Recent Articles
Showing posts with label dance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dance. Show all posts
Friday, January 17, 2020
Friday, January 17, 2020
- 0 Comments
Rating: 
I thought I'd made a big mistake coming to see Project O's Voodoo. It had been a long day at work and I'd cleared my mind with a long run in the evening. So by 9pm at the Lilian Baylis Studio in Sadler's Wells I was pretty snoozy. Worse, I was told by the staff there that I couldn't even take a cup of tea into the show to help keep my eyes open.
I thought I'd made a big mistake coming to see Project O's Voodoo. It had been a long day at work and I'd cleared my mind with a long run in the evening. So by 9pm at the Lilian Baylis Studio in Sadler's Wells I was pretty snoozy. Worse, I was told by the staff there that I couldn't even take a cup of tea into the show to help keep my eyes open.
Smash cut to 90 minutes later. I'm pepped up and full of beans, dancing my ass off in a hazy, dark and moodily lit room to a banging electro number. My route here involved smashing stuff up with a hammer, watching people writhe like maggots, a 1980s power ballad with balloon-based percussion and raising a shot glass to nothing in particular.
Project O are Alexandrina Hemsley and Jamila Johnson-Small, with Voodoo billing itself as "a science fiction addressing the desire, confusion and responsibility of being a single subject who is also a symbol of many long-persecuted people". Generally, descriptions like that don't bode well, but Voodoo is actually pretty straightforward about what it's doing.
The show begins with a lengthy introduction as the audience are seated in groups of five, watching a slowly scrolling list of events projected onto a wall. These cover historical events like suffragette Emily Davison walking in front of the King's horse in the 1913 Derby, pop culture moments like the 1997 release of Men in Black, odd snippets of history like the 1998 Japanese release of the Sega Mega Drive, and deeply personal moments for the performers, like being informed their father has died or meeting their future husband.
The list encourages you to find links between the events, teasing various arcs of political and social evolution over mankind's history. Here the medical positions of Ancient Greek doctors sit side by side with the release of Spiceworld in 1997. But the chronology is cut off mid-stream when Hemsley and Johnson-Small emerge with hammers and smash it up.
I am not hard to please when it comes to entertainment, but even I was surprised how much I enjoyed the simple cathartic act of watching someone smash up a wall with a hammer. As they do this the air gradually fills with dust and small wooden shards litter the floor. The smashing of all this information indicates a clearing of the decks for the new - so it's appropriate that soon after both performers undergo a caterpillar-like transformation via white fabric chrysalises.
Soon after the performance space itself transforms, with the audience being asked to remove their shoes and stash their coats. It is at this point that I regret wearing clearly mismatched socks, having figured after my run that I'd only be wearing them for a few hours. Oh well.
This eventually leads into the audience lying on the floor, the performers solemnly telling us to listen to our heartbeats. As we do we're gently encouraged to feel its rhythm and the gently pulsing soundtrack. Gradually we move to our feet as the music picks up, and everyone begins dancing like they're a few shots in.
At this point, I'd usually toss in a warning for introverted audience members that you're fully expected to participate in the show - but if you turn up to an "immersive dance performance" you probably know what you're getting into. Me? I loved it. As I danced I felt myself shaking out the stress and fatigue of the day, enjoying getting into the rhythm.
The point of all this seems to be the creation of a new identity that understands the past but isn't defined by it. It often feels as if performers of colour - especially black performers - are encouraged to channel a mindboggling long and cruel history of racial atrocities into their work. It's an unfair burden and Voodoo attempts to chip some of that accreted shit away and rediscover yourself through physical motion and connection with your body's mechanics.
That it can be that and a damn good time is impressive stuff. I was enjoying myself so much that one of the assistants had to come and tell me to stop dancing as the performance was over. Jokes on her, I was dancing all the way home.
Project O - Voodoo is at the Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells until Saturday 18th January. Tickets here.
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
- 0 Comments
Even just a couple of hours after seeing it, Jasmin Vardimon's Medusa is already becoming a kaleidoscopic tangle of images in my head. Men clutching their collapsing, tubular heads. Women-dolls swept off stage with a broom like trash. A shadow fighting to overthrow its owner. A woman with her head encased in coils of rope. A sunbather in a gas mask reclining under industrial smokestacks.
After many years of reviewing shows I've (perhaps unfairly) developed a slight scepticism about dance theatre. This is partly because the subtleties usually go straight over my head, but also partly because they seem like an open invitation for performers and creators to disappear up their own arses.
Medusa doesn't do that - and even if they did they'd make it look cool. This is presenting a focused, entertaining and chill-inducingly perceptive look at the various manifestations of misogyny in society.
A warning for fans of Greek mythology: this is is in no way a retelling of the story of Medusa. The snake-haired gorgon does appear, but this is more of a meditation on the themes, meaning and legacy of the character. Thematic threads include Medusa's petrifying and transformative gaze, that in many European languages the word for jellyfish is 'medusa', Sartre's notion of Medusa's 'objectifying gaze' and a distinctly contemporary demolition of male entitlement with a distinctly #metoo flavour too it.
There's a lot going on besides that, but Vardimon weaves it all into a propulsive, taut and powerfully engaging piece of theatre that has a palpable intellectual depth and anger as its bedrock.
My favourite bits tended to involve vast billowing sheets of plastic spread across the stage. Though physically fragile they end up bearing a hell of a lot of thematic weight - being simultaneously the ocean waves, the body of a jellyfish, an indication of how female sexuality is packaged and commodified, the suffocation and silencing of women, a symbol of ecological damage amidst an increasingly artificial world and... well, you get the picture.
