Author Archives: Rebecca JS Nice

About Rebecca JS Nice

Rebecca worked as a dance teacher, lecturer and choreographer for eight years specialising in tap and jazz. She has a background in Art History and is currently training further in medieval history and contemporary choreography with a particular interest in live art. At the early stage of her dance writing career, Rebecca reviews and analyses theatre and dance performance and is working on a papers for publication.

Dancin’ Oxford 2014: Moving with the Times

Dancin’ Oxford 2014, a yearly festival featuring premieres from both emerging and well established artists over an eleven day period, launched in Oxford City Centre on 1 March. For the fourth year running, Moving with the Times, commissioned and produced by Pegasus Theatre, and Dancin’ Oxford featured local choreographers whose new, short works were shown in the context of working towards developments for future performances. A hotchpotch of varying stages of growth and wavering strengths. Something a little different with an audience full of excited giggling children, the matinée performance crossed the disciplines of dance with speech, text and video projection.

Racing With The Sun, by Mamé Yansane opened the show with a piece drawing on the body’s memory, revolving around four chairs including a wheel chair and a child’s stool. Am I Here Again, choreographed and performed by Marina Collard, began as a down and dreary, plodding and methodical piece, slowly edging in and out of the corner but gradually transformed into an ebbing and flowing solo with an elegant and constant dynamic that is hard to define. One Two Wonder, by Anamorphic Dance Theatre, featured a mother and young child dancing through contact. A curious connection between the two performers, made possible only by their unique relationship, was delicate, beautiful, and trusting despite some unimaginative vocabulary and form. Politics of Love combined sung and projected words with dancing and silhouette, in a narration of several poems from a new collection by the same name. An abundance of stimuli overwhelmed and undermined the multiple interpretations of love. A less literal interpretation of the words through movement would offer opportunities to explore more complex layers of intent or meaning that the theme and medium had so much potential for. This piece had some sporadic moments of beauty but they became muddied by the competing presence of the two dancers and an extremely charismatic narrator. Redefining the relationships between performers and simplifying the material would allow for deeper choreographic exploration to take place.

Every Grain performed by Hannah De Cancho’s company Sole Rebel Tap was in vogue with its vintage theme. Six 50s pin-ups tore up the stage, cheekily attired in tap shoes and playsuits. The piece opened a little tentatively with a wash of unforgiving lighting but the power and presence grew with each track. The more theatrical lighting in Little Richard’s Slippin’ and Slidin’ improved the dynamism still further. A medley of classic tunes including Dave Brubeck’s Take Five (which no tap show would be complete without), were glued together with comic sketches, from the struggle to open a deck chair to making and drinking cocktails, which allowed the dancers’ characters to gradually emerge with fun and frolics. It would be interesting to see the choreography develop to allow the individual dancing styles and personalities of the dancers to flourish even more. The tap vocabulary varied from bluesy, to Lindyhopping to hoofing and was choreographed with flourishes of dynamism and staccato highlights broken by invaluable pauses, thoughtfully interpreting each music piece with the appropriate stylistic expression and rhythms.

Ending with a sand dance where low lighting revealed six pairs of feet cheekily playing in real sand, the girls were ushered away by My Sandman himself. The only thing missing was a cheeky encore where the girls show him whose boss, returning for an explosive tap dance in the sand after American tapper Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson. You don’t need permission to be sassy, the Sole Rebel Tap girls have definitely got it, so flaunt it even more! Artistic Director Hannah De Cancho plans to take this piece to outside venues and beach locations, building on the summer holiday theme which will inject the charming work with the energy and interaction it deserves from a less formal audience.

GOlive Dance and Performance Festival

Presenting between four and six pieces every night for the three weeks of the GOlive Dance and Performance Festival, Donald Hutera (dance critic for The Times) does not do things by halves. Personally introducing each artist and seating each audience member in the sixty-capacity space, Hutera’s belief in and support for his artists couldn’t help but rub off on his audience. This receptive environment made space for risk-taking, work-in-progress showings, discussions, and an overall sense of organised mayhem that created a big buzz around this festival. Audience members had to be prepared for a fast-paced night that could take them from contemplating their existence (Marguerite Galizia’s Where Am I?) to considering how many peas they could eat with a cocktail stick (Figs in Wigs’ Dance Peas).

