United Kingdom Matthias, Prior, Marin: Eden; Pictures We Make, Company Chameleon, Royal Opera House (Linbury Studio Theatre), London, 15.11.2013 (JO’D)
Eden
Dancers: Anthony Missen, Daniel Afonso, Elena Thomas, Gemma Nixon
Choreograpy: Gemma Nixon and Jonathan Goddard
Production Manager: Joe Hornsby
Costumes: Fabrice Serafino
Lighting Design: Yaron Abulafia
Original Music: John Matthias and Andrew Prior
Additional Music: John Matthias, Adrian Corker, Andrew Prior, John Richards
Pictures We Make
Dancers: Anthony Missen, Daniel Afonso, Elena Thomas, Gemma Nixon
Choreograpy: Anthony Missen and Kevin Edward Turner
Rehearsal Director: Navala Chaudhari
Production Manager: Joe Hornsby
Costumes: Fabrice Serafino
Lighting Design: Yaron Abulafia
Original Composition: Miguel Marin
Making a declaration in the programme notes of its belief ‘in Dance Theatre as a vital method for social change’, The Lowry arts centre-based Company Chameleon presents two new works. Before the lights come up (to the extent that they do come up) on the first, Eden (choreographed by Gemma Nixon and Jonathan Goddard), its four dancers are already to be made out in the dry-iced dimness. Moving restlessly towards and away from one another to electronic/digital music by composers John Matthias and Andrew Prior, the two women and two men could be mirror reflections of one man and one woman (as the fleeting contact of their raised palms suggests). The sense of duality continues as the two men, alone, echo each other’s movements but never connect as separate beings. A similar ‘duet’ by the two women follows. Identically dressed, they sit opposite each other on the floor with outspread legs, rather like the figures in Paula Rego’s paintings.
When all four dancers are on the stage again, they seem to represent the conflicting emotions of two people in a relationship. In beams of light projected from above, the swirling dry ice becomes a surface that is reflective (a dancer of the same sex on either side) or permeable (one of the women reaching through as if to pull the other to her). Physical strength is shared out equally between the sexes (which may be part of the ‘social change’ referred to). The women roll across the floor with remarkable force and speed or stand, sturdily, one behind the other, rocking like a metronome in two minds. The piece ends as it had begun, with the dancers becoming their own dimly-lit reflections once again.
The movement in the second piece, Pictures We Make (choreographed by company founders Anthony Missen and Kevin Edward Turner), is less stylized. In the almost everyday clothes the dancers are now wearing, they could, at first, be any two couples experiencing what happens when (according to the programme notes) ‘we plunge from I to we’. The four chairs on the stage reinforce the sense of the quotidian; there is even a banality to the displays of affection or anger. It is when one of the former sends waves of responsive tenderness through the audience that the couple involved are pulled apart by the other two dancers and the piece suddenly shifts to a register in which ‘we’ is a question of competition, of facial expressions that are exaggerated, distorted and false, of movement that is automatic and behaviour that is abusive. The four dancers make a dash for a partner. Two ‘win’; two ‘lose’. The losers make do with each other. One of the women and one of the men support, in a standing position, the partners who have wrapped themselves, as if needily, around their waists. At the end, however, these partners are lying, as if discarded, in shadow on the floor and the other two are forming a new (though perhaps no more lasting) combination in a square of fluorescent green light.
John O’Dwyer