Adventures in Movement (pt 3)

It Happens… explores the meeting point between body percussion and movement. In a mix of tap and contemporary, the performers work at times in unison and at times separately, using the body as their main instrument.

Rhythms come and go as sounds are transferred from hips to back and from hands to feet. There are some strong dramaturgical moments in the performance in which characters and situations begin to emerge from the sounds created by the body. The most interesting sequences are those that allow the same sound to travel, breaking and recreating the same tempo.

It Happens… has its gripping moments, but it would be interesting to see the company play more with situation, tonality and volume, changing the context of their sounds.

Big Beef Dance Company aims to make dance accessible to a wider audience, working with simple patterns and popular music. TAT (Together Alone Together) TAT TAT is a series of sketches that mixes comedy, dance and music to create a new context for contemporary dance – one that purportedly, can be understood by everyone.

The show is a big mix of pop culture, with dance ‘sampled’ from The Macarena, 5ive and that party classic, the ‘Chicken Dance’, all performed in white jumpsuits, and intertwined with knock knock jokes and Celine Dion sing-alongs. It certainly has energy and commitment from the performers, and, aside from its vague intentions and assumptions, it is entertaining at times.

Brought together under the theme of ‘co-existence’, half the material of the piece was apparently generated and learnt via video recording, but there seems to be a lot of unison and togetherness in the choreography, leaving the dramaturgy somewhat unclear.

With more clarity, TAT TAT TAT could be a humourous take on the more popular language of contemporary dance.

The movement in this piece is derives from an extraction of rhythms and structures in the poem may i feel said he , by ee cummings, aiming to translate poetry onstage. Beginning with a rhythm maintained by clapping, two female performers, Marie Chabert and Vera Tussing, delve into their movement, slowly building the poem alongside JS Rafaelli and Saul Eisenberg. At the end, all we hear is the poem, a dialogue between a man and a woman caught in a love affair.

May I is a witty description of a sexual act, and its patterns form the basis of the movement in the performance piece. The poem is characterized by some unique features, particularly the eight sets of parenthesis and hidden rhymes that are translated onstage through a sequence of movements that transforms as we get nearer to piecing the poem together.

In translating these poetic devices into movement is the potential for thematic collisions between the poem and the movement dramaturgy; inventing a language that neither poetry nor movement can speak on its own.

An intriguing exercise in movement, May I carried through a strong yet abstract relationship between the patterns and structures of the poem and its words, creating a language of simile onstage in the relationship between the two female performers.