Though not everything in the show achieves this rich depth, most things come pretty damn close. It gives proceedings a fractal element, the closer you peer at what's going on and the harder you think about what you're seeing the more layers of meaning you excavate.
That excavation isn't the walk in the park it might be with some other shows as Medusa fearlessly strides into extreme territory. There's a barely abstracted gang-rape towards the show's conclusion, dramatising the mythological Medusa's rape by Poseidon and her subsequent snakes-for-hair punishment by Athena.
Here a female dancer falls prey to countless spidery male hands that claw at her genitals as she struggles to break free. These hands travel up her body and obscure her face, eventually leaving her face ringed by a halo of shuddering fingers standing in for snakes. It's magnetic stuff and a moment that's destined to float around in my head for some time to come yet.
I'm just scratching the surface of what's in the rest of Medusa. While I don't know that much about dance, it's obvious that these are real top-of-the-line performers (with Joshua Smith's preeningly entitled man an obvious highlight), the show looks absolutely fantastic from start to finish and the soundtrack, which mixes classical with pop (the best song being Yael Naïm's grrrreat New Soul) and electronica (including Aphex Twin - be still my beating heart!), kicks ass.
To be honest, the whole package kicks ass in a sustained and impressively thorough manner. Medusa is billed as a celebration of the company's 20th anniversary - I can't think of a better way they could have showcased their talents.
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Sunday, August 6, 2017
- 0 Comments
Rating: 
What is a man but his memories? Theatre Re's The Nature of Forgetting is a descent through a shattered mind, our hero clutching at his fading memories as they trickle like sand through his fingers. This is Tom (the excellent Guilliame Pigé), a middle-aged teacher suffering from early onset dementia. Once quick-witted, knowledgeable and charismatic, he's now dependant on his daughter Sophie (Louise Wilcox), who he cannot help but mistake for his (possibly) dead wife.
We open to Isabella helping Tom to get dressed before the arrival of family and friends. She repeatedly explains that he must put on the dark blue jacket on the end of the rail, and that there's a red tie in the pocket. but as he stands the words warp and change and, as he peruses the clothes in front of him, he tumbles down a rabbit hole of memories.
We experience his days as a boy in school, where the relationships that have anchored his life were formed. We see him play with his friends (Matthew Austin and Eygló Belafonte) He grows up and experiences the blossoming of love for his school sweetheart Sophie, who will later become his wife. From here we gradually climb up the ladder to the present, stopping off at graduation, weddings and the birth of a child. But there's something darker interspersed with these golden memories. Like a shard of ice, we repeatedly cut to a harshly lit argument inside a moving car, which terminates with an ominous squeal of brakes and car horns.
Storytelling is via intense and expert physical theatre combining elements of contemporary dance and mime and soundtracked by a powerful live score. The cast moving with clockwork precision as they perform what feels like memories of memories, as if the protagonist is doing his best to patch the gaps before the ragged remains completely disintegrate.
Watching a man dangling over a vast abyss of nothingness, frantically shoring up whatever memories he has left is, frankly, pretty freakin' terrifying. Slow mental collapse is right up there as far as existential fears go; the very core of who you are gradually hollowing out to leave a malfunctioning shell doing a confused, nonsensical impression of the person it once was *shiver*.
What makes The Nature of Forgetting especially horrifying is the sense that Tom knows something is wrong with him, but he cannot quite put his finger on what. There are repeated scenes in which the structure of his memory begins to collapse and he frantically tries to put it back together, as if playing a losing game of spinning plates. The programme explains that the piece was developed in collaboration with a UCL neuroscientist and ideas were taken from interviews with dementia patients, and knowing that it's based on research makes The Nature of Forgetting more terrifying.
The show knocks its big themes out of the park - communicating the reality of dementia in a terrifyingly visceral way. But under these big ideas are a plethora of little moments that act as emotional punctuation marks. The tiny moment where Tom smells his future wife's hair, his best man losing the ring at the wedding for a moment, the way his teacher would lower his head to the desk as he moved past. It's a credit to the show that these important, smaller moments are comprehensible within big physical moments like the impressive bicycle sequence.
The action is fantastically soundtracked by Alex Judd's fantastic live score. There's a fascinating glitch audio effect when the memory begins to fall apart, as if a record is quietly skipping on a turntable. This is a score all about a tick-tock rhythm, repeatedly building to percussion and violin crescendoes as the action gets ever more intense before falling apart, sending Tom chronologically spinning through his life. The cast and musicians are talented enough that it never feels like the action is driving the music or vice versa, rather than they're in perfect equilibrium with one another.
This is an extraordinary production that knocks most of what I've seen at the Fringe this year into a cocked hat. I reviewed Theatre Re's last show, Blind Man's Song, last year, and enjoyed it without being fully convinced. Now I am. The Nature of Forgetting isn't exactly super happy fun times, but it is goddamn amazing.
The Nature of Forgetting is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh Aug 6-13, 15-27. Tickets here.
Thursday, November 17, 2016
Thursday, November 17, 2016
- 0 Comments
Princess is completely baffling. It bills itself as "finding the feminism in Disney", yet feels more like being trapped in a shitty goth nightclub. Rather than some exploration of gender politics, this is primarily a bunch of attractive dancers in bad wigs hurling themselves around the stage to dated plastic pop music.
