On the top floor of a city centre car park the world premiere of Still House’s Of Riders and Running Horses took flight in sun, wind, and rain. My experience of this new dance event began with excitedly queuing on the pavement outside the NCP car park holding on to the fact that something going to happen up there and I was about to part of it.
Once ascended the audience gathers around the natural/unnatural dance floor made of the blue and yellow painted bay markings; to one side is a small white marquee with festoons sheltering the makings of loud music; drum kit, guitar, electronics.
It starts with a song. Sam Halmarack’s voice sings alone, piercing and fragile, the lone singing voice combining both strength and vulnerability, he is direct and unapologetic. The words are delivered with a sense of urgency and immediacy, the song is a call to come out of our houses, to create community, to be active against isolation. Then, the beat kicks in summoning five young female dancers from their camping stools, who had previously been stretching like boxers before the fight. They ride the music with contemporary style, merging freestyle, hip hop, and folk formation.
A choreography of play begins as the dancers interpret the music with their bodies, letting it shape them, keeping up with it. This then shifts as one dancer, making stern eye contact with the drummer, begins to orchestrate the music with her body. Now it is the drummer keeping up with the rising tempo of her footwork. This playfulness between the music and the dance combined them equally, generating a clear drive and energy that propelled the whole event. The dancers are epically energetic, smiling at each other and us; they come to the borders of the performance space, where we stand nodding our heads.
The piece was an assemblage of ensemble choreography which conjured feelings and images of African, morris, and club dancing as well as galloping, racing, and strutting horses, created a spell with the ancient, the contemporary, and the human/animal, fulfilling the aim of creating ‘a new kind of old dance.’
The solos provided space for reflection, amongst the energy-swelling ensemble dance, a particularly special solo for me was thick and slow within a constant electronic drone capturing that individual moment of connecting the body with sound. There were also moments of exhaustion and of grief. My toes were tapping in my shoes the whole time, a credit to musician Luke Harney (aka Typesun) whose range of rhythm continually fed us with sound sustenance.
Raised up amongst student flats and a church spire, the night sky darkened cueing the car park lights to come up, casting an orange glow on the sweat-dripping faces of the dancers. The site is key to the joy of this work, giving us space to dance and see each other, close to the sky rather than low and swallowed. An inventiveness and resourcefulness towards the use of urban spaces is vital in this time of continuing privatisation and challenging of the public’s right of access to communal space, plus the doom of an individualist society. Of Riders and Running Horses is an event that reminds us that this is what we need and this is what we have always done. Furious dancing in wide open spaces.