United Kingdom Various composers, Thank You For Coming, A Soft Target,The Thin Veil, Almost Poetic: Verve, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, The Place, London, 21. 05. 2015. (J.O’D)
Thank You For Coming
Dancers: Amarnah Amuludun, Anna Fooks, Chris Hurst, Iris Borràs Anglada, Jake Evans, Joshua Tarifa Nuñez, Clémentine Télesfort, Faye Tan, Holly Steppel, Kai Tomioka, Rob Anderson, Stefania Pinato
Choreographer: Efrosini Protopapa
Music: Fela Kuti
Lighting: Luke Haywood
Costumes: Valentina Golfieri
A Soft Target
Dancers: Holly Steppel, Faye Tan, Jake Evans, Stefania Pinato, Chris Hurst, Amarnah Amuludun, Kai Tomioka
Choreographer: Athina Vahla
Music: Benny Benasssi, Schubert, Richter, Eminem
Dramaturgy advice:Mary Ann Hushlak
Lighting: Luke Haywood
Costume: Valentina Golfieri
The Thin Veil
Dancers: Robert Anderson, Iris Borràs Anglada, Anna Fooks, Chris Hurst, Amarnah Amuludun, Joshua Tarifa Nuñez, Clémentine Télesfort, Kai Tomioka
Music: Murcof
Lighting: Luke Haywood
Costumes: Melissa Burton
Almost Poetic
Dancers: Amarnah Amuludun, Anna Fooks, Chris Hurst, Iris Borràs Anglada, Jake Evans, Joshua Tarifa Nuñez, Clémentine Télesfort, Faye Tan, Holly Steppel, Kai Tomioka, Rob Anderson, Stefania Pinato
Choreographer: Anton Lachky
Music: Haydn, Mozart
Lighting: Luke Haywood
Costumes:Melissa Burton
There is something unusually ‘even’ about this programme by Verve, the postgraduate performance company of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Two works by female choreographers, two by male; two pieces of dance-theatre, two of dance; all of roughly the same length; all strangely downbeat in atmosphere.
Efrosini Protopapa’s Thank You For Coming stretches the acting skills of some of the performers a little far, at the start. It is better when they begin to dance in their party clothes, among balloons, in celebration of anything or nothing. (‘Batman and Superman’s wedding’ and ‘the Second Coming of Jesus’ are among possible reasons offered by the dancers themselves.) From incomprehensible small talk in stiffly-held poses, to writhing across the floor as a single, loved-up group, to collapsing in a row at the front of the stage, they are seen to run the gamut of the ‘party’ experience. ‘Oh! You’re still here!’ one of women says to the audience as she raises her head, sleepily or drunkenly, at the end.
Athina Vahla’s A Soft Target is darker in tone. Entering into, the programme note says, ‘the iconographies of our time’, it begins and ends with a seated man, wrapped in a red towel, being shaved by a woman. The sound of a dripping tap as this happens adds to the atmosphere of unease. Amarnah Amuludun and Stefania Pinato are forceful presences in what unfolds as a series of images involving gender and power, one of which makes use of the shaving mirror in a darkly ironic reference to Velàzquez’s ‘The Toilet of Venus’.
Before Robert Wiser’s The Thin Veil has even begun, haze and a rumbling sound are beginning to fill the auditorium as they did before New Movement Collective’s Please Be Seated at the Purcell Room in 2014. (Wiser is a founder-member of that company). Iris Borràs Anglada, dressed in white, performs a smooth, floor-based solo. She is soon supplanted by a group of similarly dressed dancers in expressionless white masks, who manipulate each other’s heads from behind as they face the audience. With its seamless movement, strong patterns and eerie visuals, this is the work of the evening that draws you in deepest.
Anton Lachky is also the co-founder of a collective: Les SlovaKs Dance Collective. In Almost Poetic he brings some of its ‘lively, uninhibited language’ to the Verve dancers. Breaking out of the group around them, each one lets rip in Billy Elliot-like riffs on the music of Haydn and Mozart that accommodate their different backgrounds in ballet, gymnastics and breakdance. Rob Anderson spins on his head. Anna Fooks is carried on to the stage upside down and placed in an unwavering headstand. Iris Borràs Anglada is lifted with her legs and arms in a position that brings the opening of Frederick Ashton’s Monotones II to mind. But it all goes on too long; it is all too much at one pace. ‘A celebration of young energy’ as it may be, I found it the most downbeat work of all.
John O’Dwyer