Grayson Perry at the British Museum
January 2012
The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum is Grayson Perry’s particular homage to the many anonymous individuals from ancient civilizations whose crafts, religious paraphernalia and relics give us an insight into the past, taste, habits and belief systems of an antic age. Perry acts as an artist and curator by exhibiting his new and previous works together with findings from the British Museum archives.
In awe by the patina of history, old objects and aged ethnographical imagery, Perry juxtaposes his glossy pots, colorful tapestries and pagan shrines against revered and sacred anthropological totems. Oblivious to the geographical origin and production date of the archival documents, the exhibition is organised in themes: pilgrimage, shrines, magic, maps, souvenirs, sexuality, craftsmanship, etc. Forget the weightiness of centuries of history. Although with the entire rigor, this is a guilt-free glorious walk through aesthetic pleasure in a cabinet of curiosities. Unavoidably, this sets itself into a find-the-differences game which nonetheless does not detract from the focus of the show but rather emphasizes on Perry’s interests and sources of inspiration.
As a historian or chronicler of Contemporaneity, Perry’s palimpsest of references veers on this occasion away from celebrity culture, magazines, TV and branding and centers on more autobiographical notes. Alan Measles, a teddy bear that has accompanied Perry since childhood in his imaginary world, features in pots, badges, a tapestry, getting married to Claire –Perry’s alter ego as a transvestite– in a shrine, crowning a helmet, and even as a humongous glazed ceramic, Tomb guardian (2011). On this latter form, Measles protrudes an erected penis topped with the head of god Hermes in the manner of ancient Greek tradition where pillars decorated with male genitals were used for protection and should be rubbed for good luck.
The sense of incongruence between form and content in his works seems irrelevant since Perry does not present facts of contemporary life but a mélange of impressions, emotions, and opinions. His objects will not fill the cabinets of the anthropological museum of the future but he is not an impostor either. He enjoys himself and he has enjoyed nosing around the archives. The exhibition ends with a colossal tribute to the unknown makers of his precious findings in the form of a rusty boat full of these treasures’ replicas. We visit museums and galleries to understand our past and ourselves better. It is just an anti-climax that passing by the gift shop we see the heroic, provoking, aggressive and fun Alan Measles as a cuddly merchandise icon. This surely has a place in the anthropological museum of the future.
Un Peu de Tendresse Bordel de Merde! by Dave St-Pierre at Sadler's Wells
7 June 2011
This review was published on the 6th of June 2011 in Mouth London
For his debut at Sadler’s Wells, Dave St-Pierre choreographs unreserved truthfulness and courage. His energy spills out of the stage in the form of naked bodies charged with an inner uncontrollable force that ranges from euphoria to rage, from candidness to despair, from distress to passion. An outspoken pitiless femme fatale guides us through the loose narrative while performers dress and undress themselves repeatedly and the scenes build up on a weaving of physical and emotional impulses.
Each scene creates an abyss of contrast; from the opening act, in which a woman is paralyzed in anguish and desire, and then possessed in a split second by fury, hysteria and manic desperation, to the great silliness of giggly naked men counting to eleven in blond wigs and enduring the unbearable pain of slapping themselves. All is supported by a nonsensical thread but it works, precisely because of the purity of emotions.
What does not work is the clichéd representation of gender roles, with barking mad women howling, swearing and wrestling with each other while men enjoy crawling naked on the audience, stretching their bodies and rubbing bums and genitalia before simulating a blowjob. The stolen references from Pina Bauch do not do any justice to their referent or to the piece either. They fail to evoke the piercing sorrow and grief of Pina’s women falling from men’s arms or wandering around the stage. And the lack of comedy in some scenes is only sustained by the witty femme fatale. Many left the theatre at different times during the show. They were not prude, just bored.
St-Pierre promises transgression and assures the audience a vital transformation in the way we see human relationships that we do not experience. That is the danger of an explicit commitment. Our expectations are measured against it and we fail to recognize the honesty and openness of raw emotions that really are in front of us.
The military sharpness of the group push-ups, slaps and gruff hails are done with staccato precision. An impeccable antithesis to the closing scene: a mesh of twenty-one bare-skinned bodies sliding against the drenched floor and caressing each other for an unaware moment, whirling and cuddling together. It was worth all the nonsense.
Performances on 2-4 June 2011
Marco D'Agostin / Sarah Lewis & Steve Johnstone / Uchenna Dance Company Resolution! 2011
13 February 2011
This review was published on the 11th of February 2011 in Resolution! Review, The Place's online magazine.
Marco D'Agostin Viola
Sarah Lewis & Steve Johnstone Chairs
Uchenna Dance Company Life After
The beauty of Viola lies in its ambiguity and Marco d’Agostin’s ability to draw us in. Wearing briefs, he faces one side of the stage and touches himself as if exploring his body or rehearsing moves in front of a mirror. Violent punches to the air follow kicks and beats on chest. Is he asking for a fight? Is he seducing a woman? The sexual tension heightens as he vigorously smacks his bottom, bites his arm and licks his finger with eroticism. It is gripping because it is extremely physical. Either defiant or showing off, erotic or self-abusive, d’Agostin exudes vulnerability. The dancer finally faces the audience, genitalia tucked in between his legs and fades in the dark.
In a similar vein, dependence is the kind of weakness that Sarah Lewis and Steve Johnstone fight against in Chairs. How many ways of sitting down can possibly be? On someone’s feet, lap, calf, in their swaying arms, bum on bum… and on chairs! As they dance to popular songs, it becomes apparent Johnstone’s power over Lewis and she wants to regain control. Arranging chairs and tea-lights, they prepare for a party. However, this is a dismal set up. She feels uncomfortable in her own body, contorting herself and pulling out ills. We feel reassured when he takes chairs away, preventing her from stumbling over them. After all, don’t we all need someone to lean on?