In the triple bill on Thursday 19 September, Anna Williams contemplated the worries and woes of women whilst listening to the radio in her work-in-progress piece Woman’s Hour. Williams illustrated the thoughts of ‘every woman’, using Woman’s Hour as a sound-score for an animated and charismatic parade danced alongside a woman from the audience invited to sit on stage and knit (which happened, on the 19th, to be me). When handed a microphone and asked to read a written text, I was moved by the disarming honesty of the memories of ‘my Granny’. Dancing to my voice as I spoke her words, Williams provided a visual narrative which personified the thoughts of the knitter. Williams left a poignant and lasting impression as she spoke and danced: ‘I work. I work, I worry, I cry.’

In Sorbet du Soir, Flora Wellesley Wesley played with voice as she squealed and pronounced her way through a choreography drawn from every-day gestures such as chewing and waking up. Wesley’s sense of irony and the finesse in her execution of movement imbued an amusing piece with edge and a sense of knowing.

In Cast Aside – Camille Claudel the story of an artist hospitalised for schizophrenia tinged the night with sadness. Marie-Louise Flexen took advantage of the close environment to draw the viewers’ attention towards a lit window; at first a beacon for inspiration, it quickly transformed into a symbol of imprisonment. Flexen’s inwardly focused ritual – a litany of twisting and crouching beneath looming shadows – expressed the frustration and angst of Claudel through a vocabulary drawn from the artist’s sculptures.

The works presented on Saturday 21 September moved from reflections on women to reflections on male sexuality. In Layers: (H) eroticism Of Beauty, Kali Chandrasegaram towered over his audience in a display of male physicality that juxtaposed with the overtly sexual and feminine nature of his costume. The key to this piece lay in the Indian choreography and the tension between its delicate nuances and the heavy, sweaty, muscular body executing them, building, clumsily, a strange sense of eroticism.

The Sacred, based on a series of mechanical line drawings of penises, sought to close a widening gap between the sexes. Hutera here bought together artist Lilia Pegado and dancers Avatâra Ayuso and Sarah Kent, who, in response to Pegado’s drawings, developed two overlapping solos through structured movement and vocal improvisation. Typical of the ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ nature of the festival, a film of Pegado’s drawings by Bruno De Lara and the two solos were put together for the first time that day. Although somewhat disjointed in its presentation, Kent’s madness as she reminisced over her sexual endeavours and Ayuso’s tentative manoeuvres around the periphery of the space questioned the relationship between the sexes in a show of female solidarity that sat within the context of several experimental collaborations undertaken throughout the festival.

In Late Work, the opening performance for Wednesday 25 September, Jennifer Jackson and Susie Crow (Big Ballets) continued the theme of collaboration between artists. Building on improvisations between musicians Malcolm Atkins and Andrew Melvin, Crow and Jackson recalled their traditional ballet training and rebelled against its structures. Most memorable of several sections was an almost frantic choreography to a sound-score of conflicting counts and the indicative use of ‘contrapposto’ and epaulement within the movement.

Immigrants and animals’ William William, a rock-and-roll-themed duet, used repetition almost but not quite to the point of monotony. Two female performers made up with drawn-on moustaches moved precisely through a handful of short, minimal movement phrases that gradually built towards a topless, head-banging crescendo. This well-polished piece used restraint and sobriety to question gender with a cool detachment.

In ICE BEAR, on Saturday 28 September, Fred Gehrig ironically compared his experiences with Merce Cunningham to veils that cover the face as he questioned modes of expression. The piece began with a fractious rant on film then moved on to a live dance evoking Cunningham-styled choreography, but with the body partially covered by a headpiece reaching down to black gloves. Gehrig ended the piece in a fight with a projected image of a bear, which was then transferred to a man in a white lab coat who worked the lights and projections onstage. Gehrig bravely created a grotesque character in a disjointed piece ending with an anticlimax. His sense of humour and presence as a performer shone, as did his tenacity in staging the reactionary work.

