Dance Criticism

Review One

Dance Magazine such as The Dancing Times

Word Count 1, 077

Dance Review - The Point, Eastleigh – 10 November 2011

The bgroup’s premiere of The Lessening of Difference choreographed by director Ben Wright.

The bgroup was founded in 2008 by Ben Wright who has had eighteen years of international experience as a dance artist. As well as performing with Adventures in Motion Pictures, in 1995 he choreographed the role of the Prince for Mathew Bourne’s Swan Lake. Wright has also worked as a movement director for Operas, most recently Glyndebourne’s Knight Crew. Last year Wright’s company created a hit with About Around performed by four dancers in ‘the round’ so that the viewers had to be involved with the action.

Tonight at the first performance of Wright’s most recent work, we are invited on a journey of episodic ‘real-life’ stories portrayed through digital projection by Dick Straker, conversational text by David Charles Manners, and gesture based dance movement by a quartet of performers in costumes designed by Theo Clinkard. Every story expresses one particular aspect of intimacy, that of physical love. Realities are passed on from personal points of view because Nuno Silva narrates the poem ‘I don’t believe you’re gone’ enticing us to empathise with him completely in his loneliness. We do not know why his partner left him and perhaps we would side differently if we did.

Any text draws parallels of meaning, a fluid contact duet where bodies fold into one another like jigsaw puzzle pieces (touch never being interrupted throughout every embrace or lift) is befitting to the author’s ‘all this, all you, all me’. Manner’s writing is certainly rich and meaningful; it is far more powerful and effective than Wright’s choreography which couldn’t stand alone.    

I must mention the captivating video design by Dick Straker who has worked with many non-standard projections and visual media including projections for Riverdance (1995). Throughout the The Lessening of Difference we are treated to an array of text, picture, and video projections on screen; the falling snow is particularly ‘real’ so we feel cosy and form associations when snow falls at the end of every ‘story’. The picture of heart wings is a repeated theme mentioned in narration, on the paper passed among the audience, and on the screen that Kier Patrick stands in front of flapping his arms, presenting the freedom of the soul. Guy Hoare who worked as lighting designer for  Henry Oguike for six years, gives good interpretation for intimate sections contrasted with cheerful brightness when the performers throw ‘snowballs’. A chair, duvet, microphone, scrunched balls of paper, someone writing, another playing a banjo are the things that exist on stage before anything really ‘begins’. It’s as though we stumbled across someone’s private life, the boundaries taken away.

Sound Design by Alan Stone is incredible as it comes from physical objects, a music box, an old radio, and instrument on the stage. Music is also suggestive as to tone, a Fado the Portuguese genre expressing permanent loss and its consequent life lasting damage, is sung as a solo, giving us the sense of someone contending with the aftermath of a melancholic break up. Later we have the Habanera from Carmen, sung beautifully but mocked with a candid xylophone accompaniment. Presently the stage is brightly lit, and all four dancers dressed in ridiculously blue high school wrestling singlets are running, jumping, physically pushing and catching one another in-between the occasional sexual grunt which sets the audience into fits of giggles. They rampage to Why Can’t I be You by The Cure, buttock cheeks are exposed and after one of them steps up to the microphone and says ‘these limbs made glorious’, they all rhythmically dry hump with pelvic thrusts, and sing along.

Stories are portrayed with extreme honesty and vulnerability. Patrick strategically positions the duvet and settles down to perform, pouting and posing for his Apple Mac laptop, perhaps he is on video chat on all fours reversing his rear to the web-cam to Barry White’s ‘The First, the Last, My Everything’. Elsewhere there is a women’s solo performed in silence, and she does really silly things, they are almost seductive but then pitifully comical too and she clearly longs for attention. You feel that in bed this is as confident as she dares to be and at the end of her solo, red roses are thrown on stage and her relief is very tangible as she says “thank you” because finally she is noticed.

The key message of The Lessening of Difference is that it doesn’t matter who you fall in love with. It is the desperate physical hunger for the intimacy found in another that is integral, so duets portray both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. The audience breaks into laughter at several comical points but there is forced participation too, a piece of paper is given to ‘pass on’ and dancers climb on our chairs whispering “sorry”. Yet I think it’s unique for any performance to achieve the extent of audience involvement The Lessening of Difference does; you don’t feel like you are in the auditorium and ‘they’ are on the stage.

Wright copies a position within an Indian rite where a naked corpse is laid and someone wanting to ‘face the true intimacy of life and death’ places a hand on the corpse’s chest and lower belly. Manners experienced this ritual himself and suggests in his writings that during, he felt a touch of the console offered by a higher spiritual being ‘comfort from imagined gods, Salvation’s hope, or Divine Grace in promise’. Wright claims to collaborate with Manners but seems to makes a piece about shallow sex instead. Intimacy is a multidimensional complex and has many various facets and if Manners truly witnessed the love between death and life, it would be a love far beyond the human figure and orgasmic ecstasy that Wright’s choreography disappointingly portrays.

