Resolution! 2008

Give it a whirl.

Tights at The Place

Highlight of Resolution! 2007 – a YouTube clip of A2 Company performing “She Turned Her Head And Looked”. Read review by Donald Hutera here. Find out more about A2 here.

Final Resolution

The Place, 15 February 2007

¡Wonder, My Devilfish
SHADEseasons

Table Time
Richal Dance Art Museum

The Maze
Anti-Ballet

Shades of Celine Dion came washing back over me when I read the programme notes for tonight’s opening performance. Promising an exploration of web phenomena such as YouTube and “sync-net-performances” I was bristling with expectation. I should have known better. This disjointed piece of rough vignettes stacked together just didn’t add up. I hereby review in the manner of its incomprehensible titleage:

Air guitar, ruining Jonny Cash’s version of “Personal Jesus”, step ball change, MONOTONY, bleeee, fuzzy video camera, ARGH, comedy tiny person video moment, speaking in German, cue film of disco dancing. THE END.

Richal Dance Art Museum wants a backward R but my PC won’t do that. However, once the overly long introduction section passed there ensued cartoon comedy capers, loosely based around a love triangle and largely based around a handsome table. Owing as much to the Keystone Kops and Morecambe and Wise as Anime this fun, extravagantly mimed sketch caper was lighthearted, colourful and flirty.

For a company named Anti-Ballet, “The Maze” was disappointingly jazz ballet in bodywarmers and jazz trainers. Starting out with a touch of comedy acting as the different coloured teams were instructed to navigate the maze it all went a bit wrong as the hard house kicked in and the choreography failed to do anything interesting with its concept. Nodding to the telly kitsch that is Fort Boyard this piece sorely lacked a central evil genius like Dirty Den and frankly, it was no surprise that they all failed by the end.

Come back Celine!

Resolution! 2007 ends on Saturday 17 February.

Baffling mediocrity

 

Resolution! 6 February 2007
The Place

maProject
Landlords & Nomads

Askao Shirai
Depth

Kinesthetic Dance Co
Somewhere Around Nothing

Pfft, what a disappointingly middling night at Resolution. Nothing awful, nothing special; three pieces of average, well intended choreography that amounted to less than the sum of its parts. Plus, being one for usually sitting down front, I never realised that they let newcomers in the back door. It was horribly distracting as loads of latecomers trooped in during the first piece all waving their programme notes and shuffling annoyingly behind our heads. I suppose it’s a blessing they didn’t distract from anything glorious.

maPROJECT’s “Landlords and Nomads” involves a collaboration with a film-maker who has created some truly beautiful and evocative cityscapes: a roadside, an empty caff, a desolate pub. These films are projected onto a transparent screen hanging downstage and four dancers take solo and duet turns before and behind it, inhabiting the space and the virtual world created by the film. Regrettably, the choreography doesn’t match up to the beauty of these poignant and ghostly films although an elucidation of the themes of transience and belonging are clearly attempted here.

The opening of “Depth” suggests the exploration of a dark, underground world. A dancer, wearing a petzl, gropes around a darkened stage space in fug and silence, creating a promising air of expectancy. Yet what emerges is something completely different. Another dancer, Asako Shirai, is discovered and she takes over the show, exploring different types of movement from within herself. This performance suggests she is an imaginative and neat dancer-choreographer who exploits her physicality and verges, occasionally, into robotics and other eccentricities. Shirai dominates this performance and it’s unclear why her colleague is necessary, dressed, as she is, like a female Fagin. A patchy but intriguing performance.

The celebrated Apocalyptica versions of Metallica songs herald a graduate troupe of nightie clad lovelies performing “Somewhere Around Nothing” with the kind of dedicated intensity you only get when you take yourself a bit too seriously to throaty, relentless strings. This well danced piece by Haris Marathefti and co. felt like an attempt to create something a bit sexy and edgy under the guise of addressing a big issue about ‘life’ but, instead, came across as overly dramatic, derivative and stylised; more at home on MTV than here at Resolution.

Nudity & sartorial error

Resolution!
1 February 2007, The Place

 

Helicoptered in for a last minute programming change, Timea Maday Kinga presented a challenging and brave piece for Resolution, “Working Process”. The programme notes warn that there will be nudity here but that still doesn’t quite prepare you for a totally naked Timea Maday Kinga standing on a box in a beam of light. Once over the initial surprise this is an intense and oppressive piece resembling an overly serious liveart installation rather than a dance performance. Maday Kinga’s beautifully lit, strong and graceful body slowly writhes, contracts, arches and strains to a throbbing industrial soundscape. Completely exposed she controls her movement in an attempt to subvert the constraints she is working under. However, the noise, intensity of light and inescapable nudity get claustrophobic quickly and although the commitment to this physical ‘meditation’ is, in some way, impressive it’s quite an ordeal to sit through.

