Performance reviewed: 19 May

Summer in London can only mean two things: a plethora of outdoor music and dance performances, and outbreaks of gloomy British weather. Fortunately the latter didn’t deter audiences from venturing out to Anna Buonomo’s site-specific Story of a Night Pianist this weekend, and indeed the murky skies over east London sat rather well with the mood of this haunting narrative.

Set in Trinity Buoy Wharf, the site of London’s only lighthouse, Story of a Night Pianist tells the story of strange goings-on during composer Lorenzo Turchi Floris’s nocturnal playing sessions. The audience is led on a journey around the riverside location, animated by three dozen dancers dressed in Victorian rags; each time we turn a corner, a figure appears gasping and clutching from behind a wall or under the walkways. The effect is more discomfiting than Hammer-horror creepy; Turchi-Floris’s atmospheric score, played live, first on solo violin and later on piano, is melancholic rather than hair-raising.

The modern Docklands setting with its glass and steel walkways and the lights of the O2 Arena’s dome glinting in the background makes an effective contrast with the bodices and ruffles of the dancers’ costumes, seemingly from another world and time. We weave around industrial storage containers and along the wharfside, the journey throwing up surprising views and encouraging us to look into interesting nooks and crannies as a spooky narrative unfolds.

Brief snatches of looping actions, cropping up in and around the buildings and pathways, hint at some kind of violent trauma in the past. Two dancers wind around one another for comfort; a man and a woman struggle and grab at one another bodily; another figure gasps repeatedly as if coming up for air. Having the sequences repeat on a loop as we walk past is of course partly necessary to allow a moving audience to see, but also adds to the feeling that what we are viewing is a haunting imprint rather than a performance in the present. The movement comes in intense bursts; the dancers appear unaware of our presence, staring into space as if either we or they are not really there.

An unsettling stroll through the car-park – populated by sighing, crying, moaning bodies and a dancer who walks right through the moving column of viewers like a ghost through a wall – takes us into the body of the lighthouse itself for a conclusion that is poignant rather than bloodcurdling, the spectral figures trapped in their winding, coiling cycles of movement around Turchi-Floris’s swelling piano music. There are certainly worse places to be stuck for all eternity – the maestro plays his own swelling, filmic score with ravishing sensitivity. Buonomo’s dancers seem to find some comfort at least in the presence of one another, and the piano, before the end of the piece.

Delicate, affecting and full of enjoyable little surprises, Story of a Night Pianist is said to be based on a true story; the piece is so well-crafted it’s easy to imagine the eerie circumstances that gave rise to the original idea. There’s always something fascinating – and fascinatingly familiar – about the supernatural; yet even the most hardened of sceptics can’t fail to be moved by the detailed atmosphere that Buonomo builds up with her cast over 45 minutes.

Story of a Night Pianist was part of Big Dance 2012
www.bigdance2012.com

Originally created in 2010 for the inaugural UK Young Artists showcase in Derby, Matters of Life and Death is choreographer Katie Green’s eighth, and most substantial, work to date. Appearing here in its London premiere, the hour-long piece takes Graham Swift’s unsettling novel Waterland as its inspiration, in particular a scene in which four characters find a drowned body in a sluice and how this fatal discovery reverberates through their own lives.

Opening with a sequence performed in near-darkness, in which flashes of physical forms and suggestions of action are picked out by torchlight,_ Matters of Life and Death_ plays with the visual and the cinematic throughout its duration. The body discovered, a panicked Daniela Larsen is first on the scene, fretting and casting about herself for assistance. She is joined by three helpers, who hoist Adam Kirkham’s body from the water; just as it seems we have the measure of the skittish Larsen, and a more dispassionate Rebecca Yates, the scene rewinds and we view again from another character’s perspective. With clever wrapping and reversing, Green’s choreography makes visible the conflicting narratives of multiple narrators.