That is the starting point of Vicki Igbokwe’s Life After as her voiceover recalls the passing of her mother. Six female dancers fuel the piece with hip moves and capoeira accents but their uneven technical ability taints the enjoyment. Maracas and samba tunes turn ritualistic and shamanic, taking Life After closer to a personal therapy than a show. Igbokwe asks us at the end: “Can you tell me what is the meaning of life?”. This is too much of a question to ask since she does not untangle it, nor makes it more interesting to discover.
Resolution! is The Place’s annual open season for short dance works. Over 100 works are presented in nightly changing triple bills. Resolution! in 2011 runs from Thursday 6 January until Friday 18 February.
Zosia Dowmunt / Silversmith Dance Theatre / Hubert Essakow Dance at Resolution! 2011
11 February 2011
This review was published on the 10th of February 2011 in Resolution! Review, The Place's online magazine.
Zosia Dowmunt I am Island
Silversmith Dance Theatre Thou Shalt
Hubert Essakow Dance Kanaval
I am Island spells out self-consciousness and hesitancy in direction. Wearing “Artists” labeled t-shirts, the piece is punctuated by two male and two female dancers stating their own individuality to the audience. Zosia Dowmunt mixes these passages with pop music, street-dance and a comic flair throughout. The funniest moment arrives when an infuriated male dancer argues against a pseudo-intellectual discourse that aims to explain his proclamation “I am a rock”. The explicit references to their lack of originality, stealing and recycling from previous artists, transform the piece into a student exercise. Dowmunt should not excuse herself but aim for more ambition and self-confidence.
The stringy tears of a mournful and weak violoncello sway four ghost-like women on stage in Thou Shalt. Dressing in the same habit as the rest of the cast, one of them plays the instrument. With a monastic austerity in their humble gestures, like sewing and washing hands, the repetitive tasks turn painful to watch as these women become violent and paranoid. The sudden changes of tempo and contractions remind us of Anne Theresa de Keersmaeker. Silversmith Dance Theatre create a potent image as they pass the violoncello from dancer to dancer, fusing the severe physicality of the piece with the music. A shame they do not pursue that thread much further. They offer us instead a timid rediscovering of the world and themselves.
Esoteric, shamanic and primitive can also be cool, civilized and attractive. Feathers, sequins and metallic skirts worth stepping the catwalk wrap the four dancers stylishly but overshadow Kanaval. Hubert Essakow fails to confer individuality to his characters with the exception of Dorottya Ujszaszi’s solo which is sensual, sophisticated and feline. Overall, an epic disappointment given the dancers technical ability and Essakow’s cleverly maneuvered choreography with dynamic group compositions. The dance language is vigorous and mature, bringing into dialogue elongated bodies and curves, sharp passés and fluid turns. Essakow should take pride as only artists with great ambitions disappoint.
Resolution! is The Place’s annual open season for short dance works. Over 100 works are presented in nightly changing triple bills. Resolution! in 2011 runs from Thursday 6 January until Friday 18 February.
La Peña Nuñez / Iml / James & Hurst at Resolution! 2011
31 January 2011
This review was published on the 29th of January 2011 in Resolution! Review, The Place's online magazine.
La Peña Nuñez Sunny Side Up
Iml blabla
Hurst & James Punch To The Heart
Sunnyside Up is a love-hate idyll between a female egg and a man. He helps her to grow into a soft fried egg and she helps him to fight his insecurity and hesitancy in romance. A fun, light, brave and witty piece that combines fluid and poetic moves with hip-hop, funk and pantomime. Meticulous chopping of onions precedes violent cuts of carrots in the first scene, anticipating sharp changes in rhythm and visual contrast throughout the piece. Laura Peña uses blackouts to accelerate the narrative and parody cinematic stills of horror movies. Knife in hand and it would seem that he is going to kill her. Nonetheless, Philipp Stummer’s muscular assurance elegantly becomes the perfect contrast to the delicacy of an egg and his own vulnerability.
The cheerful mood of the evening seemed to continue deceptively with blabla. One male and two female sit on a sofa, Simpsons style, in front of a TV set. What starts provoking timid laughter, a parody in slow and fast forward motion on the routine of watching TV, turns out to be a comment on isolation and lack of communication. Interested in the ordinary, the piece evolves to see the three performers dancing to disco music, urinating, changing clothes, talking and flicking through a newspaper. However, the highlight comes with their synchronised work on the floor, straight as in rigor mortis and swinging like automats doomed to a pattern.
And dark notes went even further with Punch to the heart. Hurst & James present eight performers lost in their thoughts, afflicted and visibly defeated. A grave piece where the characters’ psychological weight almost shadows the dancing. The opening and closure balances out the physical and emotional work by placing a troubled female standing still and looking at her alter ego whose fluid but assertive moves blend with a violin solo. Lighting makes the mood even more oppressive by limiting the dancers’ space in their physical conversation with falls and catches. But why are women the needy and weakest? A missed opportunity to overcome stereotypes.
Resolution! is The Place’s annual open season for short dance works. Over 100 works are presented in nightly changing triple bills. Resolution! in 2011 runs from Thursday 6 January until Friday 18 February.
Deaf Men Dancing / Letizia Mazzeo / The Federation
24 January 2011
This review was published on the 22nd of January 2011 in Resolution! Review, The Place's online magazine.
Deaf Men Dancing Mark Smith Sense of Freedom
Letizia Mazzeo Dahlia
The Federation Colette Brandenburg Encounters
Use of additional written and visual language was last night performances’ leitmotiv. Dance was not enough as choreographers strived to accompany their work with over explanatory strategies. In their attempts to illustrate the thought and creative process, pieces were punctuated by live music and technicians on stage.
Fitted with suits and impossible Elvis wigs and shades, four male military-like dancers stepped in Mark Smith’s Sense of Freedom. Their sharp kicks and robotic hip moves to pop songs were a firm and fun introduction of sign language within dance. Chest opening, expressive use of hands and quick and short caresses of their bodies gave way to an ostensibly macho style filled with beating on chest, arm mannerism and overeager virile jumps. What initially seemed an ironic and witty take on clichés, it rendered a cliché itself as dancers kept loosing garments in their thrill to embody affected lyrics and live voiceover.