Marguerite Galizia’s Where am I?, questioning where he is in his own consciousness if his brain and body are separated, performer Dan Watson jumped back and forth between postures, never realising the answer to his questions, whilst a laptop documented his location from a bird’s eye view. The aesthetics of the high-tech tracking system on screen, juxtaposed with the cerebral turmoil expressed on stage, could be utilised further to maximise the tensions between the subconscious and the physical being.

Finally, Figs in Wigs’ Dance Peas was a deadly serious pea-eating competition between five girls dressed in sequins and sports trainers. The piece became more interesting as the audience discovered that they were attempting to break a world record. A voiceover briefly discussed this process and its relocation to gallery or theatre spaces, transforming it into a piece of durational live art. Unfortunately, the world record was not broken that night. However, perhaps a few boundaries were by its inclusion in the festival. The anything goes attitude of GOlive, although risky, was far from blasé. The hotchpotch of pieces, featuring work-in-progresses, new collaborations, well-rehearsed shows and discussions revealed an honesty and integrity in the artists. The fun and games, combined with heavy themes such as gender and sexuality, made the billing precocious rather than pretentious, and the sheer volume of performances in the festival could have spelled disaster, but instead struck gold.

Greenwich Fair at Greenwich + Docklands International Festival

Part of Greenwich + Docklands International Festival for the third year running, the Greenwich Fair event showcased UK and international outdoor arts of the past year, presenting both new and proven street arts work in various locations around the town. The format revives a historical fair that used to fill Greenwich’s streets with sideshows, booths and menageries.

The majestic Old Royal Naval College was transformed into a hive of activity as the enthusiastic crowds of Greenwich Fair huddled around several stages, undaunted by the blustery English weather. The grey day was punctuated by the luminous wigs and stilettos of Levantes Dance Company’s Canapé Community, but blink and their snapshots of dance could easily be missed. Swapping a traditional stage for a trampoline, both Max Calaf’s Any Day and Tilted Productions’ Fragile defied gravity. Soaring, swimming, reading and even attempting to drink spilt water that was, for a few precious moments, suspended in mid-air, Calaf sprinkled pieces of paper to amused and bemused children, whilst across the river in the Island Gardens, Tilted Productions somersaulted and tumbled in a darker, trance-like state, a demeanour also possessed by Motionhouse’s dancers in Captive.

Trapped on all sides by a dense audience encircling a steel, cube-shaped frame, in Captive two male and two female dancers fought their minds as well as the cage around them. Scouring the frame looking for freedom, the dancers’ agility and focus demanded attention when the choreography became unimaginative in places. Using each other for leverage and momentum, comfort and conflict, the two pairs danced through a tumult of emotions as they suspended themselves from the frame in a spectacle that was crowd pleasing rather than challenging. The steel frame, so easily lifted at the end, possibly formed a metaphor for the deeper psychological motives that seemed to drive the dancer’s emotions. The proximity of the dancers to the cage and the cage to the audience created a close, tight world, the boundaries of which were broken only in moments where a flash in the eye of a dancer acknowledged and absorbed the world beyond the cage. Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem ‘The Panther’, the piece’s repetition of pacing steps and exhausting phrases – combined with relentless pouncing and climbing – evoked the simmering power of the animal and its territory described in the poem. In an emotive section, the performers pushed and leaned, chest to chest, arms outstretched behind their partner, trapped in a strangely claustrophobic but not fully formed hug. The repetition and time spent playing on the physicality and emotions attached to that idea made for a particularly striking section amongst the chaos of the swinging and climbing.

Beneath the bow of the Cutty Sark ship, an unassuming container formed a world where the commotion of the fair was replaced by a close, quiet environment for a contemplative audience. This was Res de Res & Artigues’ (remor), where one male and one female dancer occupy this re-creation of a prison cell and share it with a small, packed audience. Invited to use hand torches in the dimly lit cell, a receptive audience interacted in an interrogatory nature. The tone of the piece unfolded into a story of love and fear as the parallel lives of two lovers played out before the audience and within their space. Despite being a Total Theatre Award winner in 2012, the company’s dancing, whilst emotive and passionate, seemed a little bland to me, lacking the rich vocabulary of motifs and gestures that would have layered meaning and distinction onto the movement.