Tautly muscled men in papier mache rabbit heads strike poses, women dressed like cheerleaders in a Marilyn Manson video shake their asses, a troupe of people with hexagonal heads march across the stage. At one point someone perches in a giant wobbly teacup. With furrowed brow and thoroughly scratched head, a couple of words reverberated around the inside of my skull: what the fuck is this?!
It's never a good sign when you have to retreat to the programme to understand what you're looking at, but sometimes you don't really have a choice. So, twenty minutes I gave in and popped it open, to be told that a summary of what I was watching right now was "to be a true princess one must submit to all the wishes and woes, the young girl fails to be initiated. Striving to become the perfect princess she must shake of [sic] her demons". I glanced back up at the stage to see a topless dude barrelling around the stage flapping big glittery wings. Hmmm.
This general bewilderment never lifted. Without the programme's (somewhat garbled) assistance I doubt I'd ever have worked out even the broad strokes out of the plot - which is apparently about a young girl's self empowerment through.. uh.. princesses? I guess? Smothered deep within the impenetrable choreography, boring pop music and revealing costumes there's apparently some kind of deconstruction of the princess archetype, but it's so faint you want to call up the Large Hadron Collider dudes and ask them to work on unearthing it.
This vagueness, coupled with the fact that much of the show features sexy girls in revealing costumes wiggling their butts, makes Princess's claims of "finding feminism in Disney" risible. Giving it as much credit as possible, the conclusion that animated princesses are questionable role models for young girls begs to be met with a deadpan "well duh."
By the midway point most people will have concluded that if it doesn't make sense by now, it's probably not ever going to. So you just check out and enjoy the skimpily clad dancers cavorting around in front of you. On this base level of appreciation Princess scrapes by - I'm not going to sit here and deny I don't enjoy watching attractive people writhing around in silly costumes. But even the dancing looks a little under rehearsed. I'm usually pretty easy to please on this front, but even I notice that the performers are off the beat, out of sync with each other and/or missing their cues.
Let's face it, it's never a good omen when one person simultaneously writes, directs, choreographs, sings the songs and produces a show. There are a handful of multitasking polymath geniuses out there, but all too often it's a sign that you're in for a vanity project. When you've had as much experience with crappy theatre as I have, you can read between the lines and realise that it's less that the show could only ever work with one person doing all these jobs and more that everyone else realised early on that they'd be onto a loser.
By all accounts the guy responsible for this, Stuart Saint, is a talented dude. He's done five straight years of well received panto in the Leicester Square Theatre, and you can tell Princess is something of a passion project for him. In interview he explains that Princess has been worked on since 1996(!!!), and this extended creative gestation has done the show no favours whatsoever. Sometimes you've got to face up to the fact that, even with 20 years of work behind you, it's sometimes best to 'kill your darlings'.
Saint would have done well to heed the words of a latter-day Disney Princess and let it go, because this lumpen heap of 'I don't know what the fuck' is pleasing nobody.
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Saturday, April 30, 2016
- 0 Comments
John Milton said "To be blind is not miserable; not to be able to bear blindness, that is miserable." It's a sentiment that feels appropriate to Theatre Re's Blind Man's Song; an interpretive dance performance that attempts to recreate the imagination of a born-blind musician.
Sparsely staged; props are limited to a cane, bed and a selection of musical instruments within a piano. As the blind man (Alex Judd) plays a song he's visually accompanied by an abstracted romance. It's 'yer basic boy meets girl story, kicked off by a chance contact and developing into something passionate and heartfelt. The couple are dancers Guillaime Pigé and Selma Roth, clad in red and green and with cloth wrapped around their heads.
The narrative eschews words and is told in broad strokes. So broad that if you approach Blind Man's Song hoping to be told a story you're liable to come away rather disappointed. Instead this is a show about communication through movement, music and touch - attempting to understand the ways in which person without sight might perceive the world.
Apparently taking visual inspiration from Magritte's Lovers II, erasing the dancer's visual features forces the audience to understand them through body language. Pigé and Roth are beautifully expressive dancers, each constantly informed by the others motions as they show us a developing romance. At times Pigé reminded me of Gene Kelly stomping through the rain, hat and cane swirling through the air, his movements brimming over with personality and character.
For me, the most impressive moment came early on, as the two lovers' first contact is endlessly looped in the blind man's memory. Emerging from a train, they accidentally collide, this couple of seconds endless replaying - a plaintive piano chord repeating at their first touch. Gradually the speed is dialled down, until this tiny, forgotten fragment of time becomes invested with big heaping dollops of juicy meaning.
All through this, Alex Judd (who also wrote the music), makes for a neatly scrappy presence on piano and fiddle. He looks like a refugee from a production of Oliver Twist, all scruffy leather coat, vintage sunglasses and lovelorn expressions. He's the mystery at the core of the show, one that's slowly unspun as we work through the contents of his head.
At just an hour long, Blind Man's Song moves along at a pretty breezy pace. That said, there were times when the somnolent qualities of the music got to me a bit and, after a long day, my concentration occasionally drifted a little, not exactly helped by a scene in which the characters themselves go to bed. I didn't get as bad as the guy in front of me though; after a particularly dreamy bit he emitted a guttural honk of a snore, causing his wife to give him a sharp elbow in the ribs.
Anyone that did silently drift off into unconsciousness was in for a shock. Towards the end of the show there's this piercingly sharp sine blare that just goes on and on and on, I guess to present the character's mental turmoil. It's a bit of a shock that such a relatively sedate show is willing to dish out audio trauma on its audience, and I noticed a couple of people covering their ears to escape it. I personally found it annoying at first, but I appreciate aggressive theatre and, hell, at least it woke me the hell up.
