United Kingdom Various composers, EDge on tour: London Contemporary Dance School, The Place, London, 19.5.2015 (J.O’D)
Treasure
Dancers: Isabel Álvarez, Eriketi Andreadaki, Amerigo Delli Bove, Joshua Boyle, Iris Chan, Emily Cook, Sade Risku, Clare Schweitzer, Sophia Sednova
Production
Choreography: Eleesha Drennan
Music: Min By, Bugge Wesseltoft; Single Foot, Moondog; White (Four Pianos), Jeroen Van Veen; Movement Eleven, Bugge Wesseltoft
The Greeting Game
Dancers: Isabel Álvarez, Eriketi Andreadaki, Amerigo Delli Bove, Joshua Boyle, Iris Chan, Emily Cook, Tiffany Desplanques, Michaela Ellingson, Lilly Nguyen, Sade Risku, Clare Schweitzer, Sophia Sednova
Production
Concept and Direction: Robert Clark
Choreography: Robert Clark and the dancers
Music: Roads Become Rivers, Rothko; Embraceable You, Ulrich Troyer (for a choreography created by Georg Balschke M. A. P. Vienna); Dance The Sauris, Teho Teardo
Bank
Dancers: Isabel Álvarez, Joshua Boyle, Iris Chan, Sade Risku, Clare Schweitzer, Sophia Sednova
Production
Choreographer: Siobhan Davies
Re-staging: Deb Saxon
Music: Matteo Fargion
Original Design: David Buckland
Original Garments: Sasha Keir
Original Lighting: Ian Beswick
The Singles
Dancers: Isabel Álvarez, Eriketi Andreadaki, Amerigo Delli Bove, Joshua Boyle, Iris Chan, Emily Cook, Tiffany Desplanques, Michaela Ellingson, Lilly Nguyen, Sade Risku, Clare Schweitzer, Sophia Sednova
Production
Choreography: Itamar Serussi
Music: Richard van Kruysdijk
When Ballet de Lorraine brought Itamar Serussi’s Cover to the Royal Opera House’s Linbury Studio Theatre in March, one critic said it ‘should really have been left at home’. Yet the work that the Amsterdam-based, Israeli choreographer has created on EDge, London Contemporary Dance School’s post-graduate company, forms a successful and intriguing end to an evening designed to show how the ten women and two men of this year’s intake have developed as artists across a range of choreographic styles.
The four-work programme begins with Eleesha Drennan’s Treasure, in which the dancers are seen in a half-light similar to that of the choreographer’s Virtual Descent for the National Dance Company Wales in 2013. It is a half-light that the dancers’ bare arms, hands and feet catch. The important movement in the piece is often in these parts of the body, while the legs and trunk merge into darkness. The dancers crouch, or move in groups on strong diagonals, but both they and the piece seem hampered by the narrative elements – the recurring figure in a gold cloak and hood; the coveted, golden eggs.
At the start of Robert Clark’s The Greeting Game one dancer (Michaela Ellingson) asks questions of the others who are lined up at the front of the stage in practice clothes. They change their position in the line according to the strength of their response. Darker in tone than when presented as a work-in-progress last October, this deconstruction of performance through words and movement meanders but ends on a forceful note as Michaela Ellingson answers some of the questions she posed at the beginning.
Choreographer Siobhan Davies was one of the first students at the London School of Contemporary Dance in the 1970s. With its contrast of motion and stillness, its focus on patterns, her 1997 Bank reaches back to the ‘sterner truths than beauty’ that dance writer Deborah Jowitt sees in the work of Martha Graham and other, female, ‘modern’ dancers of the mid-twentieth century. Movement is carried on to the stage by one dancer and taken up by another. Light projected on to the back wall extends the floor space so that it resembles the ‘lone and level sands’ of Shelley’s Ozymandias. The Sphinx itself is one of the visual patterns of the body, the bank of ideas, to which the work makes reference.
While the dancers approach Bank as they might an examination piece, they perform Itamar Serussi’s The Singles as if it were their own. Gathered on the brightly-lit stage like extras in the party scene of a Minnelli melodrama, they break out into movement at different times and in different combinations. Their costumes are of an eerie elegance: leotards and tight-fitting, high-cut shorts of some velvety material in contrasting colours. Those not ‘dancing’ to Richard van Kruysdijk’s electronic score watch the others, or whisper to each other, or kiss each other’s hands. At one point a woman performs a supported balance on the hip and thigh of a man who lies resting on his side on the floor.
In keeping with the title of the piece, movement is often on the spot and in the body: knees that tremble; tongues that flicker; hips that gyrate in plíe position. When they do travel from one place to another, the focus is on the dancers’ legs. These are made longer and more elegant by frequent rising on to the toes. With this simple gesture Itamar Serussi seems to be reminding us that the toes, as the Russian dance critic Akim Volynsky puts it, are the ‘apotheosis of verticality’.
EDge is on tour in England, Austria, Switzerland and Portugal until 12 July 2015. For details go to: http://www.theplace.org.uk/edge
John O’Dwyer