Free public performances place dance – and audiences – differently
Canary Wharf: the part of London that feels like the anonymous, sky-scraper metropolis of Spike Jonze’s 2013 AI rom-com Her. As part of the city’s Central Business District, Canary Wharf on the weekend can be ghostly, awaiting the 9-to-5s Monday so dutifully brings. And that is why Dancing City, the free, outdoor dance component of Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, feels bizarre yet important. In and amongst indistinct complexes, courtyards and side streets, dance blooms. The futuristic, squeaky-clean blank slate is injected with sound, colour and movement.
To GDIF, I took with me the remnants of the Springback Assembly at Oriente Occidente in Italy, in particular a discussion with theatre critic Sergio Lo Gatto. Outdoors and un-ticketed, GDIF is a series of situations that invite passers-by, an etiquette unlike the theatre. To paraphrase Sergio, going to the theatre means you (likely) pay for a ticket, sit in rows, chatter until the lights fall, the curtains open and the dance begins. With GDIF, you more likely stumble upon dance when taking a wrong turn. The parameters are looser, expectations are lower. How does this affect how dance is received?
Let’s take a walk.
Teen times: 4 Minutes by UK company Stacked Wonky. Photo courtesy GDIF
4 minutes by Stacked Wonky (UK) belongs to the urban setting that is Wren Landing, a courtyard not far from the waterfront. Two performers, 16 and 17, perform a fast-track, cartoon-strip piece on the trivialities, conflicts and strifes of male teenhood. Rage, risk and joyous groove rapidly replace each other. They treat their bodies as disposable, teetering on the edge of a (wobbly) table, tempting its balance, then flying off. They are rough, like the concrete walls the audience occupy. GDIF can’t guarantee comfortable viewing: your experience depends on sightline. Short pieces like this are therefore safe bets. Messy, at times exaggerated presentation works in this context, a piece about the gritty, liminal phases of youth. 4 minutes felt authentically plucked from the streets.
At Montgomery Square, the French company Le Grand Jeté renders itself a gigantic art installation between tower blocks. Valse à Newton demands attention and assumes awe from its audience. To its grandeur, people flocked. An oversized Newton’s cradle structure in bright yellow can stand up against the buildings that loom, but the dancers are both dependent on and overshadowed by it. As they toy with the cradle, sending the balls at jaunty angles, they react unconvincingly to the result. Movement feels like the filler, an afterthought to the cradle’s mighty swings. Combined tricks, flips and urgent clicky beats lack forward progression. Valse à Newton aspires to grand effect, but the impact it leaves struggles to contest with the room it takes up. It does, however, serve a purpose for younger crowds, those too little to sit still in theatre rows. A childlike curiosity takes place here: as children clamber onto the cradle, the dance becomes an object.
So let’s wander inside.
PAN~ // Catwalk by Zwermers [NL) happens inside the shopping centre, another squeaky-clean stage. Dozens of clothes form the edges of a catwalk, placed to be easily whipped on and off. The immediate interpretation is a commentary on fast fashion. Genius! Stage it in a mall, instil a little fleeting guilt in streams of passing shoppers. In fact, this piece is an ongoing project drawing on the multiplicity of identities we accumulate. In the same way fashion trends are pedestalled then disposed in futile cycles, identities – represented here as various outfits – can be superfluous, fickle, short-lived and simultaneous.
Fast fashion may not have been the central theme, but in this case, the location remains essential. Under a roofed corridor lined with shops, the inevitable high footfall creates a traffic jam of shoppers as crowd is drawn to crowd. Fomo in full effect. And despite some drifters, most are fixated by this one simple action, the changing of clothes. PAN presents itself as something to flit in and out of, as if viewers were on an escalator, in keeping with the non-committal vibe of the festival. And yet most couldn’t resist either missing out, or the piece itself. Or both.
Sleepwalker by Kristen McNally. Dancers: Isabel Lubach, Joe Powell-Main. Photo courtesy GDIF
Sleepwalker (UK) and Vivace (FR) are both tucked away in Columbus Courtyard; you might miss them if you didn’t know they were happening. Sleepwalker unites the Royal Ballet’s Isabel Lubach with Joe Powell-Main, who uses a wheelchair. The pair interact fluidly. He takes her weight as she plunges into backward arches, then places her body on the ground softly. A pas de deux depicts her as tense and tormented, him as mostly tender, but at times feared by his partner. The wheelchair is used creatively with the trajectory of movement, powering Powell-Main into complex spirals, arms trailing. As a contemporary reimagining of La Sonnambula, Sleepwalker claims to challenge traditional perceptions of ballet – a high statement to make. The use of wheelchair is liberal and inventive, but the piece ends before it feels fully established. Swallowed by sweeping concrete buildings, an intimacy that was clearly there felt difficult to touch.
Vivace by Centre Chorégraphique National de Caen en Normandie follows. Three words: aerobics, hopscotch, Pac-Man. Easy on the mind, paced enough that I trust it will take us somewhere. A downstage button triggers a music change. The arc of movement is full and considered; ranging from simple-as-can-be box steps to limbs flung everywhere and anywhere in an uninhibited, frantic dance until death, to Madonna. Utter anguish defines the peak. From there? They wind down, resuming box steps, resuming structure; normalcy (if box steps are the norm) is put back on like a jacket, and a definite sense that what just happened, the blip, the loss of composure, is not going to be discussed.
A space like Canary Wharf presents a blank slate. It neither informs nor characterises the dance beyond a vaguely unsettling sense of futurism. When the space is not enhancing the dance, the movement must stand on its two feet. Vivace did just that. For those that didn’t, I wonder what draws spontaneous audiences, how long they stay and why they desire to do so. Outdoor and free works are inevitably attractive, but maybe an audience clustered around a makeshift stage draws more initial attention than the dance itself?
At GDIF you’ll find those who planned to see the dance, and those who have stumbled upon it. Either way, Dancing City is flexible and forgiving, in that audiences are not fixed or obliged. That said, however we encounter dance, whatever expectation we bring along, our own selves are inescapable. With Vivace, I found what I needed in that moment, which in itself is a cocktail of all the moments that have come before it (in this case, I rediscovered my faith in dance after a growing viewing fatigue).
As I build my archive of performances, of memories, sensations and reactions, I envy those who land upon dance by accident, who don’t know or care for it until it is before them. I envy the feeling of chancing upon movement out of context, with no prior demands on the piece, even subconscious. And I think of those who feel momentarily absorbed, before wandering back to their day, feeling uplifted by dance, maybe even lucky to have found it. ●
