For communities remembering their lives in the 1984 to ’85 Miners’ Strike, scars still run deep. In a building paid for almost 100 years ago by weekly subs that were earned working the seams at Oakdale pit, many former mining families are in tonight’s audience. Four of Blackwood’s daughters are also here but as guest performers helping to tell their community’s story.
A miner is asleep but his wife works strenuously on house chores reminding us that in mining towns, everyone works hard in this highly physical way of life. We soon see five men on their way to work just as the Welsh miners did in the 1941 film How Green Was My Valley. Jaunty, masculine and matey, they travel to a brass soundtrack performed live by members of the Tredegar Town Band in uniform, seated along the rear of the stage.
From here, the miners’ life underground is shown in the mind’s eye with more creative similitude than expected from this medium. The toil is repetitive, gruelling and dangerous under an imposing, mechanistic soundscape. Much contemporary dance relies on aesthetics more than storytelling but in his desire to create a “working class dance”, Clarke has succeeded in getting as near as possible to how it was, by using exaggerated physicality that takes on the work life but makes it into an art form, celebrating the workers of the coal age. These men use their bodies to dig coal, make quotas, carry pit props and keep their “butties” safe, be they miners underground or dancers in a theatre. By seeing dancers grafting with skill, sweat and comradery we see two forms of a shared experience.
The many of us who have never been miners might know a little of the hardship, danger and in many cases, the irreversible toll on health, so we ask, why was this hard life worth fighting for? Beethoven’s Fifth heightens the emotions of struggle and anguish as the miners work to save an injured comrade in high drama. A rapid scene change, lifting the lights, music, mood and it’s bath time. The wives clean up their heroic men, showing great respect and affection. These hard-working men have status, just one reason why the loss of pit life is still mourned.
Thatcher’s government arrives in 1979 and dancer Eleanor Perry as the Prime Minister in a blue skirt suit, performs an exaggerated, stiffly physical portrayal of her. With her personality switching between sickening obsequiousness to brief interjections when malevolent intentions break through, she can fall into the mania of Cruella De Vil. Perry is highly affecting as she manifests Thatcher’s steely revenge ambition. A superb individual work.
The miners and their families weaken in their resolve to maintain the strike. A painful to watch duet of waning then stiffened spirits, with emotions being wrenched between the spouses, says more than spoken dialogue can.
For the final scene, the manner in which Thatcher brings the miners to their knees is excruciating and incredibly emotional.
Dance often gets bad press for being arty movements, only to be understood if you pre-read lengthy programme notes. Gary Clarke’s COAL is not like that. Using speech, familiar objects, brass instruments and dance-expanded, exaggerated movements wholly based in everyday experience, he and his troupe have made a profound and highly relevant contribution to remembering this painful, life changing period in our history.