Slipping into Chapter’s Stiwdio performance space, an intimate venue that offers up a wide circle of light around which thirty or so seats circumscribe the gently lit space, the audience take their seats quietly in the calm environment and feel settled and ready for what is clearly going to be a helping of the more esoteric side of contemporary dance.
Based on a work called I Think Not by the noted American avant-garde choreographer, Deborah Hay, the evening is two solos by Anushiye Yarnell from Wales and Riikka Theresa Innanen from Finland, performing their own adaptation or translation of that source work.
Through the evening, it is clear to see the shared heritage of the source inspiration, yet the two women give very contrasting responses to their offerings. Yarnell, in the first solo of the evening, is a strong, yet delicate and precise mover with a finely articulated sense of detail expressed through her body. Tiny gestures that ripple through tightly held limbs and torso suddenly drop through her body weight into elongated and elegant lunges where her control over movement and shape is secure and solid. While the motivation and meaning for each section of the solo is hard to discern, Yarnell holds it firmly in her grasp with a tight and determined focus that amply rewards the attention of the audience. At some moments she perfectly zoomorphises into an animalistic state then in a flash she is a ballerina in tutu turning a fast ménage around the stage, which gives the viewer quite a buzz of pleasure.
The whole solo, perhaps 30 minutes-long is performed in silence along with the sound of Yarnell’s breath and the added interpolation of some vocal utterances towards the end. Even with her expressive control of tone, this vocal section created a slight drop in the intensity of the performance as it took the focus away from her otherwise illuminating and rewarding work.
By contrast, Finnish dance artist, Riikka Theresa Innanen, presents herself as an imposing presence with warlike scarred lines beneath her strong blue eyes showing herself as a steely Nordic Freya goddess arriving to treat the space and audience with disdain and aggression. The sound score from Jouni Taurianinen pounds away at high volume creating a vibrant energy in the tight oppressive space and Innanen works her way around the audience with scant regard for breaking into their personal space. Intimidating and yet with a fragile underscore to her muscular dance vocabulary, she carves a strange elemental path around and through the circle of light.
A powerful and demonic interlude occurs towards the end of the solo where Innanen lies prostate on the floor uttering guttural intonations and shakes violently from the stomach as if attempting to dislodge a devil within her body. It’s an unsettling and uncomfortable few minutes of effective theatre which also gets under the viewer’s skin as an antidote to the more restrained contemporary dance sections of the evening. Perhaps she is attempting to shake out the intellectual pretentions of the language around her artform.
Visual design is added by Maria Mastola’s offering of two small wooden blocks which Innanen uses as if they were hiking boots, skis or mountain tops on which to stand to proclaim her ownership of the time and space of the performance. They added a solid touch of Nordic art sensibility to Innanen’s Finnish heritage and gave additional and effective symbolism to the dance.
Beyond some short prose/poetry that seemed mostly a strident call to action (Ready! Fire! Aim!), the programme offers no information about the dancers’ relationship to the original Deborah Hay work, meaning the two solos relied heavily on the personal differences between the womens’ physicality and performance styles to create a satisfying whole. Fortunately, the women are completely different in tone and presence so offer highly individual takes on the theme which then evolve into strong and satisfying interpretations of challenging and thought-provoking work. More information about how they worked with Deborah Hay to create the solos would have been welcome to give a better experience of the totality of the work.
Some artists don’t like to talk or write about their work, but while afficionados don’t need it, most audiences enjoy a touch of spoon-feeding to appreciate difficult work. This type of dance needs to communicate more widely to reach out to a public who might then get used to enjoying the challenge of having a thinking person’s night out in the theatre.
A chunky excerpt from Yarnell’s solo can be seen at the Wales Dance Platform in June in Cardiff. It’s well worth catching. www.walesdanceplatform.co.uk
Chapter Art Centre was also showing a contemporary art work in its Gallery space the same evening. An impressive and immersive experience by the English artist Richard Woods, it inhabits a similar intellectual and referential world to the dance event, but the exhibition was much enlightened by a communicative Live Guide whose enthusiasm to discuss and talk about the work made for a lively prelude to the dance performance. Chapter works to its true strengths when both artists and administrators show this type of passion for communicating about art. More soon please…
Anushiye Yarnell and Riikka Theresa Innanen
I THINK NOT (Choreography Deborah Hay)
Chapter Arts Centre