Letizia Mazzeo’s Dahlia was the most mature and consistent piece of the evening. Elsa Petit personified a methodical character following a specific tea-making routine before looking up a word in the dictionary. The words, inventively projected on screen, made the piece evolve. A clever idea to build the narrative sadly overshadowed a well-delivered-but-unexciting literal translation into movement.“Organ”, “water” and “electrocardiogram” were some of the words and suddenly, a “blackout” changed the parameters of the performance. Leaving the repetitive pattern behind, Petit grabbed our attention for a poetic finale on the “solitude” of this character.
Colette Brandenburg’s Encounters proposed a night of entertainment as we took our seats with candy in hand and personalised messages urging us to enjoy ourselves. Seventeen cabaret stars welcomed us into a music-hall-come-variety show. A desynchronized group, lack of rhythm between sketches, patronizing written placards and an overall inexistent premise for the joy made the gracefully extended arms overbearing. Playing the game of self-mockery requires to master the genre first and these smiley and eye-popping faces did not.
Resolution! is The Place’s annual open season for short dance works. Over 100 works are presented in nightly changing triple bills. Resolution! in 2011 runs from Thursday 6 January until Friday 18 February.
Toby Fitzgibbons & Matthew Robinson / Sarah Levinsky / Indeed Dance Company at Resolution! 2011
17 January 2011
This review was published on the 15th of January 2011 in Resolution! Review, The Place's online magazine.
Toby Fitzgibbons & Matthew Robinson Some Other Future
Sarah Levinsky Birds
Indeed Dance Company Nadine Doran-Holder Stickler
Some Other Future intertwines an acute narrative of two boys caught up in war time with refined lyrical dance. Toby Fitzgibbons and Matthew Robinson, both choreographers and performers, access the stage from the stalls parading a suitcase like a coffin in a funeral. The two male dancers fuse their bodies in organic embraces and soft jumps and blend into visual metaphors insinuated by the textured soundtrack of radio broadcast fragments, bells and the sea swell. The piece evolves into a dark mood of sharp abdominal contractions and tense leg flicks. A fight over bright red jam becomes the most powerful image of blood, a cry for the lost love and over death as dancers collide brusquely, swirl and caress each other. This is poetry in movement.
A shock to the senses is to go from a visual poem to a mad chaos. Sarah Levinsky’s Birds is a shabby party of four female performers. These wild women dance to shrill and psychedelic music with inorganic and disjointed spasms throughout the piece and uneasy and failed sensuality, although intentional, at times. In this bold-but-lost party, the night starts with a close-knit group but gradually people disperse and purpose blurs: one passes out, one dances solo in a corner and the others plunge into their own trances. The movement is so loose and uncontrolled that it lingers a sense of experimentation and lack of restrictions throughout the piece.
Stickler brings back the composure to the stage. In fact, Nadine Doran-Holder has created a piece so precise, measured, controlled and balanced that it almost feels claustrophobic. Four dancers in a variety of solos, duets and group configurations dance to a punctuating and enduring timer or to a live string quartet alternatively. The more classical poses give way to an impeccable contemporary technique to finish with an intricate composition. The rigidity of the piece leaves the emotional charge to the string quartet. We cannot feel but sorry for those machines-like dancers who obey steps but do not convey emotion.
Resolution! is The Place’s annual open season for short dance works. Over 100 works are presented in nightly changing triple bills. Resolution! in 2011 runs from Thursday 6 January until Friday 18 February.
Cote a Cote Theatre Company / MAAIKOR Dance Company / Joss Arnott Dance at Resolution! 2011
10 January 2011
This review was published on the 8th of January 2011 in Resolution! Review, The Place's online magazine.
Cote a Cote Theatre Company The Sicilian
MAAIKOR Dance Company Karen’Or Pezard Heart of Ice
Joss Arnott Dance Threshold
The ardent notes of a tango opened Cote a Cote’s The Sicilian. Unfortunately, the clumsy adaptation of Molière’s play did not convey either emotion or skill. The lack of wit in the text, the hardly-credible and dispassionate love affair and the male actors’ uneasiness with the dancing flooded the show. Easy gimmicks, overacting, Manichaean and simplistic characters and a cringe-making moralistic finale, swamped it further. This was the kind of physical theatre more effective for children than an adult audience. A shame that a bit more of the delicately choreographed and gracefully delivered courtship scene in parallel with the fight between Don Pedro and the lover’s friend did not come through.
The lights went down as a velvety humming brought to the stage an abstract landscape that was unveiled as the dancer organically swirled, twisted and curled on the floor. Karen’Or Pezard draws a mental map with Heart of Ice. The plasticity of the movement and a sense of abandonment situate the piece in the realm of dreams. We accompany the dancer in her elongated rond de jambes as if we were witnessing some kind of rebirth. Oblivious to the reason of the sudden moment of self-realization, when the cold lighting contrasts with the dancer’s warmth, she captivated us in a magical instant of heart-stopping acting.
Challenging energy levels were demanded in Joss Arnott’s Threshold, an enduring piece of technical finesse that brought the body to extreme hyper extensions and overarching backs, which place it on Wayne McGregor’s arena. Hardcore dance which merges violent throwing of limbs into the air in sinuous lines, sharp blows against the floor and spasms of hands and head are set against a mad dissonant soundtrack. Such a solid style makes this an unnerving but addictive piece. The energy was fierce and that was enough for me but it remains to be seen if this is not a self-exhausting approach. I look forward to Arnott’s next work to find out.
Resolution! is The Place’s annual open season for short dance works. Over 100 works are presented in nightly changing triple bills. Resolution! in 2011 runs from Thursday 6 January until Friday 18 February.
