Any evening at Resolution is a matter of pot-luck, and on Friday 13 January we got lucky: every work was worth seeing. Helen Cox’s double pendulum is low-key but beautifully crafted. Andrew Oliver moves through an oblong of light, his pivots and torques, tilts and reaches all carefully placed; we almost feel the contours of the space around him. He is displaced by Cox, with a similar solo of her own. Cox and Oliver then share the stage in a duet that deftly slots their solo material together so that the two seem in complete harmony – and yet, never quite aware of the connection they have. It’s as if they inhabit two dimensions and only we can see the picture in 3D.
They Never Were, choreographed by John Ross and Nicole Guarino, uses a similar device to more emotive effect. Ross and Guarino’s actions are full of faltering gestures and hesitations, and though they seem like close counterparts and indeed stick very close together, they never actually touch, and scarcely register the other’s presence. Instead, they seem haunted by disembodied presences: voices on the soundtrack that fill the air with cryptic fragments, like lost memories. The text is actually a little confusing, but sound and motion combine to make this an eerie, melancholic miniature.
In Impressing the Grand Duke, Elisabeth Schilling plays Nympha, a grotesquely doll-like ballet dancer, eager to please and be pretty, while Simone Mousset is Dora, a more cynical, hunched- over contemporary choreographer who craves artistic success. Together they journey into the choreographic forest, through the tunnel of authenticity and over the mountain of innovation, in search of an original idea to impress the Grand Duke of dance. They make it all the way through to the fairytale ending. Then Schilling asks, chillingly: and now? An apt question, one that all the more successful Resolution choreographers will surely ask themselves. I have no answer. But I do hope this evening’s artists get lucky.