Programmed in parallel with Wired Aerial Theatre’s poetic and serious As The World Tipped as one of two big evening finales, Bad Taste Company’s Faust was performed at Cutty Sark Gardens. The piece, developed as the principle show in 2012’s Without Wall’s programme, seemed to have found its fullest context in this location and to have overcome some of the problems encountered in Brighton, the backdrop of the London cityscape, lit from across the river in Canary Wharf, adding a certain resonance to its scenes of corruption from the roaring twenties. A lesson in the history of jazz and hip-hop, Faust was true to its historical legacy whilst thrilling audiences with its breaking jams and fiery set (and without a hoody in sight). Windmills, freezes and head spins performed in time with the music and by performers immaculately dressed in waistcoats and ties was the ultimate way to deliver breakdancing. Bad Taste Company glided and lindy-hopped through scenes of temptation to the jazz music of ‘Take Five’ and an instrumental, beaty version of ‘Sing Sing Sing’, and ended with a competitive finale that would have raised the roof had there had been one.

Dancing City at Greenwich + Docklands International Festival

A part of Greenwich + Docklands International Festival 2013, Dancing City brought a series of weekday lunchtime events to the squares and gardens below Canary Wharf’s looming structures, and culminated in a jam-packed programme on Saturday afternoon. Companies working with Chinese pole, German wheel and acrobalance were programmed alongside dance pieces featuring ballet, contemporary, and hip-hop. The professional companies were joined by the events of Big Dance’s Youth Dance Day, and the whole programme concluded with Tangled Feet’s One Million, an exciting crescendo featuring live music and fireworks.

Beginning a performance trail that led the audience around Canary Wharf, Joli Vyann’s H2H injected the area’s cool, sleek, business vibe with creativity and spontaneity. Two girls and two boys got up to real antics with each other and with two woolly jumpers as they journeyed through the seminal moments in their relationships. The choreography was densely packed with fun and tricks, the expansive throwing and catching of bodies combined with intricate gestural motifs. The acrobalance was integrated with the dancing both physically and through the meaning and narrative of the piece, making these skills more than mere spectacle. One performer giving birth to a rolled-up jumper whilst balanced above the heads of the others was just the sort of bizarre tableau that gave the piece its character. These compositions were suspended for a few precious moments and then continued, often falling straight into complex phrases that were seamlessly interspersed within the dancing. Amidst the acrobatics and rugby scrums, a section with a duet and a solo placed together bought to mind DV8’s Can We Talk About This?. Two entangled lovers supported and clambered over each other while a series of signs and gestures – such as walking two fingers down an arm or a covering of the eyes – were performed in an adjacent male solo. This allowed the audience to ponder on or even question the relationship between the two lovers by opening up the possibility of multiple interpretations. This section was intriguingly beautiful, suspended between the antics of the rest of the show.

Following the trail to the next courtyard, Compagnie Massala’s Deviation delivered hip-hop, breaking and a German wheel act. The piece revolved around a car that provided a moving stage for a solo performance of locking and popping that took place on its roof. The acts presented by the company’s performers were separated by sequences where they ran around the car and bounced from it – ‘filler’ sections in comparison to their robotics or German wheel skills. Although containing highly skilled acts, the performance as a whole became disjointed.

Bursting with energy, performed by the fountains in another courtyard, Grounded’s Street Jam was a refreshingly enjoyable interlude separating the heavier, more thought-provoking shows. A jamming session featuring Charleston, lindy-hop, tap and breaking, this piece was short, snappy and explosive. The personality, charm and excitement, expressed through the risk of improvisation, was just as thrilling to watch as the highly polished but more dangerous H2H. This setting was a perfect opportunity to showcase some real hoofing, of which two tappers at the rear gave only a glimpse.

Swedish company i19 performed their piece Layers around a Chinese pole. The height of the pole and the presence and focus of the three performers added to the existing cityscape as they performed between it and the riverside. After scaling the pole himself, guitarist David Björkén serenaded the remaining two performers, alternating between humming, strumming and playing the harmonica. In a solo that went nowhere but up and down, Fabian Wixe nimbly wove his way along the pole between ground and sky as he added and subtracted layers in space. It was an indulgent show of skill that, whilst making the audience gasp, was also disarmingly pensive and captivating. Most memorable in this piece, and perhaps the entire day, was the grounded duet that happened almost entirely on one level: laying along the ground, necks entwined, heads side by side, Wixe and Marie Wårell carefully exchanged glances and held each other’s heads in their palms, patiently taking turns to support one another. The pair performed a gentle and supportive duet that was attentive and methodical in choreographing a bobbing, shifting exchange of weight. Ebbing and flowing, back and forth, the couple rocked on their bottoms together as they sat on the ground, creating an alluring shared tenderness that sent shivers down the spine.