Gregory Crewdson at White Cube
28 December 2010
A sanctuary is a sacred place for worship and pray; a church, a temple ruled by dogma and acceptance of a creed and preserved against questioning. A sanctuary accepts none or very little change and it is only enjoyed with respect and unconditional faith. Transformation of the sacred would mean misunderstanding and violation. Disregard would be pure desecration. But what is it a sanctuary in ruins? The decay of the faith or a desperate need for renovation?
Gregory Crewdson’s new photography series Sanctuary (2009) is a work based on the Cinecittà studios in Rome, the film production centre founded by Mussolini in 1937. These images are the mise en scene of a ruin of cinema itself, a remnant of film sets presumably used by the demiurges of Italian cinema: Fellini, Rossellini and Antonioni among others. Although these images are more sober and humble in grand effects than his previous works, Crewdson is faithful to his story-telling trademark. He is constructing a narrative on the ruin of cinema, between nostalgia and reinvention.
This is a homage to the roots and the art of cinema that he is so well connected to. This is the first time that Crewdson shoots outside the USA and he has decided to shoot a stage. Telling dreamlike and surrealist stories has been Gregory Crewdson’s signature: the construction of images with a strong cinematic narrative, fabricated disquieting scenes of mystery and drama. Behind each take, Crewdson has always used a large scale film production’s crew including staff for lighting, make up, special effects, set design and actors. To produce Sanctuary, the artist reduced the crew and the dramatic effect of the images to a minimum but he has not lost faith. Working in black and white and using fog to recreate a decadent ambient, Crewdson adds to the construction of a story, playing on a boundary that looks at a static past and suggests an awaiting future.
A suffocating emptiness inhabits these images, a sense of eeriness and death heightened by the subtle grayscale, almost sepia, and a framing technique making use of doorways and windows to confer stillness to the image. Some of the photographs unveil the façade, the fakeness of the shells that film sets are. Others show the wildlife gaining ground on scaffoldings and open spaces. Although these are direct pictures, devoid of human presence, nature seems to crawl on neglected and rotten corpses. It is this void that Crewdson invites us to fill with our imagination, with the stories that once happened or the ones that are yet to be shot.
Crewdson interrogates cinema through photography and paradoxically, the least constructed of his works seems the most unnatural. This comes to remind us of the power of cinema, the power of creating fantasy worlds and the sacredness of the suspension of disbelief. We have not lost faith but the authority to imagine brings storytelling to the next level.
Until 8 January 2011
David Maljkovic at Sprüth Magers London
21 December 2010
The rattle of a film projector in a well lit gallery is a call to savour the raw material and the medium itself, the sculptural qualities of the functional object and its mechanism, the delicacy of the craft and the fragility of the film stock. Recalling Frames at Sprüth Magers opens with the projection of light onto a silver metallic screen and it follows with blown up frames taken out of a film strip that David Maljkovic uses to create alluring photomontages that play with temporality. With a very low-tech approach, he constructs photographs that bear traces of cuts and scratches done with sensitivity. The use of a single frame from a film sequence is the more relevant since Maljkovic is not interested in the image per se but in disrupting the placement of this image in time. As he knows, film embodies time and the interplay with different temporalities.
Recalling Frames, 2010. B/W Photograph. Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Gallery London
Born in Croatia, Maljkovic’s oeuvre is strongly attached to his country’s political, social and historical situation. The photographs on the exhibition are stills taken from Orson Wells’ film The Trial (1962) shot in Zagreb, the Croatian city where the artist lives and works. These new works talk about locations that in the 1960s and 1970s enjoyed a period of optimism and political openness in the former Yugoslavia but that have now been neglected or forgotten. After tracking back the specific locations, Maljkovic took pictures in the exact same angle of the film stills. The collages build a new dimension of time; a temporal space that brings back an image from the past and also encounters a transformation that links it to an imagined future.
Some of these collages have a more realistic composition whilst others are more abstract and unlikely as a possible suggested future. However, the essence does not seem to be to provide us with an alternative history but to transgress fixed notions of past, present and future. But what is it that Maljkovic is inquiring the past about? Or what is he looking forward to? His works are not nostalgic but reassessing. He does not give answers but reflects on a transformation. He does not stay in the past, neither points towards a future.
Maljkovic has created a palimpsest of traces of time, not a collage juxtaposing fragments. The film stills and his own photographs conforming the collages do not work together by association of ideas, they work as a whole through the fusion of the same space in different times. The artist is not creating a new temporal dimension but suspending time. He physically cuts the film stock and reassembles it and he metaphorically cuts through time and pauses on a fiction allowing us for reflection. Maljkovic is materially playing with time and he is giving it to us to ponder on our perception of the present.
Until 23 December 2010
Rachel Kneebone at White Cube
29 November 2010
Porcelain has such a halo of softness, delicacy and kitsch sophistication that it is difficult to explain the sensual and material appeal of Rachel Kneebone’s sculptures. Maybe it is precisely the resounding physicality of the works that counterbalances the ethereal and innocence commonly associated with porcelain. Lamentations 2010 includes a group of six sculptures on plinths, six shields mounted on the wall and ten drawings. The sculptural group gives such a sense of mass, that it can only magnify the surprises encountered on a closer look: coarse cracks that break open the frail and smooth surface, the interwoven limbs, feet and vegetable motifs. “Oh! A nipple here!”. “And a penis there!”.
The monumental bases of the sculptures seem to engulf the half-woman half-phallus figurines on top but these feminine beasts compensate with pathos what they lack in size. The apparent fragility of the pieces turns into a vehement cry of grief, loss, fear, sorrow, desire and ecstasy. This high energy that the works exude is reminiscent of Michelangelo’s mannerism and the baroque period. For example, the formal composition of Mine heart is turned with me (2010) reminds us of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Theresa (1647-52). The head of the main figure is drawn back in despair; a last exhalation as a visual cue that Kneebone takes from Bernini. However, she has removed the figure of the angel and replaced Saint Theresa’s facial expression with a violent female sex; this erases narrative and the specificity of the emotion.