Manners writes about ‘essential shared experiences that unite us’, thus if you have experienced any unconditional compassion, sacrifice, understanding or companionship you won’t appreciate the animalistic content of the supposed ‘lessening’ of ‘difference’. You will leave feeling sad and empty that the agreed and here portrayed concept of universal love is so far from the truth. The attempt to define our common humanity is lost as I couldn’t feel more different. Spiritual love and physical love is never simultaneously explored, unless in the case that two spiritually awakened people who love each other, become one.

Review Two

Broadsheet such as The Guardian

Word Count, 433

Dance Review – The Theatre Royal, Winchester – 03 October 2011

Ballet Black’s 10th Anniversary Gala Performance

In celebration of their 10th anniversary Cassa Pancho’s Ballet Black gave a showcase of distinguished variety, starting flirtatiously as the music’s lyrics repeatedly ebb and flow ‘falling in love’. Confident smiles from the dancers invite us to participate in the atmosphere they create. Short red skirts expose muscularity and Sarah Kundi demonstrates assured use of line and high extensions, dynamic or controlled as required.

Robert Hylton's Human Revolution sees Cira Robinson and Jazmon Voss run towards one another so their faces meet consequently close. There is no music to begin, only silent intensity which encourages a sense of rivalry. They each perform solos while the other intently gazing, muscles fired in eager anticipation. When the music does start it sounds like a heart beat which is visually interoperated with circular pacing intercepted with immaculate precision and poise. Traditional ballet pirouettes as would be seen in a coda overlay ingenious craftsmanship because they are repeated a second time so that the turns coincided. Robinson slaps Voss’s chest and then spins away from him but he pulls her towards himself and lifts her. Now they move in clockwork unison…did anyone in the auditorium remember to breathe?  Thus, Da Gamba which followed seemed disappointingly unconvincing and excessively cordial in comparison, but being his first choreography for those who don point shoes we must commend Henry Oguiki for his creation to Bach’s Cello Suite in D minor.

Shift, Trip … Catch was choreographed in 2005 by Antonia Franceschi who used to dance as an apprentice with New York City Ballet and has since taught for Rambert Dance Company and Richard Alston. The piece shows off a sassy Kundi and Robinson dressed in white bikinis, and they incorporate hip and torso undulations between bourrées executed with powerful limbs stabbing the floor like needles.

After interval the gala came to an end with a long winded narrative piece, the first ‘story’ to belong to the company’s repertoire. Orpheus was choreographed by Will Tuckett who trained at The Royal Ballet School and he has since choreographed for English National Ballet and The Royal Ballet. Tuckett uses a Stravinsky score to narrate the story of Orpheus elegantly performed by Ballet Black’s longest serving Damien Johnson, whose character removes his blindfold prematurely and as a result tragically loses his wife Euradice performed by Sarah Kundi. It is very vivid when at the penultimate scene, the furies eat Orpheus like interrogators who become dogs ‘devouring’ with animalistic movement and the odd twitch as means to confirm if he is dead.

Review Three

Broadsheet such as The Guardian

Word Count 581

Dance Film Review - Caught, The Envelope, and Nacscimetno - Parsons Dance Company

The David Parsons Dance Company was founded in 1985 by the commercially successful David Parsons who has since created over 70 works for his company. The ten full time dancers do an annual New York season, otherwise touring nationally and internationally for 32 weeks of the year.

Parsons is renowned for creating multidimensional works, with a strong interest in technology, interested in how much can be said through a picture depending on whether the decisive moment is captured or not. Parsons performs a solo Caught with music by Robert Fripp and lighting that he designed himself. Flashes of light allow split second glimpses so the audience speculates ‘where is he?’ Sometimes he is ‘caught’ mid leap, alternatively travelling so fast that we see him in one flash, and in the next; at the opposite end of the stage, and we begin to wonder if we are missing anything.

The Envelope explores moving objects, with cheeky, plucky music by Rossinni that suitably compliments the tiptoeing and slinking entrances. The seven dancers are clad in black costumes designed by Judy Wirkula, they also have Arabian headscarves scarves and incongruous dark glasses. A dancer determinedly throws an envelope off stage, quite repeatedly in-between multiple turns, but alas the envelope keeps flying back at him. The other dancer’s join in the fascination make rectangular shapes with their arms, stacked up like a stepladder. They circumspectly place the envelope in their mouths before strategically dropping it or they might have an obsession with passing it on to one another, twitching whenever it is received but eager to be rid of it. There is a’ four cygnets’ parody with arms linked and travelling footwork leading into soldier’s kicks which triggers the rolling out of a carpet and so the passing of the envelope becomes regimental. In the slow solo, Parsons holds his ankles in a crouch, as though a reflective bullfrog on a lily pad, but the piece ends quite nonsensically and ironically because as the envelope finally leaves, another is thrown on.

