Author Archives: Thomas JM Wilson

About Thomas JM Wilson

Thomas JM Wilson has been writing for Total Theatre since 2001. His own performance work lies at the borders of dance and theatre, with a particular interest in solo performance. He is an Associate Artist of Gandini Juggling, working as Archivist and Publications Author. He also currently teaches on Rose Bruford's BA European Theatre Arts, and is a co-editor of the Training Grounds section of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.

Nigel Charnock: Haunted by the Future

2012 saw the loss of two greats of the last two decades of British dance – Gill Clarke and Nigel Charnock, both radically different from each other, but each carving distinctive careers as performers before expanding into choreography and beyond. With Dance Umbrella 2012 dedicated to the memory of both, it is fitting to see Nigel Charnock remembered in his Haunted by the Future.

This wilful and teasingly fragmented vision of the world is one of Nigel Charnock’s last pieces of work, made shortly before his death in August of this year. Embracing familiar Charnock territory and hovering between the boundaries of life and art, Haunted by the Future daubs fragments of blooming and decaying love and lust across the pristine stage of the new Platform Theatre at Central St Martins.

Charnock has always done pungent and arresting moments best. Here, with the creator akin to a fusion of Renaissance painter, animator and impatient DJ, the work is compiled from striking moments of tragedy and elation, liquid phrases of disjointed physical dexterity and teasingly evocative popular soundtracks.

Haunted by the Future‘s two characters enact moments from the trajectory of their doomed relationship. Amongst the vitriol of their rage and wounded pride, and against the broken fragments of popular music, Talia Paz and Mike Winter dance shards of delicious choreography, hovering and plunging into the emotional trauma of this entangled pair. Paz’s deft and fluid classicism is offset by Winter’s bouncing animalism, but they are nonetheless united in moments of delicate tenderness – tenderness that charmingly echoes popular musicals of the 30s and 40s. But despite these satisfying vocabularies, the power in the work is that Charnock doesn’t indulge us in these moments, instead casting each in turn aside and parading new ones in their stead. This wilful disregard for a cohesive development is at once both frustrating and exhilarating, leaving tangible threads of despair or elation hanging in the air as Paz and Winter skip vociferously around their love affair. This fragmentation is somewhat de rigeurin many contemporary choreographies, but the relief is that Charnock carries it off without losing the thread of the world he has created, reining the work in at a satisfying 40 minutes.

What is odd, though, is that this piece seems strangely out of place in this new building, in front of an assortment of London’s contemporary dance scene; it feels like it is missing the audience it deserves and needs. One that doesn’t know its pedigree and comes afresh to the work. Haunted by the Future also brings to mind Howard Barker’s Scenes from an Execution (currently playing at the National Theatre) and in particular the description of the painter Galactica’s work by her commissioner: ‘You sweat. Your paintings sweat,’ he says. ‘No one drapes in your pictures. They clash.’ This description seems justly apposite for Charnock’s work, where individual moments sweat with the dark pathologies of the flourishes of lust and the ravages of heartbreak. It is a shame that Charnock’s work will not get the opportunity Barker’s work has.

Teatr Novogo Fronta / Pro Progressione / Tara Arts: Home:scape

Opening during the Olympic Games, Home:scape, a collaboration between the Czech-based ensemble Teatr Novogo Fronta and one of the UK’s most quietly adventurous venues, appears to counter that global festival of homogenising cultural activity (sport) by bringing together diverse and plural reflections on the nature of home and transitions. Drawing from a wide range of interviews conducted throughout Europe, this international ensemble seek to connect us to the variety of elements that make us feel at home or not. In translating this into performance they generate a kaleidoscope of images and actions of people permanently in transition. These figures begin and end queueing as if for an immigration desk, this central image the touchstone to which they return at various points and in various formats. In between these they only fleetingly settle in moments that attempt to embody the joy of belonging and the dislocation of not, before being catapulted into another state.

There is unsurprisingly a hard edge to the work, a certain rough brutal physicality reinforced by the company’s avowed allegiance to the idea of the self-sacrifice of the performer, and whilst the performers set about the work with vigour, the intended revelations don’t materialise and instead it falls into the trap common with this mode of physically-based performance of becoming a visual feast of moments but ultimately an insular experience for the performers alone.

