Published by:

2001

Profile: Charles Linehan

Watch a work by Charles Linehan, and you can tell that he is a choreographer by nature


Watch a work by Charles Linehan, and you can tell that he is a choreographer by nature. True, his work is too distilled and unflashy for popular appeal, but it is clear that many believe in the quality and integrity of his work. He was, for example, choreographer-in-residence at both The Place and the South Bank Centre, as well as being the winner of the major Jerwood Choreography Award in 1998. But more than that, from early on he attracted a company of fine dancers, such as Rahel Vonmoos, Pari Naderi, Ben Ash, Greig Cooke, and more recently, Henry Montes.

Like most choreographers Linehan started making work after training and performing as a dancer. Born in Kent, his first experience of dance was folk dance classes in Cyprus, where he grew up. But it was not until he was seventeen, now back in England, that he made the real decision to dance, after seeing a piece performed by Ballet Rambert (The Accident, by Zoltán Imre). ‘It had a car crash on stage and this weird music,’ he remembers. ‘I thought it was brilliant.’

The impact of that crash propelled Linehan into auditioning for the Rambert School, where he then studied for two years. Thrown out in his third year, he luckily managed to find a job the very next day, as a dancer with Louis Falco in Milan. There followed several years of performing with companies around Europe, including with William Petit in Paris and Philippe Saire in Switzerland. It was during these years that he first tried his hand at choreography, in company workshops – the results of which he recalls as overly technique-oriented.

In outline, this is a common enough path for emerging dancemakers to follow – though of course it doesn’t necessarily produce convincing choreographers. But from early on, Linehan convinced. Why? I’d suggest three reasons. First, he clearly has an aptitude for composition, for shaping movement rather than just making it. Second, he has an innate feeling for dance as a creative material medium in and of itself, rather than just as a vehicle for ideas. And third, he has never seemed to be a choreographic imitation of anyone else: his work has a style and register very much his own.

That style is clear, cool and uncluttered, far more closely attuned to the immediate sensory impact of sound, light and space than to the saturated psychological theatrics of drama and plot. But though at the broadest level Linehan is, for want of a better word, a choreographer of ‘abstract’ dance, his dancers are anything but abstract on stage – they generally appear with quite distinct, even isolated personae. The effect of separateness is partly achieved by Linehan’s working process, where the dancers individually contribute a great deal of their own material to the choreography. But it’s also because his groupwork is never regimented or straightforwardly geometrical, so the dancers never appear like units in some larger impersonal order.

His recent Dance Umbrella commission Speak, Memory is an example. Each of the four dancers – Ben Ash, Henry Montes, Ioana Popovici and Andreja Rauch – enters separately, a considerable interval between them, and each with distinct phrases of movement. The piece gradually works them together, but not fluidly or synchronously. Rather, they are complicated physical interactions, sometimes ill-fitting and awkwardly flowing. In one section, the dancers are spread out across the stage, and triggered into motion by a ragged current of energy that seems to jump the gaps between them like a spark being fired. The piece evokes, without recourse to simple statement, a world of four separate people whose relations are interlocking rather than harmonious, complex without actually being conflictual.

The result is that the air between the dancers seems an almost palpable matrix that thrums with the low-key energy of the dancers’ presence – an effect echoed in the full, saturated sounds of Julian Swales’ commissioned score that swells and ebbs through the piece like a tide. The sudden sparks of motion echo, too, the fireworks in Wendy Houstoun’s short film that is projected onto the backcloth during one section. In fact, this mesmerising film seems to be the enigmatic heart of Speak, Memory. In black and white, and silent, it slowly pans across the London skyline, and ends with a slow burst of distant fireworks that send glowing efflorescences of light into the night sky.

The previous work on the same Umbrella programme also filled the air on stage, but to quite different effect. In Number Stations, a reworking of a piece made in 1999, snippets of short-wave radio transmissions, disparate fragments of fuzzy sound, flicker and buzz around the stage like signals lost in purgatory, with no origin and no destination. Each switch of frequency triggers a change in lighting design (an idea that you could perhaps trace back to La Primavera, an early choreographic project that Linehan undertook at the University of Michigan in 1993 [check] in which musical changes were triggered by infrared sensors around the stage.) In this uncertain shifting environment of light and sound, the four dancers, isolated figures all, cast looming shadows against the bare walls of the stage. Their asymmetric rhythms hint at logical but nevertheless indecipherable coded messages, and the piece generates a bleak cold-war ambience of fleeting meetings and undercover activity.

Some may have recognised the interval music between these two pieces from a previous Linehan work, The Secret (1995). In this work, the dancers move as if wandering in a magic garden, brushing through the lush sonorities of some truly off-the-wall jazz – lounge music that is bizarrely peppered with strange whoops, whistles and catcalls. Originally created for Bi Ma dance company in 1995, The Secret also hints at unknown codes, but again to completely different effect from Number Stations. Each of the four dancers develops a cryptic personal phrase of movement – their own personal ‘secrets’. Occasionally they’ll throw over-the-shoulder or sidelong glances at each other, as if checking to see who’s watching, and then turn away, hugging their motifs close like treasured memories. Though the dance is clearly assembled from these phrases, it’s a structure with a lot of play in it: at times the dancers are given leeway to direct each other, signalling to each other with arm gestures to go off stage, like being sent off pitch. (Their initial walk-on, holding hands in single file, was, incidentally, inspired by the Brazilian football team).