I imagine the ideal attendee for Blind Man's Song to be an enthusiastic and knowledgeable follower of contemporary dance. That's not me, but I enjoyed myself nonetheless. It's the kind of show where you get out as much as you're willing to put in.
★★★
Blind Man's Song is at The Pleasance until 15 May. Tickets here.
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Wednesday, April 20, 2016
- 0 Comments
Circus is usually all about razzle-dazzle. Sequined costumes, rictus grins, glittery lipstick, flaming rings - stuff like that. Circa push against all that, their shows straddling contemporary dance and circus via sleek monochrome minimalism. Their latest at the South Bank's Udderbelly is Closer, which, as its name suggests, is all about intimacy and physical contact: the acrobatics of human interaction.
With front row seats I got to observe them at close range. Awe is all but inevitable on viewing intense feats of strength, balance and timing. To a classily refined indie-tinged soundtrack they tie themselves up in knots high above the hard floor, arrange themselves atop one another into living human sculptures and confidently stroll over each other's strong-as-steel bodies. Best of all, at close range you observe the tiny tics that others might miss: quickly fading crimson hand-prints on backs; eyes locked ahead in fierce concentration while subtly shifting your weight to maintain balance; or the exhalation after successfully enduring four people standing atop your body.
Simply performing feats like this is worthy of praise. The audience gasps and applauds with each triumphant moment, each of us marvelling at the dedication needed to tune the human body to such a high standard of excellence. Frankly, just watching attractive, incredibly fit people in skintight lycra flexing their muscles is far from the worst time you can have in London on a Tuesday night.
And yet I found myself surprisingly unmoved by Closer. At least for the first two thirds the performers appeared to have been instructed to display no personality or emotion. While that fits right in with the minimalist musical setlist and staging, it got a bit creepily cold-hearted. Despite obviously the five having perfect trust and synchronisation, I couldn't detect any camaraderie or even pleasure in their movements.
Staring into the blank, expressionless face of someone dangling, motionless, from a trapeze made me think of dolls, robots or puppets - presumably rather far from the intimacy they appear to be going for. The parade of hyper-taut flexing bodies eventually reminded me of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia; in which the muscled human form is fetishised by the fascist film-maker, linking her subjects to ancient Greek statuary.
Mercifully, things take a turn for the personable in the final couple of segments. Some audience interaction is pleasant and amusingly flirty, splashing a bit of much-needed comedy into affairs. Similarly, a spirited hula-hoop routine, while not exactly breaking new ground, is as good as any hoop routine I've seen previously. There's even a spot of karaoke where we're asked to sing along with The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony (though, confusingly this doesn't seem to actually go anywhere).
It feels a little churlish to criticise performers like this. They're close to the pinnacle of human physical perfection, their physiques the product of hours of pain, gallons of sweat and rivers of tears. Who can imagine what they've had to sacrifice to be able to entertain us like this? Even so, about two thirds of Closer left me cold - far from feeling closer I felt like the performers were consciously distancing themselves from the audience and from each other.
★★★
Circa: Closer is at the Udderbelly until 12th June 2016. Tickets here.
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
Tuesday, March 22, 2016
- 0 Comments
I don't know much about ballet, but I know what I like. And I like Ballet Black. Founded by Cassa Pancho, the company's goal is to grant black and Asian dancers an opportunity to shine. Sadly, black and Asian dancers are overlooked for major roles, Carlos Acosta perhaps putting it best: "There is this mentality, especially with directors, that a black ballerina in the middle of a flock of white swans would somehow alter the harmony."
Ballet Black not only tours shows that showcase their extraordinarily talented dancers but run the popular Ballet Black Junior School and an Associate Programme (with 400 members), in the hope that they can inspire a new generation of dancers.
I know all this because I attended an open rehearsal for the show. There I got to know the dancers as human beings rather than as unapproachable epitomes of physical perfection, got to see the construction of the choreography and heard explanations of pretty much everything they was going on on stage. This is invaluable for a neophyte like me - ballet's always seemed like a world where everyone assumes you know your arrière from your sissonne fermée (thanks Google).
After very much enjoying the rehearsal I was eager how the sketch I'd seen would translate to a full picture. Divided into three separate pieces, two short/one long, the show is constructed on the basis of 'something for everyone'. Indeed, each segment was markedly different from the others, offering a mixture of populist theatre and the avant-garde.
First up was Arthur Pita's Cristaux. I'd thought that Ballet Black would ease us in with something warm and personable, but Cristaux quickly proves anything but. Soundtracked by the jangling glockenspiel loops of Steve Reich's Drumming Part III, this is a coolly minimalist, almost mechanically precise demonstration of what the company is capable of.
Dancer Cira Robinson emerges in a crystal festooned tutu and tiara, the spotlight casting rays of light from it that gently discoball their way across the awed audience. It's an impressively attention grabbing introduction, only equalled by the moment when a gigantic crystal pendulum dramatically whooshes across the stage, apparently threatening to decapitate the dancers below. Robinson eventually intertwines with Mthuthuzeli November, the two mesmerisingly falling in and out of synchronisation - their motions occasionally giving the illusion that the two somehow physically meld.
As it ends it feels as if the audience collectively exhales - there's a general sense of "wow". Christopher Marney's To Begin, Begin has big shoes to fill. This is anchored by two elements, a large sheet of cobalt silk that weightlessly flutters around the stage and the magnetic stage presence of Sayaka Ichikawa. The two work through a series of eye-catching configurations; ranging from a costume to bondage to scenery. Contrasting the loose chaos of the silk with the precision of the dancers is effective, but lacks some of the oomph of the preceding piece.