 

Linda Gieres‘ “White Moment” thankfully returns us to more conventional lyrical contemporary dance, a tinkling score by Arvo Part and impressive execution in full on skirts. Inspired by a quote from the composer, Gieres seeks to explore how the audience perceives the work presented; the audience or listener is the prism that can divide the “white light” of the work into its component parts and meaning. The dancers move united and sometimes out of sync. They shadow and vary each other’s movement, resembling each other in stature and costume, although one of them chose the wrong sort of top for their body shape and looked unreasonably dumpy next to her better dressed friend; this irked me throughout so maybe that’s why I’m really not sure my ‘prism’ was working. It is a poignant and gentle, fluid duet which neither moved me nor interested me very much. Possibly a manifestation of two aspects of one consciousness or perhaps a memory of a lost sister. I’m not sure and it probably doesn’t matter.

Jessyka Watson-Galbraith rounded off an all round, good Resolution! night with “Let’s Talk About Love” and some dramatic and overblow silliness. You must read my extended wordiness here and remember all the good things about Celine Dion.

Read other Resolution! reviews here.

 

 

Love YouTube

Resolution!
1 February 2007, The Place

Jessyka Watson-Galbraith’s Resolution work “Let’s Talk About Love” is inspired by the frighteningly prolific production of love songs by Celine Dion. 198 in all. Good grief.

Taking the Canadian diva as the ultimate embodiment of the cheap commercial exploitation of love, Watson-Galbraith plays with the idea of what is good and bad quality in several forms: dance, film and music.

The cast have been messing around with poor quality videos of them dancing in bedrooms and singing along to Celine on YouTube for months and several of these feature as a backdrop to the performance. The intention, it seems, was to use this tawdry, sentimental music (pop schmaltz ‘low’ culture), contrast it with contemporary dance moves (supposedly a ‘high’ art form but also poking fun at its seriousness) and have it performed by a cast of 13 young women dressed ready for bed but actually convey real emotion through the drama and blowsiness of La Dion. The project blog talks about looking at the moment when bad becomes good because it’s so bad it’s cool whereas good can be uncool and bad. Yeah, confusing, I know.  The piece is really good fun and like nothing I’ve seen at Resolution before. The opening section is the most rehearsed and straightfowardly enjoyable with the ensemble executing serious contemporary dance moves in their own style whilst feeling the love from Celine and lip-synching along. After that, it gets a bit more shambolic – too improvised and shabby for 12 of the cast whilst one, spotlit downstage, almost performs the same dance moves as the girl in the dodgy video behind her – which is effective – but too much undisciplined activity going on around her detracts from it. Still, watch this. It’s kooky:

This was very nearly cracking in its shambolic appeal and was the emotive icing on a tasty three tiered Resolution cake.

PS. I hate to admit it, but the Celine tracks actually sounded very powerful in the intimate Place auditorium. And, alarmingly, I know the words to this song:

Flatulence speaks louder than words

Resolution!
Tuesday 9, January 2007
The Place

Mirjam Gurtner Tree. Book. Cigarette

Kerstin Schellander Both of Them

eko dance Ekomefeemo – Synthesis (Making one together) (Hilary Wrack-Lartey)

It seems, somewhere along the line, spoken word became the thing to do. Whatever happened to dance being the mode of expression? Isn’t that the point? Yet all three of these pieces relied heavily on their textual aspects, whether spoken by the dancers or played as accompaniment and, to varying degrees, it didn’t work for any of them. I travelled through disinterest, to hysteria, disbelief, incomprehension, back through hysteria and back to disbelief and desperate wishing for it to be over. Thank god for intervals. There was plenty of gin.

“Tree. Book. Cigarette.” by Mirjam Gurtner presents five women, colourfully attired and potentially funky, exclaiming and exploring the phase “I live my life”. Talking continues through the dance and often gets lost in the movement. A microphone is used occasionally. An unstable table and trapeze serve as perilous props in an under-rehearsed and nervy piece. It feels like My First Dance Theatre™; not dreadful but stirring no excitement, intrigue or real emotional effect. Plus it is unintentionally distracting when one of the dancers manages a perfect little fart during a dramatic unaccompanied solo. Nothing like a touch of untimely wind to crack the back row up.

Kerstin Schellander’s solo, “Both of Them” opens with a stately, ominous walk on tip toe across the stage to an inconsolable, shrieking lament. Soon she starts to speak, then her recorded voice takes over but the whimsical story about the girl and the tree and the broken legs is not illuminated by the choreography, although Schellander’s talent for understated movement and filling stillness suggests that there might be better work to come. Very suddenly, it is bafflingly over well before the billed 25 minutes leaving a bemused audience.

