A series of photographs by Paris-based photographer, Alan Eglinton, on the Butoh performance Unetsu by Sankai Juku.
View these photos on Theatre in Pictures »

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.

Mass Exercise
With Nadia and Olga Sokolski

Devised and performed by Performance Klub Fiskulturnic
Concept, direction, performance: Olga: Lara Ritosa Roberts
Aristic collaboration, performance: Nadia: Ivana Peranic
www.fiskultura.com

Exploring the relationship between ideology and body culture, the piece takes its material from the archetypal Eastern European gymnasts of the 1970s. Based on Fiskultura, the theory and practice of physical culture practiced during Soviet communism, Nadia and Olga walk us through a series of warm-ups and simple exercises that eventually persuade us to join in the mass dance-exercise-celebration (and who cares what we’re celebrating?).

Olga (Lara Ritosa Roberts) is Nadia’s (Ivana Peranic) instructor. Using text based on speeches by the former Yugoslavian leader Tito, and sound from military parades and Ex- Yugoslavian music, Olga talks Nadia and us through the warm ups that progress into dance sequences. I am encouraged to wave a flag (red, white and blue, the former Yugoslavian flag) and, without even realising, I’m up on stage joining in some dance-celebration.

Based on a very simple progressive structure, packed with double meanings and two very well rounded characters, Mass Exercise is a piece that challenges the notion of identity and the embodiment of ideology. It alludes to a socialist realism that links body and ideology, transforming the body into a mechanism that can be owned and controlled.

The movements taken from Fiskultura pamphlets are simple, robotic, architectural and, well, educational. The dance the audience is invited to join in contains sequences of movement with names such as ‘propeller of change’, ‘greet the revolution’ and ‘fight the enemy’. It’s not only a look back into an archive of physical experience, but a satire of collective art (we are reminded during the performance that we are a community of comrades who wish to collectively create better art) explored through a physical text.

Vulnerasti
By Lo Commotion Dance Company

Four performers unfold the story of a relationship behind a photograph in this short dance piece. Intertwining monologue with dance against extracts from Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, the piece explores the turmoil of a ravished heart.

Vulnerasti is the second part of Ad Cor (meaning ‘to the heart’) in Dietrich Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu Nostri, and a biblical extract from the Song of Solomon. The lyrical and tragic atmosphere of the song is directly reflected in both the languid, fluid dancing and the very detailed description of the story and emotions behind the photograph.

Although beautiful to watch, Vulnerasti seems to follow a single line, despite the different textures of the spoken language and the effort of the skilled dancers. Tragedy is enforced in all the elements of the piece, and too much of the text is illustrated, leaving little for the audience to uncover. For this reason, Vulnerasti falls short of dramatic tension, leaving the mysteries of this relationship in the hands of the storyteller, not the minds of the audience.

After Cinderella
By Liz Chan and Daniel Weyman
(work in progress)

Inspired by the meeting point between fairytale and real life, After Cinderella is a short physical theatre duet exploring the world beyond the ‘happy-ending’.

Liz Chan and Daniel Weyman both performed in Cinderella at the Lyric Hammersmith, which inspired them to work on the ‘afterlife’ of the fairytale. The two performers work beautifully together. They demonstrate interconnectedness in their movements, and a dramaturgy to their synchronicity whereby each new sequence of movement alters the one before.

It’s riveting to watch two performers transform their bodies from raw material to dancing figures in a dark fantasy world. Repetition and deconstruction play key roles in this piece as the same movement sequence that opens the performance is re-enacted at the end. The difference is this time the two bodies are not separate, they work as a single entity.

There are a number of moments in the performance that have a dangerous but beautiful quality – shifting between violence and tenderness – and that is something I would like to see develop in establishing the stage language of a fairytale lost in its own future.

I’d also like to see the duo play more with the darker side of the happy ending, adding a wider range of movement and vigour between the two performers. As it stands, After Cinderella is a grippingly raw, physical exploration of fairytale.

Violet Smile
By Sweetshop Revolution
(work in progress)

A piece with a great sense of humour, Violet Smile is a physical monologue that explores the experiences of a waitress in Transylvania. The performer, Tamzen Moulding, plays with plates, ropes and sticks in an energetic performance that goes through the emotions of a vampire waiting for its prey, from lust and greed to desire and attack.

The piece integrates circus and movement with vigour and breadth. Tamzen arranges and re-arranges her plates, moves around them, climbs above them and balances her weight, skilfully descending in the space of play and danger she has created. There is a balance between instability and equilibrium as she goes through the different qualities of a vampire, building upon her routine as a waitress.

The physical storytelling in Violet Smile and the playfulness of the situation is not fully explored. The two guiding emotions of the piece, sensuality and innocence, are too closely knit. Where Violet Smile could really excel is entering the uncharted territory it so strongly wants to toy with.

The first performance, T5#1 choreographed by Kate Webster, is the abstracted corporeal dreaming of three women, who rise from the seated audience, convulsively gasping for oxygen, to weave their spasmodic, tentative way among us, searching for something in the empty air above our heads. They move to the music of their own muttering and gasps, with jerky, delicate, clawing hands and blank faces. Their bodies tell tales about sensuality, violence, betrayal and shame, and their quiet departure from the performance space is understatedly, oddly exhilarating.