After the internal is the main course: Christopher Hampson's Storyville. It tells the story of Nola (Cira Robinson) a young girl lost in New Orleans. She's a talented and natural dancer, but falls under the sway of salubrious nightclub owners Lulu and Mack. Gradually she sinks into a life of vice, the only ray of light in her life the love of an honest sailor.
Using a variety of Kurt Weill songs, there's a Cabaret-esque seedy tinge throughout, with Nola's plunge into the metaphorical (and later literal) underworld ably conveyed by smart choreography and a carefully chosen group of symbolic props. Highlights are when Nola's childhood doll is used to puppeteer her, voodoo style. As it's dropped Robinson perfectly and dramatically collapses onto the stage. Also impressive is a later scene of drunken hedonism, in which we see the interesting juxtaposition of drunken clumsiness and ballet, the dancers obviously relishing the challenge.
That said, though Storyville is an excellent showcase for the company and oozes style, I didn't feel half the emotional heft that I felt from the earlier conceptual pieces. The sustained focus on narrative didn't quite pay off, and despite a downer ending I didn't particularly feel the tang of tragedy that I'd anticipated.
Nitpicking? Perhaps. It's difficult for me to criticise performers this skilled - they left me thoroughly gobsmacked from start to finish. As promised, there's something for everyone here, though for me it's the boldly experimental modernist thrills of Cristaux that will stay with me the longest.
After very much enjoying the rehearsal I was eager how the sketch I'd seen would translate to a full picture. Divided into three separate pieces, two short/one long, the show is constructed on the basis of 'something for everyone'. Indeed, each segment was markedly different from the others, offering a mixture of populist theatre and the avant-garde.
First up was Arthur Pita's Cristaux. I'd thought that Ballet Black would ease us in with something warm and personable, but Cristaux quickly proves anything but. Soundtracked by the jangling glockenspiel loops of Steve Reich's Drumming Part III, this is a coolly minimalist, almost mechanically precise demonstration of what the company is capable of.
Dancer Cira Robinson emerges in a crystal festooned tutu and tiara, the spotlight casting rays of light from it that gently discoball their way across the awed audience. It's an impressively attention grabbing introduction, only equalled by the moment when a gigantic crystal pendulum dramatically whooshes across the stage, apparently threatening to decapitate the dancers below. Robinson eventually intertwines with Mthuthuzeli November, the two mesmerisingly falling in and out of synchronisation - their motions occasionally giving the illusion that the two somehow physically meld.
As it ends it feels as if the audience collectively exhales - there's a general sense of "wow". Christopher Marney's To Begin, Begin has big shoes to fill. This is anchored by two elements, a large sheet of cobalt silk that weightlessly flutters around the stage and the magnetic stage presence of Sayaka Ichikawa. The two work through a series of eye-catching configurations; ranging from a costume to bondage to scenery. Contrasting the loose chaos of the silk with the precision of the dancers is effective, but lacks some of the oomph of the preceding piece.
After the internal is the main course: Christopher Hampson's Storyville. It tells the story of Nola (Cira Robinson) a young girl lost in New Orleans. She's a talented and natural dancer, but falls under the sway of salubrious nightclub owners Lulu and Mack. Gradually she sinks into a life of vice, the only ray of light in her life the love of an honest sailor.
Using a variety of Kurt Weill songs, there's a Cabaret-esque seedy tinge throughout, with Nola's plunge into the metaphorical (and later literal) underworld ably conveyed by smart choreography and a carefully chosen group of symbolic props. Highlights are when Nola's childhood doll is used to puppeteer her, voodoo style. As it's dropped Robinson perfectly and dramatically collapses onto the stage. Also impressive is a later scene of drunken hedonism, in which we see the interesting juxtaposition of drunken clumsiness and ballet, the dancers obviously relishing the challenge.
That said, though Storyville is an excellent showcase for the company and oozes style, I didn't feel half the emotional heft that I felt from the earlier conceptual pieces. The sustained focus on narrative didn't quite pay off, and despite a downer ending I didn't particularly feel the tang of tragedy that I'd anticipated.
Nitpicking? Perhaps. It's difficult for me to criticise performers this skilled - they left me thoroughly gobsmacked from start to finish. As promised, there's something for everyone here, though for me it's the boldly experimental modernist thrills of Cristaux that will stay with me the longest.
★★★★
Ballet Black's Triple Bill is on tour throughout 2016. Tickets and info here.
Monday, December 14, 2015
Monday, December 14, 2015
- 0 Comments
Feels like it's been a while since I last sat in a drafty Hackney Wick warehouse watching East London artists at play. Christmas Wishlist, organised by Theatrefullstop, is a smörgåsbord of the arts; encompassing theatre, dance, monologues, comedy, circus acts, poetry and burlesque.
First up is We Play Projects with what is ominously described as an "avant garde musical". That's the kind of phrase that sends a chill through any critic's bones, imagining some impenetrable chunk of po-faced obscurantism. Fortunately, We Play Projects come at this with sense of humour and willingness to get a bit self-deprecating. As two performers lasciviously writhe around one another, while another chants "this must be art", a third annoyedly exclaims that she's not getting paid for any of this, worries about losing her wallet (then finds it) and finally heads to the bar to order a drink and gossip with the bartender. The performance ends with a bit of puking; to their credit I'm not sure whether it was real puke or not.
 |
| We Play Projects |
Next up is Jessica Andrade, who emerges to the rattlingly 90s tones of the Spice Girls' Spice Up Your Life. This is The Brownie Club, a comedic circus piece about the performer's memories of racism in school. Andrade proves to be impressively chameleonic, the most impressive moment coming as she dons a sari and, for a couple of minutes, plays the stereotypically submissive Asian girl, before lapsing back into her Londony tones.
