December 7, 2009
Crushed by the wheels of industry
As trailed a few posts ago, the last few weeks have brought performances by several companies of long-term WT interest. Jasmin Vardimon's Yesterday was the most familiar, a collage of material from earlier pieces reworked into near unrecognisability, shown last year at the Peacock and now returned to the more intimate environs of The Place. I liked this a lot the first time around, and it seemed even better on repeat viewing -- the choreography is striking and beautiful, the performances fluidly brilliant and the integration of some fairly flashy technology works a treat without seeming at all gratuitous. Vardimon is, as usual, especially good at capturing the tics and attitudes of British masculinity, but is also more generally touching, managing to make contact with some pretty fundamental emotions. Become a memory indeed.
Lea Anderson's boy band The Featherstonehaughs were instrumental in the creation of my abiding interest in contemporary dance, and are now being reconstituted as a distinct company for the first time in many years. Their R&D show -- also at The Place -- combined fragments of their last proper solo outing, The Featherstonehaughs draw on the sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, which is being prepared for revival, with some preliminary feints towards a new, as yet untitled, work intended to premiere next year. The company now boasts nine (count 'em) dancers, all but one of them completely new; they're all talented and have clearly been working very hard. The material wasn't any kind of radical departure, but it was distinctive and very enjoyable and generally seemed to bode well for next year's tour. Perhaps put off by the evening's "work in progress" status, none of my usual partners in crime were willing to come along to this, but it was actually surprisingly polished and entertaining. Given what I've seen I think I'll probably manage to drag at least one or two to the finished product. For anyone else, it's definitely worth a look.
And then there was Shunt, very much up to their old tricks again with new show Money. Easily their best work since the excellent Dance Bear Dance, this was another exercise in playing games with the audience, this time inside a brilliant machine set whose whirring and clanking seemed -- these things are hazy at best -- to embody the grinding awfulness of modern capitalism. Amidst much weird Lynchian awkwardness, the show makes its viewers complicit in an ill-advised entrepreneurial enterprise that may or may not be The Future. It's true that the set pieces don't really add up to much in the end, and there's never the sort of transformative surprise that DBD furnished, but it's highly enjoyable along the way, and leaves one with some memorable images, skewed perspectives, and perhaps a balloon. Not many shows serve you up a glass of bubbly partway through, or pelt you with brightly coloured balls, and who can resist either tactic?
Posted by matt at December 7, 2009 12:47 AM