The beauty of Kneebone’s sculptures is that the mannerism of her works does not resort to anguished faces or traces of human emotion. The drama comes from the expressiveness and the folds of the many cracks and vaginas she sculpts, which reverberate in the lilies and the drapes. The ecstasy comes from the orgiastic continuum of limbs and penises that go in and out of orifices. Both Eros and Thanatos reside in the impassioned combination of the physical and the emotional. It is impossible to dissociate the affections that Kneebone creates because she does not represent characters, nor creates a narrative. It is the sublime which the works embody and that which empowers the viewer.
In comparison with the works in porcelain, the drawings seem to lack vitality. They are studies for the final sculptures but out of context they could be mistaken for surrealist porn. The rough sketches depict masses of human bodies without regard towards emotions. The abundant representation of phalluses and penetrated orifices, although erotically charged and full of movement, ignores the exuberance of the drama. The sensual lines flow and erotica permeates the drawings but it is the play with volumes, the glaze of the porcelain and the vigour of primitive gestures that enriches the artist’s work. We might not be able to empathize with Kneebone’s figures but we recognise the primal energy, the visceral.
Until 22 January 2011 at the White Cube, Hoxton Square
ROTOR at Siobhan Davies Studios
12 November 2010
Siobhan Davies has done it again. She has been doing it since 2007 with her Parallel Voices annual series of events. And she also did it in The Collection, an exhibition created in collaboration with Victoria Miró in 2009. Davies’ driving force is to open up channels of debate and collaboration between dance and visual art and to show us that dance is an art form in its own right. ROTOR is a commission-based exhibition where Davies has invited eight artists from different disciplines to respond to The Score (2010), a work choreographed for four performers and filmed from above. Davies’ piece has a central axis and a relentless imaginary line that will keep increasing its pace no matter what other things the dancers are doing. A walking line of dancers who end up drawing a myriad of patterns as they run away from the line, turn around, stop, slow down or gain speed to catch up with the merciless line again.
The True Story of Someone Putt Only Half Heard by Alice Oswald, a Siobhan Davies Dance commission for ROTOR 2010, photo Steven White. Courtesy of Siobhan Davies Dance
It is the endurance of dance artists, the spirit of rebellion, the creation process, the tempo and the formal qualities of The Score that have inspired a production designer, a composer, a photographer, a poet and a playwright among other artists. One of the most enchanting and beautiful pieces of the exhibition is The True Story of Someone Putt Only Half Heard by Alice Oswald. It is a poem recorded by the artist herself and played under a staircase, in a minuscule enclosed space that we can imagine is ordinarily used for storage. The room has been furnished with cushions, an armchair and a lamp and when the door is closed and the recording goes off you are transported into the world of this child—Someone Putt—who never walked forward. Oswald takes the cadence of the unforgiving line in The Score and translates it into words. The swirls of the wind, the blows she describes and the intonation of the sentences as she pulses on the last “but” of each verse, resonate the resilience of the dancers and the circularity and intertwined patterns in Davies’ choreography.
The pieces exhibited in
ROTOR are art works that speak for themselves. They do not derive from a choreography. If anything, they have been inspired by dance. The synergies between visual art, dance and performance start with movement, the body, the gesture, rhythm, musicality, forms, tempos, emotions, narrativity, immediacy...
ROTOR highlights these channels of dialogue but also hints at the limits; for example, the difficulty to programme performance in an exhibition space. Live art problematises its own exhibition and its after life. Durational works, documentation and entrance into the commercial circuit are ongoing debates around performance. They require creative and ever-changing approaches to accommodate to specific works and artists’ aims and I suspect Davies will be telling us something about this soon.
The Featherstonehaughs Draw On The Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele at The Place
10 November 2010
Five semi-naked dancers sleeping on futons and live rock music opening the show set the mood for high expectations. Lea Anderson’s 1998 work is inspired by Egon Schiele’s expressionist self-portraits from the early twentieth century. The show is as disquieting as Schiele’s paintings themselves. A demanding piece in interpretative qualities from the dancers, that nonetheless falls short of depth in its own development. Scenes follow one another after Schiele’s psychological and physical convulsions with little play on the piece’s internal rhythm and progression.
Photo Pau Ros. Courtesy of The Cholmondeleys
Super-stretched fingers, non-blinking eyes, contorted hands and open mouths are highlighted by strong beats in the dissonant music. The six dancers have embedded Schiele’s expressionism in their muscles and it is a delight to see the many nuances of the artist’s personality that they all confer onto this dancing portrait. Anderson’s skill in casting different kinds of performers empowers this work and allows inner conflicts, ambiguity, doubts and contradictions from Schiele’s ouvre to slip into the choreography. By dancing in pairs, a soft and sensuous embrace complements a fierce and spasmodic head twist; the vulnerability of a frail body counters a defiant and aggressive glance.
The highlight of the show is the erotic, impudent and unrestrained pas de trois. Dancers spread their legs asking for pleasure, curve spines in ecstasy and open their mouths in an afflicted gesture. The bodysuits, faithful recreations of Schiele’s self-portrait nudes, enhance the sexually charged and technically demanding choreography. It is this intensity that we wish the piece would sustain until the end. We want to see this sketchbook unravelling and we want to see Anderson’s take on it.
The Arbor by Clio Barnard
31 October 2010
Winner of the Best British Newcomer award at the 54th BFI London Film Festival and the Sutherland award for Best Feature Debut, The Arbor (2010) by Clio Barnard tells the story of the playwright Andrea Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine, the eldest child of three by different men. The dramatised documentary is a tale of hardship with difficult escape, a vicious circle of lack of love and self-destruction. Andrea Dunbar was one of eight brothers and sisters, born to a drunken father and an apathetic mother living in a working-class neighbourhood in the Bradford of the 80s. The Arbor (1980) was her first play, developed at school when she was fifteen. This bleak auto-biography of a pregnant teenager in a deprived environment will repeat itself in the life of Lorraine. The film brings out Lorraine’s life after her mother’s death in 1990, when she was eleven. Lorraine herself will enter a self-abusive pattern of prostitution and drugs to end up in prison in 2007 convicted of manslaughter after her son’s death.