Following that is the confessional Sex With Your Ex by Ese Ighorae. Raw and ragged, Ighorae snowballs from emotionally bruised to wounded to half-dead, explaining that to her ex she's "Lidl not Sainsburys". Ouch. Things only get darker from there; a performance infused with white-hot fury and miserable regret at those who've taken advantage of her, and worse, at herself for allowing them to.
More dance next with Emi Del Bene, fusing contemporary dance with Bharatanatyam. A likeable stage presence, she endears herself to us the moment she off-handedly remarks about how cold the floor is on her bare feet. To Fabrizio De André's Il sogno di Maria, del Bene expressively twirls and gesticulates, her motions translated into sound by the jingling bells on her feet. De Andre's song is about profane and anarchic readings of Christian religion, so it's appropriate that her dance includes ritual dancing from a different cultures. Perhaps it was a touch too literally choreographed (touching her back when the song mentions vertebrae for example), but given that the majority of the audience won't speak Italian, this is an easy criticism to duck.
Prior to the interval we get a spoken-word monologue from Adam Tyler. The organisers have been asked beforehand to tell us as little as possible about it, but from the first minute or so it's obvious what's going on. Tyler's playing the biblical Judas, out to explain himself and moan that he's become the byword for betrayal. In the delivery I detected more than a whiff of Tony Blair; behaving as if fancy rhetoric can paper over crimes against humanity.
Post interval, the next performer was Cici Noir with a short burlesque performance. To the rolling electric guitars of Carrie Underwood's Before He Cheats Noir squirms all over a chair and to slightly muted whoops partially strips. I haven't really got anything against burlesque, but this performance felt out of place amongst the other pieces. The best 'arty' burlesque has some kind of twist, but this was just someone taking off their clothes to MOR soft-rock.
 |
| Letters to Centre Stage |
Fortunately the next piece marked a definite up-tick in quality. Letters to Centre Stage, set within a Nigerian girls boarding school, consisted of an extended debate over Western reactions to the abduction of schoolgirls in Nigeria. The central character, played by Ese Ighorae, is a London born and raised girl unhappily relocated at the will of her uncle. She attempts to defend her position against the incisive comments of her classmates. Evocatively written and performed, the piece probes at the edges of British quasi-racist apathy to events in Africa, the lingering aftereffects of colonialism and the ineffectiveness of 'feel good' gestures in the face of genuine evil. It was brill - thrumming with the precise kind of electric directness I crave.
 |
| Dois Stupid Girls |
Next up was Dois Stupid Girls, with a circus themed comedic performance. I think the plot was about a girl wishing for an elf, then the two overcoming their suspicions with each other and becoming fast friends. Considering the generally festive tone of the invitation and venue, the night was up to this point a bit lacking in Christmassyness. Stupidity made up for it, a gentle and heartwarming piece that reminded me a bit of a live-action Pixar short.
The final performance was the balls-out craziness of Ugly Collective, with a "circus sex tragedy". In practice this involved some seriously dangerous looking stunts, involving walking across a broken glass and lying down in it, before charging about the stage with sharpened kitchen knives with reckless abandon. It's a bit scary to see something that looks genuinely dangerous on stage - reaching a height when they attaching carving knives to a woman's feet and encouragie her to wobble across the room like a particularly stabby penguin. The piece was performed with such wilful disregard for health and safety that the person sat next to me evacuated their seat in terror - a ringing endorsement. There were hints of Nietzsche throughout, but frankly I've got no goddamn idea what this was about. Fun to watch though.
 |
| Ugly Collective |
All in all a pretty damn fine night out. Grab-bags like these may be of variable quality, but common to all was a spirit of adventure and willingness to experiment. Also, I won a bottle of wine in the raffle, so there's a nicely alcoholic cherry on top of the cake.
Thursday, March 5, 2015
Thursday, March 5, 2015
- 0 Comments
Ten minutes into Romeo and Juliet the music stopped, the dancers disappeared and a contrite looking man walked on stage. He explained that the performance would be restarted as the projections weren't working. After a short wait they were fixed and we tried again. This time each character was introduced with a large projection of their character's name behind them. What I found fascinating was that even without the projections it was plainly obvious who was who purely through body language and staging.
The stomping, muscled bad-boy? Well that's Tybalt. The robed man with the Shaolin dance style? Friar Lawrence. The leaping, graceful and vivacious teenage girl? No prizes for figuring that one out. That the show was this communicative so quickly bodes well, especially given my slight misgivings about ballet.
Despite enjoying the ballet movie subgenre (both Red Shoes and Black Swan are faves), my sole direct experience a sceptical 13 year old me being dragged to Swan Lake. After an hour of flouncy, tutu clad leaping I was bored to tears. But perhaps now, with a bit of cultural experience under my belt (and a smidge more patience) this ballet might just be the one for me.
Then again, maybe if 13 year old me had been taken to a ballet that featured the music of Jay Z, Katy Perry, LMFAO, My Chemical Romance and Lady Gaga I might have perked up a bit. This production, by BAD BOYS OF DANCE, directed by Rasta Thomas and choreographed by Adrienne Canterna, sticks a mischievous middle finger in the face of snootily tuxedoed 'high' culture - popping Prokofiev on the same cultural shelf as Party Rock Anthem.