The atmosphere, a total contrast to Number Stations,  is both intimately private and generously open. At the end, the dancers come one by one to the fore, replay their little secret, and then slowly bend forwards before leaving the stage. We gradually realise that this is a choreographed version of a curtain call, as if each of the performers is saying ‘and this is me’ before taking a bow. It’s a delicately childlike finish to an enchanting work.

Linehan typically balances a sense of the individuality of his performers with the more focussed demands of composition and style. If The Secret tipped the scales towards personal idiosyncrasy, the piece he made in the following year, commissioned by Ballroom Blitz 96 while he was choreographer-in-residence at the South Bank Centre, wore its structure on its sleeve. Here we see additive phrases built up by the accumulation of separate building-blocks of movement, Linehan constructing long choreographic phrases, then putting them together to see how they adjust to each other. Several times he illustrates the process step by step: one dancer performs a phrase, then another dancer comes in with a different movement so that the first person has to accommodate it; then a third joins in. By the end the piece has developed into a swirl of movement that’s almost too complex to grasp; but because we’ve seen how it has been built up it retains a startlingly satisfying sense of legibility. But that description scarcely does justice to this sumptuous piece, which makes me think of waves, surf and sand, its movements rippling through space like the undulating lines of a Hockney swimming pool, and splashes of motion eddying among the dancers.

Although Linehan clearly thinks compositionally, you get the sense that it’s not the structure itself that fascinates him, but seeing what effects emerge from it. ‘I’ve got lots of different ways of achieving certain effects,’ he says, ‘like varying how I use the music, or making up rules for improvisation, and then altering the rules. Building up constraints can give you a lot of freedom. You have freedom within those structures – to set up expectations and then throw a spanner in the works.’

You could see the process of how building in constraints produces particular effects in Linehan’s early work Two Seasons (1995), a diptych in which the same dance was done twice in succession by two trios of dancers, but with different scores and lighting. Actually, as Linehan explains, although the lighting and music were different, they followed the same basic outline and progression. ‘It was an experiment. I was trying to be as strict as possible. It was also limited in that the whole piece was on one plane that gradually moved upstage.’ The effect was taut, restricted, bleak.

A tight set of constraints also appeared in the short duet with Henry Montes and Andreja Rauch that opened the recent Dance Umbrella programme, a snippet of a work-in-progress lasting less than two minutes. On a darkened stage, the dancers are confined to a short, narrow corridor of space that is fitfully illuminated by a swinging overhead lamp. To a Leonard Cohen-like dirge, the two performers duck and twist around each other, spinning a cat’s cradle of restrained energies, trapped within their bedsit blues.

The dancers in this duet frequently perform out-of-synch, never quite harmonising with each other, often narrowly missing another’s swinging arm. That sense of missing each other, of people interlocking more than connecting, seems to be a current that surfaces several times in Linehan’s choreography, clearly so in the recent Dance Umbrella programme, but also in earlier work such as Sefauchi’s Farewell (1997). The music – Bach suites played by a viola – is solitary, bittersweet, and between each section it is interrupted by an electronic hiss on a taped soundtrack, like the buzzing in the ears created by intense silence. The whole dance seems suffused with a spirit of interruption, loss, departure. The subdued lighting often isolates one figure, leaving the others in semi-darkness, and while subtle relations develop between the dancers, they are fleeting, and seem to occur across a deep personal gulf. One dancer is displaced by another; a third departs; another leaves to dance with a different partner. And even when dancing together, the performers avert their gaze, rarely looking at each other directly.

The piece maintains its inward restraint until the last section. Here the five dancers begin to run and launch themselves into each others’ arms, their faces still barely registering each other – a final, summoning-up of energy that seems to be a last, failed attempt to bridge the gap between them. They return to standing and to solitude, each facing a different direction as the light fades, the dying vibrations of the viola hanging in the air like an afterglow.

It is moments like this that make you realise that Linehan has a special choreographic gift. There is nothing overt, dramatic or gimmicky about his work, nothing remotely glitzy about the presentation. But it is performed with integrity and commitment, and if you’re prepared to watch and listen, you’ll be drawn into the quiet heart beneath that undemonstrative, even reticent surface.

Linehan’s interest is in poetics more than theatrics. If he were a film-maker, he’d be an art-house independent; a good one, I mean. When asked to describe his vision of dance, in fact, he responds with a quotation from film director Andrei Tarkovsky: ‘The birth and development of thought are subject to laws of their own, and sometimes demand forms of expression which are quite different from the patterns of logical speculation. In my view poetic reasoning is closer to the laws by which thought develops, and thus to life itself, than is the logic of traditional drama.’

Linehan’s most recent commission is for George Piper Dances – ex-Royal Ballet dancers Michael Nunn and William Trevitt, made famous through the Channel 4 documentary Ballet Boyz. If Linehan’s less media-friendly work gains a wider exposure by this, I’ll be happy; happier still if it brings greater recognition for his own company.

Repertory
Speak Memory (2001)
Pacific 3-2-1-Zero (2000)
The Order of Things (2000)
Number Stations (1999)
Preludes and Fugues (1999)
Rialto (1998)
Sefauchi’s Farewell (1997)
Untitled Work (1996)
A New Ground (1995)
Falling Light (1994)