The film has a complex narrative structure that intertwines documentary footage with scenes of the play The Arbor, staged in the streets of an actual Bradford council estate—à la Dogville (2003)—and dramatised sequences with actors lip-synching to tape-recorded testimonies by the family, friends and theatre associates of Andrea Dunbar. The intricate script creates a distancing effect between the tragic biographical facts and the audience. Fed by Shklovsky and Brecht, Barnard disrupts any attempt of the public to empathise with the story and its personal dramas by rendering transparent cinematic techniques that would typically recreate an illusory world that embraces the audience emotionally.
We are alienated from judging parenthood because the director does not take positions, nor develops the characters in depth. Camera shots favour the appearance of neutrality, using static and distant takes when characters are interviewed and subtle hand-held camera takes for outdoors and scenes which entail movement. The direct appeal to the audience, when interviewees look at the camera and the distortion of the sound track by dubbing all actors and manipulating ambient sound, place us in a state of alert, of conscious analysis, instead of letting our emotions fly.
Clio Barnard’s dialogue between the real and the fictive is a constant reminder of the manipulative nature of cinema. Actors impersonating real people, dramatised scenes and the representation of a play are countered with Dunbar’s relatives and friends interpreting themselves, actors’ lip-synching with actual interviews, documentary images, using a Bradford council estate as a movie set and locals as extras. The director weaves with care and respect the threads of the real and the fictional so we embrace the complexity of the story. We feel for these people but our emotional engagement is not immediate; it demands minute post-film reflection.
Screened nationwide until the end of the year
Celebrating Trisha Brown
18 October 2010
Celebrating Trisha Brown is a programme including talks, performances and films taking place across different venues part of London’s Festival of New Dance organised by Dance Umbrella. Last weekend was a thrilling opportunity to leave behind definitions and boundaries among art disciplines and simply embrace and enjoy art.
Trisha Brown Dance Company re-staged early works from the 70s in the galleries of Tate Modern and also on stage at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall. The selection of works on show at each venue respected the original space for which each piece had been created, non-theatrical or the stage respectively. The choreographer experiments with movement, sometimes isolating it without music and collaborates with visual artists to create work for the gallery and the theatre. The process is the same but somehow the experience is different.
Like contemporary art did in the 60s and 70s, modern dance also wanted to break with narrative and virtuosity and find a new vocabulary. Mercé Cunnigham and Judson Dance Theatre in America were also working on these experiments at the time. Trisha Brown stripped and deconstructed choreography to the bare essentials. She wanted to free up the body, explore new movements, abolish rules and set up new ones.
Distance from conventional dance, repetition, accumulation and process are the basics of Brown’s early works. Three pieces at Tate Modern were presented in the Turbine Hall, facilitating the audience to surround the dancers. For example, Group Primary Accumulation (1970) is performed without music by four women lying on the floor, repeating a sequence of movements and adding a new gesture each time. Standing position is the most favoured in dance to make easier for the public to see the performers so for Trisha to lie her dancers down on the floor is a big statement in itself. Nonetheless, she also makes them turn on their backs giving us different points of view and conferring sculptural qualities onto the dancers. These bodies are objectified and become living sculptures. We do not look at them anymore as possible characters but as objects with a sense of form, rhythm and balance. This effect is greater in the pieces performed at the galleries, as Spanish Dance (1973), re-staged in the Joseph Beuys room. It creates a beautiful dialogue between Brown and Beuys’ works of the same period. Trisha’s choreography is full of wit and humour and contrasts with the solemnity of Beuys’ practice.
We breath Trisha’s freedom of creativity and respond with the same flexibility to explore her work in the gallery. When we enter the theatre the parameters of her practice are the same but the formalities of the venue determine our experience. We are bound to a seat, where we lack the proximity of the dancers. However, we are rewarded with a complete event were visual art blends with lighting, set design and costumes. Robert Rauschenberg collaborated with two of the works on stage and Trisha herself is the artist behind the painting that acts as a backdrop for the newest piece in her repertoire (L’amour au theatre, 2009). It is a joy to see Brown playing with the conventions of the theatre and dance. She challenges the idea of backstage and what is shown and concealed to the audience in Glacial Decoy (1979) and, along similar lines, she chooses dancers to perform with her back to the public in You can see us (1995/1996).
The context determines how the works are created and how we experience them. Moreover, our attitude and expectations when entering a gallery or the theatre are conditioned by tradition and convention. Nonetheless, it is exhilarating to see artists that relentlessly question, experiment and test their disciplines without the fear of failure. After all, witnessing the birth of living sculptures and the beauty of a new vocabulary of dance on stage can never be a failure.
Gimpel Fils: Gallery Artists
12 October 2010
Gimpel Fils gallery presents the work of three artists in their basement space. An unthemed exhibition of four drawings in a vitrine by Lucy Stein, a Seamus Harahan video and a sculpture by Littlewhitehead, a two-artist partnership comprised of Claire Little and Blake Whitehead. The gallery is not trying to impose any connection on these works and that feels liberating. However, Littlewhitehead’s piece (Any last thoughts?, 2010) overshadows the other works and dominates the space and our attention.
Any last thoughts? is a hyper-real life-size sculpture of a captive man, seated with his hands tied to the back of a chair and a paper bag covering his head. The dim lighting, the gesture of the drooping body and the feet slightly turned inward as in defeat are compelling elements that immediately transport us to a possible narrative of which we are part. The lack of eye contact makes us feel in a dominant position. We cannot engage emotionally or empathise with the suffering of this body because we are actually inflicting the torture. The title of the piece suggests the person in front of us is about to die and we are the murderers.