To cap a disappointing evening, Eko dance give us a dog’s dinner of a piece exploring European and African identities. As Hilary Wrack-Lartey’s commentary for “Ekomefeemo – synthesis” begins with “Who am I?” a man behind me groans “not again..” in response to yet more verbals. Worse is to come with the incomprehensible trio of Wrack-Lartey, a white woman with apparently no professional dance training, with Ya Lai Boye and Michael Neewuaye, two African male dancers with exuberance and showmanship in abundance. Shame there is nothing to get their dancing teeth into here. Bits of Irish, African and hip hop dance are haltingly woven together to live percussion and Eminem in between overly earnest pontificating from its creator. How this reached the Place stage I cannot imagine.

Fewer words; more dance please.

 

Resolution! review 2007

Check out what’s going down and how, here.

I’ll chip in when I make it down to Euston in the next week or so.

Get you some dance in ‘07

Happy flailing new year! Now, go get you some dance. Three ace recommendations:

1. London’s International Mime festival

Catch the premiere of a new full length work called Arc at the Linbury Studio of the Royal Opera House, 22-23 January. The Company, Ockham’s Razor, is a group of aerialistes who combine mime, dance and excellently clever aerialistics to tell simple stories beautifully. I saw them perform at last year’s Resolution! and they were a breath of fresh air. Tickets for Arc are only £10-£15 (£8 concessions) and it’s a 90 minute show with an interval. The Linbury is an intimate studio theatre beneath the Opera House with a bar decked out with great dance photos and truly excellent toilet facilities. These things are important, I know.

2. Sadlers Wells Sampled

There’s a brand new, exciting thing happening at Sadlers that’s IDEAL for flailers. On 2-4 February they’re putting on a mini festival of dance featuring 3 nights of mixed bill performances by lots of different companies and two days of FREE taster classes and workshops for those who fancy having a go at breaking, tapping, flamenco, contemporary, tae-kwon-do and ballet. The evening performance on Friday looks especially tasty to me including a cutting edge contemporary duet from Random Dance (under the directorship of the truly funky and wonderful Wayne McGregor), tap, hip-hop and, to end, the mesmerising “Swamp”, created by Michael Clark and performed by Rambert Dance Company. This piece alone is worth the meagre £10 ticket tag (£5 for a proms ticket if you’re willing to stand). Workshop places are only available to those who’ve bought an evening ticket so get booking now as places are limited.

3. And remember, Resolution! is on at The Place, Euston between 5-31 January. You never know what might happen. Full listings here.

See you there!

New Year’s Resolution!

Spangle fatigue

As the silly season of fake snow, eyeshadow with glitter in it and puff ball skirts passes me by there’s the usual slew of sickly sweet Nutcrackers, pantos and all things unchallenging filling the dance venues. The notable exception is Matthew Bourne’s “Swan Lake” at Sadlers Wells which packs out theatres with its promise of an alternative to the classic tragedy: the swans are (fit) male dancers in feathery pants rather than tiny ladies in tutus. Although, apparently, it isn’t a gay thing. Oh no. Anyway, more of that anon as I’ll be there on 21 December gawping from the third row. Those swans deserve close attention.

Take a chance on the new

January brings something fresher, more random and potentially interesting, if not – at times – downright dreadful. Resolution! is a season of 114 new short dance works hosted by The Place. “First Footing” is open to all who have completed full-time dance training, and are presenting work in Resolution! for the first time, “Evolution” is selected from those who have appeared in the season before and Aerowaves is for works produced elsewhere in Europe. The only criteria apart from that seems to be the willingness to take a financial risk (performers rent the theatre and share the income from ticket sales – hence the auditorium is often packed out with friends and family who leave the show en masse at each interval leaving the final performers rather lonely) and put together a piece of dance. The chance to be critically reviewed on an internationally respected contemporary dance platform is not to be sniffed at for emerging dance companies. The writers programme “Resolution! Review” partners a group of new writers, via a competitive process, with professional critics. The review team review all performances of Resolution! and the reviews are posted online. I did it and it’s great.

So, why should you get tickets for Resolution!?

1) If you book 7 days in advance tickets are just a fiver. That’s cheapo, cheapo for a fresh, cultural experience in the strapped for cash post New Year depression. Impress your friends. Embrace the new!

2) Each night there’s a triple bill of new works. That’s three different things and statistically, it’s unlikely it will all be dire (although, it has happened). It is a lottery so my advice is to drink before the show and in each interval. The Place is a great, intimate and un-intimidating venue with a friendly bar easily accessible between Euston & Kings Cross. Go with an open-mind and don’t take it too seriously.

3) There’s every chance you’ll find a gem. And if not, you might laugh so hard deconstructing it in the interval that you’ll feel just as good. Just remember though, the audiences will be full of friends & family so be careful where you vent your spleen.

Go forth, be brave, good luck!

Resolution runs for 6 weeks, 5 Jan to 17 Feb. Book tickets at www.theplace.org.uk