Shunt Dance Company Some Suggestions for Being Good
shift this floor does not exist (do elevators cry?)
Emma Lee In Your Shoes
It was a night of muffled meanings at Resolution! but that's not to say each of the three pieces on show were without their plus points.
Shunt Dance Company opened the evening with Some Suggestions for Being Good. This is their second showing at Resolution! and it was clear that choreographer Sadie Hunt's language had evolved since last year, the angular diagonals enhanced by freer, more playful movement and a theatrical riff involving Russian dolls. It seems to be a piece about layers of female identity but the ideas just aren't delineated sharply enough. Some nice moments though - such as when a blast of Beyoncé comes juxtaposed with some very unbootylicious dancing.
From Shunt to Shift, duo Barbara Gamper and Dimitris Politis, and the exceedingly unsettling this floor does not exist. We're not talking schlock horror or real-world suffering, just an unfathomably, meanderingly, depressingly disconcerting 30 minutes, complete with existential voiceover, shades of madness, urgent whispering, maddening chirruping noises and foggy projections. So full marks for atmosphere, but the content left us scratching our heads. Why dress a man in a giant flea collar? Why climax with him taking a shower? The artistic choices felt arbitrary. It was like poking around in somebody else's dream, and we all know there's nothing more tedious than that.
Finally, Emma Lee gave us In Your Shoes, a piece that benefited from some thoughtfully crafted choreography, precisely performed by Lee and fellow dancers Maisie Whitehead and Charlotte Coking, but suffered from a musical mismatch. The shuffling trip hop and percussive breakbeats that came in cataclysmic surges overwhelmed the child-like tussles onstage, the dancers in peasant dresses, furtive feat picking at the floor, shoulders hunched, hair hanging in their faces like shy kids. Neither music nor movement enhanced the other, and any broader intentions were stifled.
Lyndsey Winship
Perhaps Shunt's new piece should be subtitled Some Suggestions for Being Good [As A Woman], for the five female strong company seem half torn between executing domestic duties, and wanting to shake off the layers that mask their real identities. Although interspersed with occasional murmurs of playfulness and desire, the movement is somewhat repetitive and limited to angular lines and shunting steps but this may be to reflect a common language shared by the women. This meant, however, that it was the music by artists including Dixie Chicks and Rachel Portman that revealed the work's meaning more clearly than the choreography.
The central premise for shift's work is ‘A transcendent journey outside of reality into the subconscious'. However, this concept alone is not strong enough to hold the divergent elements together. Instead, we are presented with a roaming introspective that plays itself out like an obscure dream sequence with little rhyme or reason. The minimal on-stage action, long monologue and dimly lit stage do little to engage the audience. The realm of the subconscious is not new to dance but to work well onstage the audience needs more than a series of incoherent ramblings.
After the languor of the previous piece, it was refreshing to watch Lee and her dancers, Maisie Whitehead and Charlotte Coking shunt, shift and slide across the stage with quirky deliberation, arms fixed penquin-esque by their sides. Lee's entourage of two occasionally break into pushing and shoving as if vying for the same spot; they are less tentative than Whitehead but seem drawn to her nevertheless. After stepping cautiously into a pair of male shoes, Whitehead's movement becomes buoyant and forward, as if their owner's persona penetrates her body. Overall this is a tight yet inventive work that proved worth the wait.
Katie Fish
Shunt Dance Company, Some Suggestions for Being Good
shift, this floor does not exist (do elevators cry?), photo by Damian Lukas Pertoll
Emma Lee, In Your Shoes