The use of the basement seems most appropriate for this work but at the same time the visitor’s trust is betrayed. The small and intimate space and the sudden proximity with the work that we are confronted with after going down the stairs force us to be part of this violent narrative. We have instantly become the aggressors, the tyrants. By positioning the work in this hidden spot, the visitor is taken by surprise and unable to escape.
Littlewhitehead’s work is a macabre play. It revolves around ideas of violence, pushing the boundaries and forcing the viewer into an uncomfortable position. Their practice borders on bad taste but it seems justified to shake our role as passive viewers. The interplay between reality and fiction makes us rethink our perception of and our position against the imagery of violence present in the everyday. We have become immune to seeing physical or psychological violence on TV or the movies. We know it is there and we choose to ignore it or just live with it.
“We want to beat you up visually” is the presentation statement that greets visitors to Littlewhitehead’s website (at least they warn us here) and they certainly accomplish their purpose but is this a valid one? As awful as the trick they are playing on their audience might feel, the generated afterthought seems compelling enough. Something inside us is stirred more vividly than just watching the news. However, is then the work’s validation based on awakening our conscience? In the end, the effect is the same: we switch off the TV and go for lunch or we leave the gallery and on to the next.
Any last thoughts?’s central point is to position us as part of the work. It is not an invitation to participate, it is an imposition. We play by their rules or there is no game. This is a dishonest game that turns effective. I never believed all is fair in love and war but it seems it is in art.
Until 7 November
Inhabiting worlds
5 October 2010
It does not happen often that you are asked to take off your shoes when entering an art gallery but this happened three times to me on one day last weekend. This was a precaution not to damage the installations on show. They were three very different proposals on how to create an art experience and transport us to a different world. Hopefully, the world of the artist with its strength, nuances and a lingering aftertaste.
Aaron Curry’s Mmnktlplkt exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery is a shock to the system as soon as you cross the threshold to enter the second room of the gallery. Curry’s proposal is extremely ambitious in its formal and conceptual scale: fluorescent colours, reflections and biomorphic forms are embraced by a grey-patterned wallpaper. Self-standing sculptures, reclining on the walls or hanging from the ceiling and clusters of collages create the illusion of entering a microorganism. It is almost a psychedelic trip, rich and overwhelming, quick to draw you in but difficult to navigate conceptually and aesthetically. After the first joyous impression, it becomes complex to negotiate one’s way through the works. The collages are specially beautiful with their cracks, ripped paper and flashes of colours but they get somewhat lost in the magma of the exhibition’s accumulative experience.
Nearby in Hoxton Square, IBID Projects presents the work of David Adamo. The visitant is greeted by an axe stuck on the wall and wood chips on the floor. The mood is set to encounter tension, violence and a mysterious narrative to unravel. The following works, spread around eleven rooms and two floors, resemble different settings out of a psycho-thriller production. The masculinity of some objects exudes severity, like the harp’s tensed strings or the axe, but this is presented in contrast with the fragility of other works which are reduced to splinters, such as the cane or the column. This interplay among the objects creates a dialectic around the exhibition. The creative process reflects on the repetitiveness of shaving the wood. The artistic gesture translates a personal and emotional journey into form.
On a completely different tone and scale, Matthew Richardson suggests a modest in size, but playful and heartfelt, installation at Limoncello Gallery. A series of ceramic plates arranged on slots on the floor and a poster of a naked man holding a plate with his buttocks conform the installation. The title Feelings and the disposition of the work makes it all sound rather naïve at first glance. However, the wandering around the plates trying to pin down the specificity of each piece makes for a cumulative experience on the abstraction of these emotions. The installation is light and humble in intentions but grand in its effects.
Three valid statements: the spectacular, a narrative play and the emotional. Curry pushes us into a dream-like nightmare, Adamo guides us through his personal obsession and Richardson allows us to gently slip into a cloud of abstraction. We inhabit their worlds but their success will depend on the traces left after the shock, the narrative and the charm respectively have worn off.
Aaron Curry, Mmnktlplkt: Michael Werner Gallery, 20 September – 18 October
David Adamo: IBID Projects, 25 September – 6 November
Matthew Richardson, Feelings: Limoncello. This exhibition is now closed.
The Collection at the Victoria Miró Gallery
May 2009
Siobhan Davies and Victoria Miró proved what a collaborative art project should be like last April with The Collection. The choreographer and the gallerist worked together to explore the dialogue between contemporary art and dance. The links and limits between the two disciplines should establish a comparative relationship that set the basis to contextualize and understand the works in the exhibition. Dance brings up the use of body language, musicality, rhythm, movements and gestures and takes from visual art its formal structure and composition.
Some may argue that the relation between the two disciplines in The Collection was subtle and elusive. Nonetheless, this was not what made the exhibition for me. It surprised me Davies' inquisitive attitude, embracing alternative artistic approaches and open to doubt, investigate and rectify while contemporary art works in the exhibition tended to be more absolute and categorical in their statements.
Davies' work, Minutes, is a dance in three pieces where she searches for new modes of understanding movement and looks for answers instead of offering them. She believes in dance as an artistic discipline that allows for aesthetic, expressive and cognitive examination like any other traditional art medium. This understanding positions her work next to contemporary art and makes us assess it in the same parameters.
This is not the first time we see dance practitioners leaving the theatre and entering art galleries, looking for cross influences with contemporary art. In the 60s, Merce Cunningham started to collaborate with visual art and music and it remained a constant until the end of his career. Also in the 60s and 70s, a more experimental approach was adopted by Judson Dance Theatre performances, playing with improvisation and video. However, by understanding dance as an art in its own right, placing it in the same scenario as contemporary art and treating it as a formal and compositional piece within a fixed frame, Davies aims at the objectification of dance. Physicality is placed over personal attributes and emotions and the dance as a whole is instrumentalised to connect with audience’s awareness of themselves and the creative process.
