Resolution!

Your regular hit-and-miss Resolution fare opens the 2006 season


Now in its 17th year, Resolution! is a platform for new choreographers, presenting three different pieces every evening for six weeks. Each show is wildly unpredictable in style and quality, but if you’re lucky, you’ll spot one of tomorrow’s talents today.

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On opening night, two choreographers showed potential, if not quite promise. Jin-Yeob Cha’s Mum is an intriguing, moody duet. Some partnerships are about who wears the trousers; this one’s about the jacket and boots. Dylan Elmore has them to start, but he soon doffs them. Cha sidles into the jacket, and there follow some inventive, nuanced duets: fingers slip through vents, arms tug up lapels. Even without the jacket, Cha squirms and wriggles as if slipping through sleeves. The boots play their part too – taken off, moved about, left standing. The music is broodingly atmospheric and Elmore and Cha are fine, fluid dancers, but too often the piece drifts into vague introspection.

Umm … I … and uh … splices together fragments of different spoken stories, quirky childhood memories of people and places. Soloist Susanna Recchia begins by simply miming them – which is funny, but not that interesting. Things get better as choreographer Efrosini Protopapa shifts the rules: she shapes the mime into phrases and has Recchia replay them out of sync with the words. Then she loops, accelerates and distorts the speech, with Recchia now shuffling, crawling and kicking in response to the vocal gaps and hesitations. It’s clever, but more a study in composition than a piece as such.

Imagine a girl group in chic 1960s sweaters and ski-pants doing slinky modern dance to smooth modern jazz. Well, Sophie Arstall’s The Absent Body has the soloist, the backing trio, the clingy clothes and the hip music – but is not nearly as engaging as that sounds. It is earnest and fuzzy in intention. The easy-listening music smooths away any choreographic edges, leaving the piece curiously featureless.