One might imagine a corpse would have little to do, but Kirkham’s body becomes animated in a series of flashback and dream sequences that illustrate his impact on the other characters. Marie Chabert seems to feel weighed down with guilt after the discovery, the world pressing in on her and Kirkham’s carcass heavy on her lap. Larsen fears the body reanimating and making erotic advances on her, ending in her own strangulation; Morgan Cloud imagines instead some kind of brotherly communion. The grim situation pushes all four into a frenzied whirl, bodies pushed off-kilter as lives are unbalanced by the discovery.

Max Perryment’s electronic soundscore is a superbly atmospheric accompaniment to the work; much like Green’s choreography, it’s evocative without being obvious. Green’s five agile dancers make nimble work of the emotional twists and turns, and keep the piece both enjoyably physical and admirably legible. The disquieting subject matter and troubled characters leave little room here for levity; dark as it is, Matters of Life and Death is an accomplished and highly watchable piece of dance theatre.

Q&A with Katie Green

www.madebykatiegreen.co.uk

Originally published at www.londondance.com

Bob Lockyer’s name might not be as instantly familiar as those of the artists he has helped to champion, but as a director and producer at the BBC and a founder member of Dance UK he has been a quiet but vital part of the UK dance scene for over forty years. It’s illustrative of this commitment that, instead of throwing a private shindig for his own 70th birthday, Lockyer instead decided to commission some of the UK’s leading dance artists to create new works and to show them at The Place in a birthday celebration that salutes emerging talents and household names alike.

Artists invited to create new works were Richard Alston, Rambert’s Mark Baldwin, Siobhan Davies, Wayne McGregor and Royal Ballet director Monica Mason. Baldwin and Alston chose to create pieces themselves; Mason, Davies and McGregor passed on the honour to others. The result is an eclectic programme of short works that ranges from the classical to the post-modern with excursions into abstract formalism and romantic narrative along the way.

Alston’s new piece, Isthmus, is danced by a quintet of Alston company members to a piece of the same name by contemporary Japanese composer Jo Kondo. There are hints of waves swelling and rippling in both Kondo’s music and the rolling tides of Alston’s choreography; dancers arc and sweep together, pause and wash away again. With its clean lines and gentle angles, Isthmus is reminiscent of some of Alston’s early pieces with Second Stride. For me, Nancy Nerantzi most fully captures the work’s sense of weight and undulating energy.

Final-year Royal Ballet School student Sebastian Goffin offers a short, lyrical duet for fellow students Mayara Magri and Skyler Martin. Set in a summer garden in the early Victorian era, the piece finds two young lovers relaxing on a bench while nearby musicians play. A sweet and simple illustration of young love, Papillon peaks a tad too soon; Magri is swept up into ecstatic arching lifts almost as soon as the music begins, leaving the lovers with nowhere to go as Dvorak’s music builds to a blissful climax. The two young leads work well together, however, dancing expressively as well as prettily.

Siobhan Davies selected images by Etienne-Jules Maray, one of the earliest dance photographers, for performer Charlie Morrissey to revive and re-create in The Way It Works Is This. Maray’s chronophotographic experiments, merging several consecutive frames into one image, blended science and art, and Morrissey’s solo captures that sense of fascination with the body as instrument as he steps, lunges and pads across the stage on all fours. Probably the most postmodern piece in the programme, The Way It Works Is This reveals that Davies and her collaborators still have their own senses of enquiry firmly and playfully intact.

Mark Baldwin’s Prayer is a more formal, neoclassical quartet. Inspired by the music’s structure – “a series of tunes which appear and float away in quick succession”, the piece starts with unrelated solos for each of four female dancers. The Rambert house style of minute articulations through the body, scoops with the torso and long-limbed extensions is much in evidence; as usual, the performers are exceptional but the piece itself rather appears and floats away without leaving much of an impression in the middle.

Loudest applause of the evening went to Daniela Neugebauer for her performance in Royal Ballet choreographic apprentice Robert Binet’s Lake Maligne, commissioned by Wayne McGregor. The demanding solo begins with lots of McGregor-esque double-jointed movement, snaking and popping limbs and joints in directions that can no longer truly be described as unexpected, but still don’t look quite human. A strong white light casts an inky shadow that gives the movement an extra dimension, shrinking and growing as Neugebauer winds to the floor and back. It’s an assured composition from Binet, who makes great use of his performer’s formidable physical capabilities.