Minutes is a non stop performance by six artists, including Davies herself seated on a chair and counting off minutes. There are three different pieces that start, stop and resume without any order. Although the three of them have a different underlying mood, this does not seem to be an essential element. The focus of the works is the movement itself. Simple, everyday gestures are recognised by their familiarity—for example, a hand shake or the short sentence “I sing”. They are repeated again and again at the same time that little variations and nuances are added to make the gestures evolve. This is a statement against automatic movements or a prescribed dance body of language. Instead, performers' consciousness lends the movements new connotations while emptying them of meaning and learnt conventions. We connect with the familiarity of the movements but the repetition makes us question the gesture itself.
This emphasis in the study of the gesture displaces completely the drama of the works. There are no characters which we can be identified with; there is no narrative to follow and no emotion to feel. The subject is dance itself and the human body is its subject matter. Paradoxically, despite the physical proximity with the dancers and the familiarity with the movements, the whole performance feels impersonal and detached. Davies juxtaposes a rigorous composition and a structured choreography with organic movements, plain gestures and an allure of simplicity, almost improvisation. These contrasts give the impression in the audience of experiencing a very physical work in an abstract context.
The physicality is an obvious but important element in Minutes; not just the dancers' bodies but also the spectators'. Siobhan Davies situates three dances and the audience in one space. Spectators can move freely—around the room or walking across—and indeed are encouraged to do so to follow a particular dance or more than one at the same time and from different angles. The dance pieces have no directionality and challenge the audience on seeing totality; we cannot follow the three works at the same time and someone's experience will be different from someone else's because of their different positions in the room. Davies wants us to be aware of our presence and our active interpretative role while she highlights the making process and the choices behind each movement.
Lying in Wait was the other piece exhibited that most directly related dance and visual art. This is a truly collaborative project between film director, Idris Khan and choreographer and dancer, Sarah Warshop. Their work was exhibited in a dim-light room with three screens placed at different angles and playing the same footage from different perspectives. The experience of seeing the entire room and walking through by passing in front of each screen was a splendid choreography in itself. Also, the beauty of the dancer's distressed gestures was increased by the tempo, the slow motion editing and the manipulation of sound. Again, this work highlights the investigative attitude of dance and the assertive position of visual art. Khan's camera is fixed and her sound and video editing reinforce the repetitive and hesitant movements of the dancer. While the video work seems to come from the inside and responds to the determination of the film director, the dance appears to be open to the outside, interrogative and more subtle in its statements.
From a curatorial point of view, an art exhibition partnering with dance should fight against featuring art works that explicitly deal with human body's movement and musicality. The Collection included some works that bordered on the obviousness but revealed themselves as ingenious propositions. I am referring to Socle du Monde by Cildo Meireles, Francis Alÿs' paintings and Come Into My Sleep by Alex Hurtley. The last one is a gripping endless loop of famous movie scenes of wall climbing, races, escapes and chases that conform a picture of the physical engagement with space. We all recognise popular characters that appear on screen but the repetition of the same type of action erases the scenes' individuality and fixes the movement’s simplicity, rhythm and function. This effect is the same that we saw in Minutes: movement and dance become something of an object through repetition.
Spectatorship, composition, formal structure, audience engagement, abstraction and physicality are all concepts associated with visual art that dance practitioners in The Collection blended with ease into their performances. Furthermore, the works of Yayoi Kusama, Sarah Sze, Anri Sala and Conrad Shawcross allow us to talk of gestures, a constituent element of dance, in visual art. We understand gestures as intentionally communicative actions. [1] In her essay for the exhibition, Rachel Withers suggests to recognize visual art works also as gestures and questions “who or what is doing the intending?”. [2] Complementing this idea, Lia Markey distinguishes between the gesture of the artist and that of the artwork itself. [3] In other words, each creative act starts with an artist’ single gesture that the artwork must possess and make its own.
Yayoi Kusama's Gleaming Lights of the Souls, another highlight of the exhibit, is a moving installation where the artist's unmistakable polka dots acquire individuality as they fade in and out in the dark. The lights still retain the artist's singular gesture but the whole experience—the flickering, the reflections in the mirrors and water, the immensity of the darkness—confers them a new entity. Sarah Sze's obtains a similar effect with her Notes on Circumstance, a sanctuary of random but carefully organised objects that transport us to Sze's haunt for everyday refuse and its methodical arrangement. This makes us rethink these materials in terms of their banal and humble purpose in our daily life and their appeal in its new configuration.
Finally, there is a choreographic gesture from the curators that guides the visit as an experience of the space and our senses. At Victoria Miró Gallery, from the intimate atmosphere of Lying in Wait we are directed outdoors to see Kusama's Narcissus Garden while subtly making us aware of Susan Philips' audio work, Woods so Wild. Moving on, Minutes' visual strength has its counterpoint in A solo in the doldrums by Anri Sala. The last room contrasts some powerfully charged works with more subtle approaches to physicality. The exhibit finishes at Siobhan Davies Studios with Conrad Shawcross' Slow Arc Inside a Cube III, sculptural shadows in motion in a dance environment.
The dialogue between contemporary art and dance in
The Collection might be debatable for some. At the very least, however, the exhibition shows the importance of the lack of fear and limits as well as the investigative approach of dance practitioners. Cross disciplinary dialogue neither aims at a false interchangeability of attributes, nor to erase the difference among art disciplines. The aspiration should be to open up a more inclusive understanding of art to enrich artists and audience’s experience.
[1] Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary: Gesture: 2. A motion of the body or limbs expressive of sentiment or passion; any action or posture intended to express an idea or a passion, or to enforce or emphasize an argument, assertion, or opinion. 1913 ed. p.623
[2] Withers, Rachel, The Collection Quintet. Exhibition catalogue. 2009
