Artistic Director of Ransack Dance, Sarah Rogers, is a keen supporter of start-up dance-artists in Wales and her new programme, Arrive at The Riverfront is part of an ongoing and excellent support for dance and innovation. As the name suggests, Arrive presents mostly young choreographers in new, fragmented or exploratory work in a generous and supportive environment.
The intimate Studio Theatre at The Riverfront is an ideal environment for small-scale dance and the programme opens with performers and audience members sitting together on the stage to witness Eleanor Browns’ Tell Me A Story. A group of dancers explore the space and emotional world of reading which involves much passing around of books, walking on them and quietly reading passages to each other in assembled groupings. Brown takes a soft and gentle approach to her subject and the performance is an interesting workshop exploration. Questions arise such as why use a group of dancers rather than a solo dancer to illuminate such a personal experience and how does a director get dancers to read text which can both be heard and understood? Brown needs to be clearer with these issues if she intends to develop the work further.
Cheap Date follows with a whimsical, yet promising offering of three young women in an existential world of shopping and to-do lists with much exhortation to do more and more to sustain daily life. In How We Lost It, a stream of consciousness flows through a sound track which seems to drive the women into various dance passages which are performed with skill and feeling. The work concludes with an extended solo for one of the dancers who pares the material down to her face alone and she captures something essential and honest. The printed programme credits nobody as choreographer so we are left to assume there’s nobody in charge beyond the dancers.
4.33 by dancer and choreographer, Michael Williams uses John Cage’s seminal and famous ‘silent’ work from 1952, which has been used ever since as a starting point for choreographers to display radical aspirations. One of Cage’s key ideas was not silence but a sensitisation to the ambient noise around each performance. For sound, Williams begins with silence, interjected by mobile phone alarms and then follows this with a full-blown, but uncredited orchestral intervention. Williams is at his most elegant and strongest in the first half of the work when performing short and sharp passages of highly structured dance material. He handles stillness and movement with considerable skill and creates a fine cut effect with torso and limbs. The concluding section of the work to recorded classical music over-extends the dance sequences and defeats the point of Cage’s work which is for the audience to listen and think for itself. Williams is a handsome dancer with much presence and potential, but his version of 4.33 would benefit from more restraint and trusting that the audience will buy into Cage’s visionary idealism.
The first half of the evening concluded with wonderful chaos and energy by Far From The Norm. Six dancers, dressed as if straight from a South London back street tear the stage up with loud raucous material that carries a joyous and thrilling vitality in each explosive entrance onto the stage space. They are funny, ironic, self-mocking, serious and demanding as they perform in a fury of seemingly improvised, yet highly choreographed scenes. Are they a hip hop group, a street dance crew, or what? Are they just people or highly trained dancers? We don’t know and we don’t care as their work avoids all stereotypes in character and dance style, engendering a privileged feeling of peeking into the lives of people fighting to survive in a contemporary world.
After a short break, Gemma Prangles’ Dances I Made On My Bathroom Floor offered a light and fragmented interlude when the dancer gets as far as brushing her teeth before setting off on a series of dance sequences. Prangle is a strong technical dancer, but her take on the theme seems lightweight. She avoids the all-too-British terror of being exposed naked by wearing a passion-killing, inelegant bra and pants while in the shower which undermines artistic intentions and makes the work juvenile and lacking punch. If Prangles could find a way to be more brave, then she might take an audience further along with her thoughts.
Following that, Sarah Hudson and Cet Haf show an entertaining and light-hearted duet, Wimmin. It’s a sweet-natured and well-performed duet, mostly danced in unison, catching the eye as a funny take on the theme of women escaping from the ‘benign’ but overbearing influence of the male of the species. It’s a nice, sharp vignette of a work and provides a strong platform for Hudson and Haf to show a strong comedy routine through precise choreography and personality.
The evening concludes with Ransack Dance performing Sarah Rogers’ Broken Arrows. Rogers is rapidly making a name for herself as a dance director who handles dancers, music, stage space, light and theatrical timing with great aplomb and subtlety. Each of the scenes in Broken Arrows is perfectly judged and delightful to watch, hanging in space as if about nothing in general yet everything in particular. With an easy and unforced touch, Rogers gives her six performers the perfect amount of space and time to breathe and move, and everything creates maximum impact on the viewer. Each dance passage, each song, each scene gives different artists their time in the limelight and the final concluding duet is moving and beautiful in its restraint and poetry. Rogers is a talent to watch out for.
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