Past Thoughts on Dance (Originally in The Shimmy)

Gareth K Vile gets down to specifics.

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 09 AUGUST 2009

Once dance has been stripped of the “universal language” rhetoric, it entertains more personal potentials and becomes about shared learning rather than confirming consensus. By drawing on traditional movement vocabularies, it studies concepts that are so often excluded from the bland consumerism of modernity, echoing the conflicts of the past and present through an accessible symbolism. 

Anwesha Dance Company, with their North-East Indian inspiration filtered through Watford, make the battle between freedom and tradition explicit in A Mind's Journey in Search of Destiny. Pulling on the themes and style of Manipuri, it captures the tension between modern openness and ancient discipline in a throwdown between a ferocious contemporary dancer and a decoratively costumed Manipuri conscience. 

The text which leads the story deals with big issues in a leaden tone – as if to emphasise the contrast between the fluidity of the body and the dullness of mere words – and the young company are still evolving: yet this visceral war for identity is compelling through its exquisite video and dynamic structure. Manipuri, rooted in devotional worship, offers a foundation that happily evokes big ideas: the contemporary lends aggression. 

The story itself is intensely personal; dance training is used as a metaphor for the individual’s journey to integration, with the competing pulls of past and present beautifully represented in footage of the dancers performing in tube stations and shopping malls. 

Boh, on the other hand, does not pull on any particular past, using contemporary dance as a vehicle for confusion and crisis. A single dancer rotates personalities, flirts with a cupboard that holds memories of lost love and hope, hurling herself across the stage and channelling superb technique to a series of buzz-cut sketches. Italian in origin, it escapes the problems of translation by dealing with familiar matters – romance and social pressure, loneliness and the need for glamour – without ever being trite or obvious. Again, a specific story is told, making the particular comprehensible and expanding the debate around the pressures of female identity. 

Iona Kewney is an even more extreme example of freedom. Her Self-Interrupted Exhibition comes from her gymnastic training. Taking something usually so showy, she delves deep into a feral agitation that removes the gloss to gradually entrance with ecstatic dance. The loud music, the intensity of her actions, the awkward stumbling and impossible contortions: Kewney is utterly original, stunning and exhausting. Relentlessly idiosyncratic, her work is essential and maps out the outer-edge of possibility. 

Dance is always a dialogue, between audience and performers, between technique and expression, between the idea and its expression. The Fringe, when it is not a series of late night parties and drunken antics, is a hothouse of alternatives and invention.