Alma Soderbreg (Sweden) Cosas
The Guerilla Dance Project Laura Kriefman Not Looking for Anyone
Avatara Ayuso Dance company Pidgin
A good night, marked by intelligence and surprise, kicked off with the first of this year's six Aerowaves selections. Cosas is a sound-and-motion collage by Swedish soloist Alma Soderberg, a strapping blonde with a confidence equal to her glowing good looks. Shuffling effortlessly between song and speech, this multi-lingual vocal artist came across like a one-person Stomp minus the props. Operating with engaging mastery on shuffle mode, she switched in an instant between tongue clicks, squeaks or beatbox and scratch effects supplemented by gestural or full-bodied mime. Potential irritations - an ear-splitting scream, a protracted cover of Fred Astaire's Cheek to Cheek - were ultimately overcome by her winning ways. The audience's enthusiastic response was a prime indication that Soderberg is something special.
Avatara Ayuso's well-plotted Pidgin was also deservedly well-received. Here two couples in identical black short-shorts and differently coloured sleeveless tops were pitted against each other. Alejandra Banos and Melanie Lopez were the slightly-built duo in orange and Emily Absalom and Ayuso herself a more Amazonian pair in gun-metal blue. Enacted via a dynamic vocabulary of sometimes strenuously stretched yet undulant gyrations, the quartet's encounters were borderline gladiatorial with perhaps unwitting hints of Sapphic desire. Ayuso's dramatic thrust was their attempts to find a new, shared physical language. The piece could use tightening and trimming, but how invigorating to see a power play between strong women.
In-between came Guerilla Dance Project in Laura Kriefman's Not Looking for Anyone. The not always original manipulation of a plethora of props - chairs, teacups and saucers, beer bottles, mobiles, shredded newspapers - demonstrated the nascent discipline of a nine-strong cast (all-female save for a token bloke). It also grounded the performers in our possibly isolating times. If the work ultimately succumbed to its deliberately narrow subject matter - how contemporary youth can become strait-jacketed by ennui and joyless, lemming-like banalities - it nevertheless conveyed at least a partial sense of bleak truth.
Donald Hutera
Alma Söderberg is exquisite. Just her stride on to the stage is impressive. Her solo Cosas is a torrent of song, language, stamping feet and verbally punctuated gesture. Sound and movement become one pumping, well driven engine. She is fiery but also incredibly cool. Her jeans and sneakers are cool but also the way that she controls herself, flicking and switching between dynamic states and remixing snippets and lengths of songs-that-we-know, is cool. She is also a bit wild, but nothing is random or lost. She alludes to culture and then tears it apart. Weaving abstracted sounds and images together she sends us into a dancing trance.
Guerilla Dance Project doesn't offer the warfare and sabotage that I secretly hoped for. The dancers are preset on stage. High street dresses and teachers' chairs - it could be an afternoon in a dull student union bar. There is a strange pre-performance, pre-the-real-thing atmosphere. The piece begins but the numbness of the preset remains. There are bodies, cups and scatterings of torn newspaper on stage but nothing that I want to look at (aside from a few interestingly glary-eyed performers pulling ear phones out of their cleavages.) Kriefman is nobly ‘looking for the dances in everyday life' but at present everyday life is more interesting than her choreographed version of it.
Avatâra Ayuso presents Pidgin with conviction. There is attention to detail, chemistry between the dancers and a satisfying embrace of both the awkwardness and precision of the dense, spiky movement. However, obsession with position distracts from the richness of dynamic quality, there is fickleness in the compositional relationships between the dancers and the physical softness tends to become affected by the stylistic habits of the dancers' trained bodies. An engaging performance but in need of an edit and something to define it amidst the sea of hot pants, arched lumbars and pointed feet which floods so much of today's dance scene.
Eleanor Sikorski