Given that Romeo and Juliet is the story of two rebellious teenagers thumbing their noses at an ossified society and getting mad rutty, the obnoxiously punk attitude fits the material to a tee. The show is fuelled by the idea of kicking back against authority, which it does through gravity-defying somersaults and backflips, hip-hop influences in the dancing and the (slightly Baz Luhrmann influenced) fashions, which run the gamut from Gaga-ish art couture to Latin street gangs.
.jpg)
Watching a narrative told through contemporary dance, even one as familiar as Romeo and Juliet, requires the audience to up their observational skills. Every facial expression, kick, bounce and gesticulation adds up to complex visual vocabulary. Whether you could watch this production while entirely ignorant of the story and pick up what's going on is iffy (they summarise the entire plot in the programme), but snatches of Shakespeare's dialogue spring to mind unbidden throughout, communicated purely through motion. Mercutio's strangled "A plague o' both your houses!" comes through as clear as day, as does Romeo's hushed "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?".
Smooth as the dancing is, the slightly clunky pacing distracts. Rather than present a continuous narrative, the show is broken into 24 separate sequences, between which the stage is cleared and we dutifully applaud. If I were being charitable I'd suggest that this is to emulate the atmosphere of a pop concert, but realistically it's because these disparate songs don't quite fit together. While enjoyable as is, I can't help but feel this might have become stratospherically wonderful if they'd manage to mash each song into the next, 2 Many DJs style.
As such, the experience is less that we're watching Romeo and Juliet and more that we're watching a Romeo and Juliet themed pop show. There's a decent argument that this makes it a bit plasticky - but then ephemeral, uncynical pop trifles are very much my bag. Anyway, regardless of all other concerns, seeing a daydreaming Juliet ecstatically dancing to Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, or their wedding soundtracked to Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory (complete with a hippie dance sextet), light up the pleasure centres of my brain like few other things I've seen on stage.
.jpg)
Even if you're not into the whole pop thing, you can't help but appreciate the sheer skill of the dancers involved. I couldn't rip my gaze from Adrienne Canterna's Juliet. With a shock of glossy platinum hair she looked oddly ephemeral, as if her skin was made of glass. That apparent fragility makes each one of these leaps, tosses and flips that much more impressive - as if she'd shatter into a thousand pieces if she fell. At the other end the scale is Ryan Carlson's mean-as-all-hell Tybalt, whose muscular gymnastics infuse every motion into aggressive.
I walked out of this show with a big smile on my face, swept up in the sheer performance energy throughout and the simple ballisness of squeezing Shakespeare and ballet into the same space as Bruno Mars and My Chemical Romance. On further reflection there's something intangibly missing: fragments of emotion that vanish into the narrative gaps. It all adds up to a hollow experience. But still, it's a hell of a fun hollow experience.
★★★
Romeo and Juliet is at the Peacock Theatre until 29th March. Tickets here.
Given that Romeo and Juliet is the story of two rebellious teenagers thumbing their noses at an ossified society and getting mad rutty, the obnoxiously punk attitude fits the material to a tee. The show is fuelled by the idea of kicking back against authority, which it does through gravity-defying somersaults and backflips, hip-hop influences in the dancing and the (slightly Baz Luhrmann influenced) fashions, which run the gamut from Gaga-ish art couture to Latin street gangs.
Watching a narrative told through contemporary dance, even one as familiar as Romeo and Juliet, requires the audience to up their observational skills. Every facial expression, kick, bounce and gesticulation adds up to complex visual vocabulary. Whether you could watch this production while entirely ignorant of the story and pick up what's going on is iffy (they summarise the entire plot in the programme), but snatches of Shakespeare's dialogue spring to mind unbidden throughout, communicated purely through motion. Mercutio's strangled "A plague o' both your houses!" comes through as clear as day, as does Romeo's hushed "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?".
Smooth as the dancing is, the slightly clunky pacing distracts. Rather than present a continuous narrative, the show is broken into 24 separate sequences, between which the stage is cleared and we dutifully applaud. If I were being charitable I'd suggest that this is to emulate the atmosphere of a pop concert, but realistically it's because these disparate songs don't quite fit together. While enjoyable as is, I can't help but feel this might have become stratospherically wonderful if they'd manage to mash each song into the next, 2 Many DJs style.
As such, the experience is less that we're watching Romeo and Juliet and more that we're watching a Romeo and Juliet themed pop show. There's a decent argument that this makes it a bit plasticky - but then ephemeral, uncynical pop trifles are very much my bag. Anyway, regardless of all other concerns, seeing a daydreaming Juliet ecstatically dancing to Katy Perry's Teenage Dream, or their wedding soundtracked to Lady Gaga's Edge of Glory (complete with a hippie dance sextet), light up the pleasure centres of my brain like few other things I've seen on stage.
Even if you're not into the whole pop thing, you can't help but appreciate the sheer skill of the dancers involved. I couldn't rip my gaze from Adrienne Canterna's Juliet. With a shock of glossy platinum hair she looked oddly ephemeral, as if her skin was made of glass. That apparent fragility makes each one of these leaps, tosses and flips that much more impressive - as if she'd shatter into a thousand pieces if she fell. At the other end the scale is Ryan Carlson's mean-as-all-hell Tybalt, whose muscular gymnastics infuse every motion into aggressive.