One of the main reasons this piece is difficult to engage with is the repeated pre-emptive breaking of established actions and moods, such that any moment rarely establishes itself firmly enough before it is cast aside and another takes its place. There are exceptions – a man tenderly asleep in his suitcase, a suspended foetal-positioned figure surrounded by the earthbound, and a leaping line of dancers against which one man rhythmically pounds the earth with his feet. Overall though, the aggressive montage does little to support the meaning of, or an emotional connection to, the work. Whilst there are some striking images at points, including a Géricault-esque line of figures swallowed by darkness, the majority of the material feels under-developed and opaque.

Gandini Juggling: Smashed

In this, their fourth visit to London International Mime Festival in their twenty-year history, Gandini Juggling present their most theatrical work to date. This represents the culmination of a continual investigation of the relationship between juggling, dance and theatre, aided not least by their long-standing relationship with the late, and quietly great, choreographer Gill Clarke.

In the original outdoor incarnation of Smashed, commissioned for the National Theatre’s Watch This Space Festival in 2010, Gandini Juggling continued their joyful acceptance of the failure of juggling, of the ‘drop’. This resulted in a light-hearted and zesty destruction of apples and crockery which celebrated the release that comes with accepting failure, accompanied by the performers’ mischievous disruptions of each other’s work.

For this new version, now indoors and extended, the material has taken on a darker, less benign feel. Artistic director Sean Gandini has acknowledged his debt to Pina Bausch, and this influence runs through the piece, with echoes of1980 and Kontakthof. Ostensibly, much of the material is the same as the outdoor version, but now the summer romance has turned sour. Instead of the light-hearted teasing, each of the nine jugglers prey mercilessly on each other.

What is central to this new version of Smashed is that Gandini Juggling have taken advantage of the juggler’s underlying relationship with power. The act of juggling imbues the juggler with power, merely through keeping their objects aloft. This power, which comes with a certain mastery over the fundamental force of gravity, is here translated into power over the other performers. Thus we see acts of humiliation, subjugation and isolation played out around and in-between the various solo and passing patterns.

With only two women, Kati Ylä-Hokkala and Cecilia Zucchetti, in the nine-strong cast, gender often appears as the key battleground. They crawl slowly in front of a line of seated men, moving platforms for tiny, self-contained patterns; and they are subjected to violent physical manipulation as they each attempt a simple three-ball cascade. In return, the male performers approach each woman to receive slaps on cheeks, stomachs or buttocks, each slap replacing one ball in the women’s cascades. Alongside these acts there is a dangerous and sultry frisson to the performances of Ylä-Hokkala and Zucchetti, who play-up their sexual power as all the performers ‘jockey’ for position.

In many ways Smashed is no longer a juggling show. Instead the juggling is one gestural vocabulary within the work, alongside the choreography and the personae of the performers. This last part is key in the impact of the piece: each gaze or response from the performers sets-up and develops the underlying relationships on the stage. All the while the audience is complicit in this developing action, as the performers seek their approval and play-up to their responses.

With Smashed Gandini Juggling have concluded twenty years of experimentation with an increasingly nuanced and complex theatricality. The question remains how this approach will develop over the coming years; how the use of juggling’s dramaturgy can be used to investigate a wider scope; and how Gandini Juggling can continue to marry their invention of intricate patterns with the intricacies of human experience.

www.gandinijuggling.com

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Jérôme Bel & Ictus: 3Abschied

It is rare to see a work that has an audience rushing for the exit in the first curtain call, a veritable snub, in full and uncontested view, to the artists, but3Abschied (3Farewells) appears to be such a work. This collaboration between the deeply structural Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and French post-structuralist dancer Jérôme Bel is both a product of them and not of them. It is Bel though whose eyes you need to see this work through.

Set to Mahler’s ‘undanceable’ score for the final part of his ‘Song of the Earth’,3Abschied is a dance that attempts to grapple with the repercussions of looming (planetary) extinction. It is also, as with much of Bel’s previous work, a provocation of the nature of dance. For de Keersmaeker 3Abschied is a personal work operating in her own emotional territory, and unlike many of her previous works it wears its politics overtly.