Nacscimetno is based on Brazilian social dancing with people having a good night on the town with everyday clothes, costume by Santo Loquasto, and music by the composer Milton Nacsimento whose name constitutes to the title. The piece commences with a male dancer travelling towards and around his female interest. It’s as though he kisses her cheek, ‘boy meets girl’ and she is moving too, animated with enchanting leaps and turns that wind up like a corkscrew and then release back. The eight dancers fill the space, alive with skipping that moves both backward and forward with sudden changes of direction. Girls run to jump to be caught and spun around by their male partners and the unfolding skip or a springy ‘grape vine’ sequence definitely reminds one of social dancing. As a conclusion approaches the original couple just walk slowly, and stand amongst the frenzy which then stops too and in close proximity to one another the group lunges and sways from side to side with sweeping arm movements, like a slow windmill that gathers pace. They all fall to the floor leaving just one of their community standing, but then they all make a soft cluster with heads rested on one another as to slumber, and oh so gently uncurl to stand and form a horizontal line, their arms linked across their backs to walk away from us.

Review Four

Broadsheet such as The Guardian

Word count 401

Dance Film Review - Esplanade (1975) by the Paul Taylor Dance Company -

Video Published in 1988

Inspired by simply watching people going about daily life in the street, Esplanade, choreographed by pioneering American modern dance choreographer Paul Taylor, is based on everyday movements such as skipping, running, jumping and walking. Taylor intended to use physical people, and they do maintain high energy throughout the piece in a manner beyond the average person’s capabilities, but it is skilful choreography and modification of the ‘pedestrian’ movements that constitutes the piece to becoming ‘dance’.

This is a joyous piece and Taylor’s famously athletic company certainly enjoy to move, and move they do because their bodies are habituated to his capabilities to push non-dance movement into the realms of rich dance. Esplenade is a captivating piece that tests perceptions because Taylor stopped dancing the year before it was made, beginning to choreograph without the reliability of his own movement vocabulary choosing ordinary movement, and we gasp at the genius of it.

There is an element of relational humanity expressed in Esplanade which compliments the inevitably cheerful music by Jan Sebastian Bach. The bright blue background as stage set and the choice to have each dancer in an individual colour ranging from pink, to peach to lavender add a playful quality to the overall visual experience. Taylor aimed to provide food for the eye; engaging the senses of his audience.

Although in the genre of pure-dance there is a glimpse of characterisation and narrative portrayed through slow sections where couples embrace, or a female dancer might kneel close to her male partner who places a hand on her head as though to soothe or provide comfort and reassurance. Dancers gesture reaching out and towards to walk slowly surveying their surroundings with calculated gaze.

However most movement exists fast-paced - as if in a playground with spatial patterns altered and rearranged almost by accident; sometimes the nine dancers (six women, three men) all move together, running in a large circle, then without warning cluster and clump. No lines in space, vertical, horizontal and diagonal are left unexplored. Female dancers literally run and leap, flinging themselves towards respective male partners in the trust that they will be caught, so the total commitment to each movement is exhilarating. Taylor has certainly succeeded in presenting a delectable visual platter.

Review Five

Broadsheet such as The Guardian

Word count 400

Dance Review - The Point, Eastleigh – 05 October 2011

The Featherstonehaughs say a final goodbye with Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele

Choreographer Lea Anderson presents a re-working of the 1998 hit, Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele inspired by the Austrian 20^th Century figurative painter. Anderson’s craftsmanship takes us on a journey of intricate tense movement between exact poses of stillness as intimidating eyes stare out from hauntingly painted faces. The six all-male Featherstonehaughs wear audacious suits that are textured stiff with bright coloured paint designed by Sandy Powell. They literally become sketches using splayed fingers iconic from figures in Schiele’s thirteen sketchbooks.

Sometimes in the silence we hear the sound of the dancer’s shoes but the electric guitar and set of drums have a powerful influence too. Played live so the molecules fill the space the music is performed by Steve Blake and Will Saunders who also composed it. Anderson decided to set the piece to new music because, as she explains in her pre-show talk, ‘it didn’t quite fit before’ and she has a particular love for live music and the atmosphere it creates.

At one point in the piece three of the Featherstonehaughs move together, and when I say together I mean they are ‘just’ walking across the stage but one cannot help being impressed at legs moving in mechanical perfection. Spatial patterns and stances are presented before they stop… another pair has been staring at them like voyeurs but now take a turn to move with an uneasy jittery quality. This interplay between the two groups continues and a sense of aggression builds particularly since some of the stances reek with attitude. One wonders if this is a piece about zombie like mannequins come to life or a catwalk gone wrong but the eye so appreciates the repetition and the shapes created.

One might ask if they actually move, will the pace increase, is this a build-up …and if you hold these questions you are rewarded; the movement does become fast and frenetic with them all moving simultaneously. Suits are replaced with Powell’s skin tight ‘nudity costumes’ (painted red nipples, extenuated genitals and pubic hair). We see the versatility of the performers who were ridged with tense movement before, but now execute fluidity and control of curved continuous shapes. The Featherstonehaughs culminate an unforgettably impressionable goodbye, demonstrating their accomplishment since their founding in 1988.