In the early evening, crowds surrounded the water of Middle Dock – reaching along the bridge and up the stairs, even climbing up along the balconies above for a birds-eye view of Two Sink, Three Float by Belgian company Studio Eclipse. Three dancers appeared to breathe underwater, suspended in the depths beneath a rectangular raft. Alternating between mermaid-like sylphs and playful seals, two very wet female dancers and one male appeared and disappeared in a hauntingly captivating dance of object play and rippling water. The dancers’ drenched, off-white robes, and the cold, murky water matched perfectly the cool metals and glass of the surrounding architecture, like Canary Wharf’s own ‘Middle Dock Monsters’. Often returning to pyramidal compositions containing a preying upwards stare, these dark and knowing water creatures composed moments reminiscent of Théodore Géricault’s oil painting ‘The Raft of The Medusa’, recalling notions of isolation in an expansive waterscape. The constant dunking of their heads below the water and the flicking of long drenched hair added an almost violent edge to this sinister piece that both beguiled and mesmerised.

Various Artists: Cloud Dance Sundays

A tiny theatre, in a quirky pub in Kentish Town, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, hosted the first of what will be a monthly programme of Cloud Dance Sundays. Confronting harrowing subject matter, the billing was far from laid back, proving that Cloud Dance is serious in its initiative to reach new audiences (an ambition it achieved, on its first outing, by pulling in a mixture of locals and dance-bods to this unusual venue).

Rachel Burn’s Pull Through, Flick opened the programme trying, perhaps a little too hard, to be dark and dramatic. Burn’s dancers punched their chests, brushed the floor, and franticly whisked up the fabric of their tunics in a scene of frustrated anguish, a ritual of the tortured soul. The trio of dancers slowly progressed on a journey that circled the stage, returning to the dark corner from which they emerged, now bathed in light. As they dropped in and out of solos and duets, their cramped spatial compositions would have benefited from performance in a larger space.

John Ross choreographed and performed Man Down, an intense solo that suited the intimate surroundings of the Giant Olive Theatre. The story of a soldier who was posted to Afghanistan and did not return was told through the voice of his comrade in a form of dance integrated with oral history. The recorded words engaged the audience in a story that, for the sake of the speaker, needed to be told. The isolation of a soldier at war, both voiced and embodied, became a cleansing ritual for the man whose words were spoken. Listening, commanding, watching, waiting, Ross evoked the energy, strength and physicality of a soldier, marrying this brutality with a sensitive vocabulary that was first and foremost dance. Using a pen to draw a bullet wound on the chest and turning to reveal its exit mark, created a tension between the enormity of death and the inability to recreate such a scene. The lightness of the act of drawing and the closeness of the man stood before the audience evoked a sense of life’s fragility without undermining the event.

On trend in its interdisciplinary nature and popular subject matter, Tom Jackson Greaves’ Vanity Fowl portrayed the trials and tribulations of youth culture using video projections to propel the audience back and forth from intimate interactions with the soloist to a busy bar scene. Greaves introduced himself with the longest, firmest, funniest handshake whilst the use of voiceovers placed the audience in a role that identified the thoughts and insecurities of the soloist. Social interactions informed a rich vocabulary of intricate gestures and showy high kicks alternating between a boy riddled with doubt and a peacock on parade. Greaves’ charisma was the strongest part of this piece, making the light-hearted scenes the most successful. However, the curation let him down a little here, as the unfortunate billing after Man Downmeant Greaves’ journey through vanity and disgrace felt crass in comparison to a man’s journey through war.

Cloud Dance Sundays is an ideal platform for emerging choreographers, and, more specifically, pieces with personality and charm. Unconventional pieces with the presence and individuality to exist within the intimacy demanded by the venue will be the most successful in this context. This expectation, set byMan Down, will hopefully be fulfilled by each monthly event.