Bel’s insouciant trademark stamp comes in the form of an opening lecture on the process of making the work, delivered casually by de Keersmaeker and preceded by a CD recording of the ‘Abschied’. She directly questions the validity of her attempt, exposing the journey to – and processes that underlie – the dance; and the recognition of the political act that they have set out to stage. Bel appears explicitly only at the termination of the piece, introducing multiple unsatisfactory endings – equally toying with the supposed impossibility of their task.

In the dance itself de Keersmaeker unfurls her expressionist roots as she attempts to inhabit the music, played onstage by the Ictus ensemble. Cast adrift from the formal structures of the music of previous choreographies de Keersmaeker has the quality of a dancer who has lost her way. Clumsy and unbalanced she fails in her attempted ideas of dancing to the score amongst and around the musicians. The vocabulary is sparse and clearly taken from the actions of the musicians. de Keersmaeker appears to drown amongst the music, lost in the eddies and currents of the orchestral phrases, as she attempts to evoke the crisis and final acceptance of her own death. But unlike in Mahler’s world, where nature’s immortality, the world’s immortality, is a given; here it is cast off and de Keersmaeker’s crisis is a wider crisis. Like the looming darkness of the upstage area – beyond death is only emptiness.

Adrift of the Romanticist’s cosseting construction, the work flounders in its own pointlessness. It is pointless to dance, but dance de Keersmaeker does. Like a young choreographer finding her first steps or an old one taking her last. The choices are crude, the options underdeveloped – as if collective paralysis had invaded the studio. Only the music lifts and carries – the life in the auditorium – like the bass notes of Jerome Bel’s possible endings. In this way Mahler’s music is left to dominate, trammelling attempts at physical expression. We hear the music three times, as if the point of the dance is for us to experience the music – to sit and listen, rather than to sit and watch, to share the abject state that de Keersmaeker finds herself in – facing death, accepting death. Facing the pointlessness of dance and accepting it – with only Mahler’s music for consolation.

But the kernel of the work is a hard one to grasp, hard to hold onto, and although Bel’s presence brings an archness to this loss, perhaps even an irony, it is never quite clear what failure is constructed and what might be bad choices. Although there is a nagging dissatisfaction with the performance, there is an equal elation in the possible connivances of Bel and de Keersmaeker.

www.jeromebel.fr / www.rosas.be

Under Construction: Mapping Wonderland

Mapping Wonderland sits interestingly somewhere between a historical walking tour and a site-responsive performance, feeling at home amongst Oxford’s tourist trade whilst retaining a frisson of adventure. Beginning in Radcliffe Square and taking in the back streets of Oxford city centre, Under Construction’s fourth performance to date passes you from host to host, each one selected from lesser-known historical figures tied (in some cases literally) to the spaces of Oxford. Experimenter with noxious gases John Haldane, who journeyed into the depths of Oxford’s subterranean streams, is one of the more intriguing; others include Christopher Wren, his sister (and “she-surgeon”) Susan Holder, and Fantasy writer Naomi Mitchison.

Each host regales you with short tales of their times and fascinations, recounted in an odd mix of verse and prose that, with mixed success, tries to provide both facts and flights of fancy but which few of the performers really get on top of. The most successful moments come when the performers relax with their audience, avoid grasping too hard for our interest or the role, and revel in the spaces in which they stand. Jeremy Allen as Haldane manages this best in conjuring up the madcap quality that has been a part of Oxford since the inception of the university.

The route the work takes uncovers some interesting back corners of the city centre, and succeeds in drawing your eye to the differences of architecture and style that abound in the back lanes and along the city wall. There are some deft touches from the company, including tiny figures resting by a ventilation grate that we stumble upon, but these are few, and consequently the work tends to vie against the spaces it inhabits. Thus there is a discordant feel that echoes throughout the work without establishing itself satisfactorily as a device.

With more rigorous development Under Construction’s bold work with spaces has the potential to be richly rewarding.