I walked out of this show with a big smile on my face, swept up in the sheer performance energy throughout and the simple ballisness of squeezing Shakespeare and ballet into the same space as Bruno Mars and My Chemical Romance. On further reflection there's something intangibly missing: fragments of emotion that vanish into the narrative gaps. It all adds up to a hollow experience. But still, it's a hell of a fun hollow experience.
★★★
Romeo and Juliet is at the Peacock Theatre until 29th March. Tickets here.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Monday, January 12, 2015
- 0 Comments
I try keep a cool, analytical mind at every event I attend, but there's only so much my brain can cope with when I'm presented with strobe lights, billowing clouds of dry ice and sexy girls in ape masks re-enacting the Planet of the Apes musical from The Simpsons. Dammit - I'm only human.
SuicideGirls is an online community, business and publishing concern founded with one goal: "to see hot punk rock girls naked." From this zen-like ideal sprung forth legions of snarling pale-skinned women with bad attitudes, fancifully dyed hair, clanking heaps of piercings and whose skin is covered in burning skulls, bloody knives and satanic symbols. These girls have bad news written all over them. Sometimes literally.
Founders Sean Stuhl and Missy Suicide may as well have struck oil when they hit upon this concept (though the tidal wave of gushing fluids they unleashed on the world is of a somewhat lighter shade). And so in a torrent of studded leather bras, Bettie Page fringes and barbell piercings they cornered the hipster/alternagirl/punk rock pin-up market, releasing books, DVDs, movies, video games, comics, magazines, music videos and an international tour. That last one, the Blackheart Burlesque, is where I come in.
It's a Saturday night in Camden Town, and the Electric Ballroom is packed to the rafters with the usual gang of punks, meatheads, geeks, sluts, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads, sadgoths and creeps. By a hair this is a mainly male crowd but there's a sizeable female contingent, who coolly survey the venue with kohl-lidded eyes. Everyone expectantly gazes towards the stage, hundred of heads bobbing in happy unison as Zack de la Rocha screams out the up-yours chorus of Killing in the Name Of and Kurt Cobain sings about mulattos, albinos and mosquitoes.
Then the women take to the stage. There's a chorus of obnoxious hoots from the meatheads, polite applause from the geeks and shrieks of pleasure from the sluts. Clad in animal onesies, they enter to the booming bass of Die Antwoord's trash-rap hit Cookie Thumper. Tossing primary coloured hair, shaking wobbly bits and sporting demented dominatrix grins, the girls groove in synchronisation, quickly discarding away the onesies and strutting about the stage wearing only black tape over their nipples and SuicideGirls branded knickers.
Theoretically burlesque is all about the quasi-mystical "art of the tease", but by the time Yolandi Visser has stopped ranting about her 'snoekie cookie' we've seen pretty much all of these women that we're going to. The next 90 or so minutes are repetitions on the same thing; combining something from cult/geek culture with tits, fire and loud music. So you get, among others, sexy Lara Croft, sexy Link from Zelda, sexy Pokemon, sexy The Little Mermaid and sexy Star Wars. You get the picture.
 |
| and sexy superheroes |
Can a show really maintain our attention for 90 minutes or so by doing what amounts to the same thing over and over again? Annoyingly the answer appears to be yes. There were moments during Blackheart Burlesque where I actively tried not to enjoy it. I couldn't. Maybe it was the beer, maybe it was being caught up in the crowd, maybe it was the enthusiasm radiating off the stage. Or maybe it was the tits and ass.
It's a bit depressing that I'm able to be led around so easily, the caveman part of my brain grabbing the controls and transforming me from cultured man-about-town to the kind of drooling dog-like creature you'd normally see in a Tex Avery cartoon. Dragging my eyes away from the stage for a moment I took a quick peek at the rest of the crowd. Line after line of glassy-eyed stares greeted me, mouths slightly hanging open to the point where you expect to see a legion of mop-wielding drool cleaners rolling up their sleeves as the curtain falls. God only knows what we look like from the perspective of the stage.
 |
| sexy stormtroopers |
Midway through comes two interludes that break things up a bit. The first is an apparently traditional crowd participation bit. The compère calls out to the "sexy girls" in the audience and invites them up on stage. To the glute wobbling bass of Major Lazer's Bubble Butt they're encouraged to gyrate, wiggle and show off a bit of skin. This splits the girls into two camps; the first eager to rip their clothes away and shake what they've got and those whose smiles slip into dread, realising they might have gotten in slightly over their head.
The philosophy of SuicideGirls is to empower women by granting those with non-mainstream bodies an opportunity to be adored. There's the odd moment where this feels a tad flimsy, none more so than a somewhat regrettable segment where a man from the audience is summoned on stage and ordered to memorise a sheet of paper. He's stymied by a gyrating Suicide Girl who flashes her arse, spreads her legs and rubs her tits in his face. This is less metropolitan, sexually liberated feminism and more Stella-soaked stag night in Margate.
 |
| This pic sums up the night pretty well. |
The Blackheart Burlesque is precision-engineered to appeal to people who grew up kissing people with tongue studs, tracing the outlines of tattoos on their partner's back and for whom liberally applying talcum powder is an essential part of the dressing up process. This subcultural veil is tossed over the whole affair, rendering it just about artistic enough to conceal the seamier strip-show routine that's the skeleton of the night.
If you squint a bit, toss down a couple of beers and stroke your chin you can just about convince yourself 'hey maybe this whole thing is a legitimate cultural exercise'. That's what I'm going to keep telling myself anyway.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
