I am always careful when watching a show to be aware of the response of the audience. On this first night of NDCWales back at their home, the Dance House at Wales Millennium Centre, this proved a little tricky.
Why? Because being back in Cardiff after a short tour, this was probably not your average audience (the usual gaggle of straight-faced board members and other WMC company administrators, friends of dancers maybe, the odd reviewer) and no school kids who sometimes make up a chunk of the audience when the company is on tour. However, I would still say my reaction was pretty much reflected by the response and lack of response from that atypical audience.
One would expect a triple bill show to conclude with its new commission as its star attraction yet here Roy Assaf’s Profundis opened the evening while the dance from the company’s artistic director Caroline Finn was the finale, with in-house choreographer and rehearsal director Lee Johnston’s duet sandwiched between. Now, I think that was very wise in that the strongest work did indeed close the evening and the beauty and grace of Johnston’s work followed on without an interval from Assaf’s rather disappointing dance. At other venues the dance order may have differed and some did not have the same programme, yet here the audience reaction seemed to reflect this sense that the best was saved to last as Assaf’s work was given quite a muted reaction even from this partly in-house audience, Johnston’s dance clearly charmed and Finn’s work elicited a hearty response.
I had not previously seen any of these three dances, Assaf’s Profundis, Johnston’s They Seek to Find The Happiness They Seem and Folk although the latter two and particularly Folk have now toured reasonably extensively.
Folk is a work from a strong choreographer who takes an audience on her journey with ideas, concepts and themes investigated through movement without leaving an audience behind; she uses and involves the characters and styles of individual dancers, communicates with the audience and is inventive enough to be stimulating and a little edgy without sacrificing an underlying elegance, artistry and comprehension. The zonking great metaphor is the upturned and uprooted tree, the natural world and cycle of life etc., from which all the folk come and all things go. Crisp choreography is juxtaposed with still life tableaux, humour balanced with pathos, beauty with decay. The vocabulary entwines bold leaps and body contortions with chic lines and zany gesture.
Folk
Perhaps a little unfortunately there is some similarity with Assaf’s Profundis and Finn’s Folk. They both have individual dancers seemingly empowered to develop their responses to ideas, concepts, characters but while Folk has an overarching comprehensible theme, Assaf’s work comes across somewhat like an arts house class – try being an ape, be a penguin, be a synchronised swimmer, be a lion – with resultant goofy movement not helped by increasingly annoying spoken lines usually starting with “It is not a….” and then insert any of the above. The conclusion is what all these are NOT being incorporated in some sort of short circus sketch about an elephant. Reading the not particularly helpful notes in the programme as it was presumably produced before the work was finished – and sad the programmes now have to be bought, especially as on this occasion it didn’t really add much to our appreciation anyway – it seems the name is irrelevant as the music that originally inspired the idea, Arco Part’s De Profundis, was dropped.
It started nicely if a little disturbingly with a sensual solo by the very fine dancer Elena Thomas (dressed in what actually looked like a 1940s synchronised swimmer costume from designer Angharad Matthews) moving to music from Umm Kulthum. Beautiful, lithe, gorgeous dance, always sensual and occasionally erotic and a little unsettling moved to music from an Arabic country. The boys then arrive dressed again in something like 1940s bathing suits crossed with Turkish mud wrestlers and then we have again disturbing Nazi saluting with one hand and the other covering an eye. Why? Who knows? Enter the entire company (have we reduced the number of dancers?) and then the multicoloured troupe (clothes not ethnicity) create the aforementioned goofy characters with their own movements and vocal lines. There is a pleasant double duet in the middle contrasting fighters and lovers interaction based on some words written by company dancer Josef Perou. For good measure we also had lines from Leonard Bernstein’s What Does Music Mean? from Young People’s Concerts.
They Seek to Find The Happiness They Seem
Moving swiftly on to Johnston’s heart warming duet, created as she acknowledges with her lighting/technical husband Joe Fletcher who used to be Technical Director of NDCWales when Lee was a company dancer, which cannot fail to please. The choreography is refined and on the right side of inventive without being either too familiar or quirky. As one would expect with Joe Fletcher involved, the lighting is not only integral to the dance but glides and caresses the work as it flows along with the exquisite Max Richter’s score. Our dancers speak a dialogue of understand then division, literally embrace then are in isolated pools of light, in this subtle study in relationships. All sumptuously danced by Elena Tomas and Matteo Marfoglia.
Overall an interesting evening of dance that shows a company that is still developing a style that speaks beyond the individual choreographers creating works and with a troupe of young dancers at differing levels in their own development. It will be interesting to watch the growth.
It is interesting that we have one new dance company, Cascade Dance Theatre, touring Wales with what I would class as entertaining perhaps people’s dance theatre, and the more established NDCWales, ending its autumn tour with a more esoteric arts house offering. I am sure there is room for both.
Roy Assaf on Profundis:
https://asiw.co.uk/my-own-words/roy-assaf-creating-profundis-national-dance-company-wales
Caroline Finn on Folk:
https://asiw.co.uk/my-own-words/folk-caroline-finn-ndcwales
Cascade Dance Theatre review:
https://asiw.co.uk/reviews/cascade-dance-theatre-autumn-tour-2016