lit stage with the company in a variety of white pants and billowy tops in a frenzied, disco onslaught. Just stunning.

And so, to the Rite of Spring. I had to do a bit of research here. Despite my childhood spent earnestly reading every ballet book I could get my hands on my knowledge of this infamous Ballet Russes/Stravinsky collaboration is pretty shameful. However, even in spite that, you can see where this is coming from. It’s a pagan spree, all earth and fecundity. The dancers may bear stick on bald patches and have sparkly noses but you get the whole spring thing. Stravinsky’s score, played here by two pianists/four hands is fabulously rhythmic and primal. Odd things happen. Dancers with toilet seats around their necks, a marshmallow creature like the one out of Ghostbusters (but apparently a joke representation of a pregnant Mother Earth that’s a tribute to Leigh Bowery) and the ‘how now sacred wow’ phrase. But it’s Amy’s turn as the Chosen One, that ends the piece and really makes an impression. Dressed in just an oversize pair of white pants and a hitler mustache she dances an incredibly dramatic, Nijinsky-esque solo that seems to be the antithesis of the sacrificial virgin. Whatever, it’s a bold and dominating performance.

The ‘Rite’ section may be odd, but Mmm… as a show is full of colour, beauty, humour and striking images. There’s a happy balance of choreographic intent, idea, music and homage without annoying pretentiousness. It’s a show you emerge from with a sense of wow and a longing to see it again.

Take: best mates, boyfs, girlfs, parents, first dates, foreign exchange students and those who think they’re arty.

Read what the press thought at londondance.com

Lovely. But, er, what?

Rosas
D’un soir un jour
Dance Umbrella 2006 (II)
Monday 16 October, Sadlers Wells

Formally conceived as a cyclical musical journey and, by its title, suggesting the passage of an evening and a day, the presentation of six new choreographic episodes from Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Rosas was ostensibly alluring, weird, serious-minded and technically challenging but at the same time baffling, obscure and almost wilfully impenetrable.

De Keersmaeker is famous for her obsession with music and pure movement and her score here is a rich and classical one: Debussy, Stravinsky, Benjamin, including an original composition from the latter. The performance opens with Rosas’ homage to Nijinsky’s “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faun” casting a topless woman in the central role in a sparse and abstract piece for three dancers, the incorporation of Nijinsky’s famous angular poses providing a recognisable link to the original. The following pieces, in spite of the glorious music, leave the audience bemused. The second half is more engaging. Stravinsky’s “Fireworks” offers a fun and throwaway parade of exuberance and the final piece, “Jeux”, derived from Nijinsky’s controversial work of the same name, incorporates a clip from the film “Blow up” featuring a mimed tennis match. This starts promisingly but, again, the choreography disappoints, failing to communicate or subtly elucidate its laminated references.

The set is beautifully styled; an exposed, stripped bare Sadlers’ stage cut across by a rack of strip lights that rise or lower to change the mood. The white stage is coated with chalk dust that puffs up evocatively with the movement. The dancers too are a beautiful, kooky cast, colour coordinated in muted shades of gold, green, purple and blue, randomly spliced with boys and girls in mismatched suit trousers and vests and the odd incongruous woman in jeans and a spangly top straight off the high street. There is sporadic nudity.

But it’s as if the styling has sucked the life out of the choreography. The dance vocabulary is both difficult to grasp and not strange or beautiful enough to merely wash over the senses pleasurably. Extensive explanatory programme notes serve to annoy further.

Even an attempt to just enjoy the aesthetics of this programme is spoiled by the relentless and apparently depthless intellectualism that seems to beg to be acknowledged throughout. “D’un soir un jour” feels like the ultimate in continental boho styling, set to a gorgeous and exciting orchestral score and with a grand shape and concept, yet tiresomely, it fails to speak to, or move, its audience,

Take: those interested in postmodern european aesthetics

Read what the press thought at londondance.com

Burble, burble, snooze…

Carol Brown Dances
SeaUnSea
Dance Umbrella 2006 (I)
Friday 13 October, Siobhan Davies Studios

SeaUnSea is a collaboration between choreographer Carol Brown and architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen. The piece has grand aspirations emerging from a subtle concept. Understated fluid and serene choreography for three dancers evokes the drifting movement and interplay of creatures and plantlife beneath the waves whilst shadowy images of the dancers are simultaneously projected onto two video screens, one suspended from the undulating ceiling of the Siobhan Davies’ roof studio and one as a backdrop. The dancers’ movement triggers computer generated, constantly shifting patterns which emanate organically around them accompanied by a calming sub-aquatic soundscape.

All you really need to know about this is that I keep dozing off throughout. Very nice dance when it happens and nice relaxing swooshing sea type soundtrack and pretty visuals but oh, yawn…

The digital technology involved is impressive and quite captivating to watch. Shifting sands and rolling waves seem to ebb and flow around the shadowy figures but the effect is to distract from, rather than complement, the actual dance performance. It is difficult to experience both at the same time with any perspective.

Billed as a cyclical and interactive installation experience it was also disappointing that the division between performance and audience interaction time was clearly delineated and linear, thereby excluding the audience from anything but a meaningless playtime afterwards.

Thank goodness it was only 40 mins long.

Take: people you really don’t like then stand them up at the last minute so they have to watch it alone and/or your dancey friends who grab every opportunity for self expression in front of a crowd.