There’s three women, two chairs and one lamp on a rug. One of the women fiddles with a switch, another picks at the carpet. Offstage sounds (cat yowl, door knock) and easy-on-the-ear songs galvanise them into distracted action: bops, gesticulations, a coffee-percolator impersonation. In turn, each strays from this domestic space into outside solos, the first all swoops and arcs (freedom at last), the second flighty and indecisive, the last a flop-haired trance. Caldonia Walton’s Living… in the Living Room is accessible and clear – almost to the point of becoming formulaic. You can all but hear the eights being counted.
There’s no dancing in Sofie Burgoyne’s Dancing together apart/Dancing apart together. No performers, really. Just an empty stage, and Burgoyne seated among us. This is less a piece than a guided visualisation: everything happens in our heads. Burgoyne is good at getting us there: two assistants draw an imaginary “blanket” over us, and then it’s just darkness and her voice – first soft, then more sing-songy – conjuring up a curtain, a waterfall, a surreal body with splitting limbs. We sit in the dark, engulfed by a rising tide of sound, our experiences unknowably different; yet connected. I got easily into its headspace; once there, I felt it could easily be more adventurous with its story.
[pullquote1]
Julie Cunningham has danced with both Merce Cunningham (no relation) and Michael Clark. Those bloodlines are clear in her quartet Guts, a stylised, highly technical composition (gawp at those arabesques and planted stances, those tilts and hinges) that begins with Merce-style animal abstraction – bird-like pivots, inquisitive crouches, mermaid reclines – and ends with a Clarkish ballet of stiff springs and controlled pitches, to deadpan rap music. Derivative, maybe; but mesmerising. While “guts” may have provided the source ideas, any semblance of viscera or involuntary reflex is transmuted into clarity and structure: clusterings, chain-reactions, the passage of material from one place to another, accompanied by noises reminiscent of burps and gurgles. Guts is clean, highly ordered, and mysteriously beautiful.