In keeping with the evening’s theme of celebrating new talents alongside familiar names is Drone, a rather lovely male duet created by third-year London Contemporary Dance School student Andy Macleman. With its motif of airy circles and sudden bursts of energy, Drone is carefully composed and nicely performed by Macleman and fellow student Drew Hawkins. Accompanying the new commissions is an excerpt of Robert Cohan’s In Memory, created in 1989 shortly before the choreographer left London Contemporary Dance Theatre, and Alston’s Shuffle it Right, a po-faced plod through the works of Hoagy Carmichael that not even Hannah Kidd’s characterful dancing can leaven.

T.S.Eliot, in the essay Hamlet and his Problems, borrowed the phrase “objective correlative” to describe a chain of events in a dramatic work that both makes sense of the action and evokes an emotional response in the audience; in other words, a reason for use to care about what the character does. It’s a rather good essay, and one I wish more choreographers would take a glance at from time to time.

It’s not that any of the works presented in the ROH2’s mixed bill are weak in craft terms; indeed, all three are well-made and serve a clear vision from the choreographers concerned. It’s just that there’s no clear reason for us in the audience to care about what happens on stage. When Helka Kaski wanders across the forestage with a yearning gaze in Laïla Diallo’s Hold Everything Dear, it’s readable in that we see the travelling, the longing, the lack of closure, but there’s no sense of why it’s taking place or why that might matter. Similar issues haunt all three works in the programme, a sort of graduation showcase for the first three artists working on the ROH2’s Choreographic Associates scheme.

Sarah Dowling’s Remote imagines a future in which people are unable to experience or express emotion unless told what to feel by their televisions. Three ancient-looking cathode ray tubes show brief fragments of cartoons, musicals and reality shows interspersed with directives on how the body experiences joy, tears and anger: jaws clenched, chins lifted, torsos contracted and muscles contorted, which the dancers enact to order. It’s in many ways a clear vision of its subject, a nightmarish progression from our current dependence on television and its ability to manipulate our emotions.

Performers Elisabetta D’Aloia, Kath Duggan and Jake Ingram-Dodd jitter and giggle at their television screens, left motionless and bereft when the signal is removed. But with viewers in the real world turning away in droves from the manipulative reality shows that she critiques here, the imagination-less future that Dowling projects is implausibly bleak; and Remote’s premise is ultimately too slight to sustain our interest for its full length.

Laïla Diallo’s piece about migration and transit, Hold Everything Dear, is full of beautiful and intriguing images – a woman walking along a bench leading nowhere, collections of travellers surrounded by suitcases, a man staring into the audience with something that might be hope, or curiosity, or resignation. Images wash over us – still tableaux, little exchanges between the performers as they pass one another, Letty Mitchell repeatedly finding herself wrapped up in packing tape – at a meandering pace and with no resolution or purpose. It’s not of course necessary for a piece, even one about journeys and migration, to go anywhere; but the more Diallo’s piece avoids a sense of character or place that might resonate with the viewer, the less we care.

Freddie Opoku-Addaie’s Absent Made Present begins with an interesting idea about manual craft and the human presence manifest in objects made by people. The craft bit is represented by two dozen hanging lumps of clay swung about the stage by Opoku-Addaie’s four perfomers; the human presence by some nicely animated contact work. Accompanied by an entertainingly Greenwich Village score (played live on, among other things, half a tree trunk) Hian Ruth Voon sheds a mask of dry clay into a waiting bucket; maskless she is free to duck and dive among the swinging clay balls. There’s a playful and accessible piece about making things work here fighting to get out, but long minutes of repetition and heavy layers of concept weigh Absent Made Present down.

There’s always a place in dance for the conceptual, and new work is in no way obliged to be simplistic or simply pretty; but almost three unrelenting hours of high-concept angstiness would wear down almost anyone. There are problems that mere craft, however adept, and performance, however capable, cannot solve in art; I do think Eliot might have been onto something.