Dance: Do you wanna funk?

Out
creator-director Ray Young
performers Azara Meghie, Bambi Phillips Jordan
set Naomi Kuyck-Cohen • costumes Mia Maxwell
lighting Nao Nagai • sound Naomi Jackson
Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells, London • 25-26.Apr.24 ★★★

An astonishing celebration of culture and queerness, this experimental piece is quite demanding of the audience, as it uses dance and performance art to both delight and provoke the senses. Skilfully performed, and staged with a wonderful mix of lights, costumes, music and even smells, the show is energetic and also somewhat indulgent in extended, repetitive sequences that are carefully designed to make a point.

The first section features Jamaican music, with performers Azara Meghie and Bambi Phillips Jordan already circling around each other as the audience enters the studio and takes seats around the edge of the dance floor. This Caribbean vibe kicks up a gear as Vybz Kartel's It Bend Like Banana blasts from the speakers, and the dancers begin striking lively acrobatic poses while both oozing attitude and gleefully hamming it up for the crowd and each other. Sexy and sleek, their costumes are made of leather and lace with red accents.

In the style of an epic lip-sync, they alter their costumes on-stage, losing the lace and replacing trainers with stiletto-heeled boots, and the music changes gear. Their body-positive chemistry is strong, adding a sexy vibe as puffs of smoke billow across the space and both the music and choreography take on more sensual R&B rhythms. Behind this are spoken words that emerge as an evangelistic sermon exploding with homophobia. The words become louder, and the movement gets stuck on repeat, locked in spotlight squares for what seems like an eternity.

Finally, they are able to break out of this nightmare to the groove of Sylvester's Do You Wanna Funk, producing a bucket of oranges, which they begin to peel in silence, competing to de-skin each one in a single spiral move. Once all the oranges are peeled, they pass halves to the audience and begin eating them in increasingly seductive ways, covering the stage with juice and flooding our nostrils with the scent.

Through all of this, both Meghie and Phillips Jordan allow their personalities to come through, playfully using their distinct physicalities as they blur the lines of culture, race and sexuality. Aside from the extremely extended middle section, which is deliberately harrowing, they also have a lot of fun with each other, and their cheeky smiles and seriously gifted dance skills combine to create a terrific atmosphere in which bigger ideas can swirl around hauntingly. It's rather elusive, but also unforgettable.

For details, SADLER'S WELLS >

photos by Jack Thomson, Rosie Powell • 25.Apr.24

Dance & Film: Juxtapositions

Transparent
dir-scr Siobhan Davies
in collaboration with David Hinton, Hugo Glendinning
with Siobhan Davies, Andrea Buckley, Lindsey Butcher, Charlie Morrissey, Annie Pui Ling Lok, Paul Douglas, Linda Gibbs, Jeremy James, Lucy Suggate, Marina Collard, Matthias Sperling, Laurent Cavanna
prd Pinky Ghundale
22/UK 35m 
Lillian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells, London • 20.Apr.23

In this biographical film, Siobhan Davies examines her life over the past 50 years as a dancer, choreographer and artist. Her approach is insightful and observant, so rather than tracing details, she explores thoughts and feelings. What emerges is a revelatory look at the experience of a dancer that will resonate for anyone who has ever considered what it means to be human.

The film unfolds in three chapters. Animal Origins uses still images to consider raw physicality, especially where Davies sees similarities between herself and other creatures. A Lived In Circle brings movement into the picture, as four dancers walk in concentric rings that echo throughout nature and art. And Transparency reflects the way Davies prefers to work using acetate and tissue paper, so she can overlay images with each other to find commonality, which helps her further understand her own connection with people, places and history.

"Dance involves movement and constant change," Davies says, "and the see-through nature of my note-taking helped me to experience ideas and images as less fixed in time or place but rather on the way to becoming something else or emerging out of what came before."

The film is a kaleidoscopic collection of images intriguingly juxtaposed with each other. It features artwork, antiquities, sketches and photographs, including a series of striking pictures of the young Davies in a dance studio. She also appears in new video sequences as she discusses how all of this has fed into her career as a dancer and choreographer. And the ideas lead to observations about her young granddaughter's pure relationship with her body, a feeling Davies only recalls experiencing once as an adult.

Davies is encouraging the viewer to explore what it means to move, to be part of the world and to create shapes and possibilities with our bodies every day. It's a mesmerising collision of images, words, music and sound. And it leaves us looking at our own movements through a new perspective.

For details, visit TRANSPARENT FILM >

photos by Siobhan Davies Studios • 20.Apr.23

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Stage: Make a connection

Rewriting and Science Fiction
by Burrows & Fargion
with Jonathan Burrows, Matteo Fargion
Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler's Wells, London • 5-6.May.22

Delightfully off the rails, this performance continually challenges the audience to make connections in everything that happens on the stage. Choreographer Jonathan Burrows and composer Matteo Fargion have been working together for three decades and have almost supernatural timing as they mix comedy, music and choreographed movement to create something that's both surreal and deeply engaging.

Rewriting is a reworking of an abandoned three-year project during which a series of thoughts were collected on 108 cards. Burrows uses a series of random-seeming, increasingly elaborate movements as he tells the story, lays out the cards and reads comments from them, while Fargion accompanies him on a small electric keyboard. It's properly uncanny to watch as they mix carefully memorised actions with sometimes improvised dialog. What emerges is a series of oddball connections between ideas, motion and music that exist only in our imagination.

Science Fiction is also about this interaction between expectations and reality. This time, Fargion and Burrows take positions on opposite sides of the stage, so far from each other that we can only watch one at a time. With synthesisers, percussion and voices, they perform a series of call and response riffs that echo and blur, expand and reverberate as they move from isolated notes into a full-on wall of rather glorious noise.

Each of these pieces is performed with a cheeky sense of humour that's thoroughly infectious. This is mainly because it's so impossible for us to predict where things might go next, even as we desperately try to second guess them. But it's clear that Burrows and Fargion know exactly what they are doing. We may not be able to understand what any of this means, but that seems to be the point. It's possible to get the message even if it's never spoken. And even if the performers gleefully try to keep us from finding it.

For information, visit SADLER'S WELLS >

photos by Urška Boljkovac, Hugo Glendinning • 5.May.22