T5#2 is a more explosive proposition, with three dancers manipulating and contorting one another’s bodies, fighting, and coupling, and occasionally throwing themselves into the void left by unanswerable questions. Marie Francis, Leon Maurice Jones and Adam Wong dance to their own speaking of fragments of Stephens’ text, repeatedly wondering “can that be right?” Their startled physicality is reminiscent of the shudder when you wake from a falling dream, wondering what body and what place you’ve found yourself in. Lucie Pankhurst’s confident composition evokes the habitual violence of the big city, its confusions and dislocations, and the guilty pleasure of exploring one’s own body.

The last piece, T5#3 centres around a woman come unmoored from the ties that bind, repeatedly walking and dancing away from the routine being performed all around her. The luminous central figure of Gemma Donohue’s choreography is perpetually out of step, breaking away from the mechanical motions of a rush-hour crowd to perform expansive, lyrical solo phrases, rapt in contemplation of some unseen horizon.

By way of a final treat, the marvellous Deborah Findlay is in attendance, to provide a humorous and confiding reading of the text that provoked all of these performances. It’s the stream-of-consciousness story of a woman’s journey across London, fleeing boredom, betrayal, and the shame of moral compromise.

Once again, the DryWrite team have put together an event that challenges and inspires participants and watchers to take risks, make imaginative leaps and think in new ways about the process and purpose of writing for the theatre. DryDance seems to signal a new confidence and widening scope in their remarkable experimental activities, and the astonishingly high standard of work on show is testimony to the positive fizz they seem to provoke in all sorts of creative folk. I wait with anticipation to find out what theatrical wheeze this talented trio will come up with next.

It is a shame, for theatre lovers in general, and fans of Japanese theatre in particular, that Hiroshima is such a long way from anywhere. Even within the country, this vibrant city of more than one million people is sufficiently removed from Tokyo, Kyoto and other major centers that it receives negligible press, outside the realm of car exports, agricultural production, and peace studies. Yet, if theatre critics were willing to take the road less traveled (or the bullet train in this case), they would discover a vibrant and sophisticated re-imagining of one of the oldest performance traditions in the world.

Kagura is an artistic expression of the Shinto religion. In Japanese, the term is written with two ideograms, suggesting the concepts of “God(s)” and “Entertainment”. Kagura performers take their inspiration from the myth of the loss and recovery of the Sun Goddess: Shinto texts dating back more than a thousand years describe how the Patron Goddess of Dancers lured the Sun out of a rock cave by creating an impromptu stage from an overturned wash basin, and bearing it all in a bawdy and provocative display. The Myriad Gods were provoked to laugher, and when the Sun Goddess peered out to see what all the fuss was about, light and warmth were restored to the universe.

The paradigm for Kagura is thus socially-motivated physical entertainment, with recognition of spiritual forces as audience. This template is flexible enough to have endured for a millennium, while renewing itself in countless variations. Some contemporary forms are essentially “pure” dance, with choreography based on long-forgotten principles of spatial mysticism. Other Kagura are more operatic, combining mime, recitatives, and mythological storytelling. An official court-sanctioned version was established in the Japanese Middle Ages and has continued with virtually no changes to present. There are also three major unofficial styles, incorporating local legends and folk deities, as well as acrobatics, Chinese lion dances, processional elements, and more recently, stagecraft from the conventional theatre.

“Hiroshima-style” Kagura is perhaps the hippest, most secular, crowd-pleasing style of Shinto performance in the country. This art is epitomized by the taikai, a semi-annual gathering of actors from all over west-central Japan. Taikai combine elements of both western fringe theatre and the theatre sports motif. Each troupe is given forty minutes or so to present a classical mythological story, a quasi-contemporary 19th or 20th century play, or a completely new work. Most of the presentations consist of a two-act dance/drama fueled by an epic confrontation between the forces of good and evil. The lyrics are arcane, but the boom of the taiko drums is accessible to everyone. So too is the surreal atmosphere, which relies on judicious use of dry ice, fireworks, and other imports from the Kabuki stage. Most of the performers are technically amateurs, although this is hard to believe given the dedication to their craft. The choreography is fast-paced and meticulous, right down to the synchronization of wrist and finger movements. The dances also carry an element of danger, particularly when hero and villain spar with javelins, daggers, or broadswords.

The taikai is an opportunity for excellence, and an illustration of how heritage can retain its relevance even in an ostensibly urban setting. The day-long event is well-attended by a net-savvy fan base, who blog between conventions, share trivia and memorabilia, and cheer on their “home town” favorites with the kind of fervor one would expect at a rock concert. The audience also includes a panel of experts, who provide each troupe with feedback on their costumes, masks, special effects, and dance technique. And some would say that the kami (spirits) are in attendance as well, particularly during the highest-energy passages.

Hiroshima taikai became my entry point into “Kagura culture” during a four-year stay in the city. After a few such gatherings, I was hooked, and began traveling to rural townships on the weekends, attending more homespun agricultural performances, and learning the tricks of the trade through discussions with troupe leaders. Eventually, I ended up several hundred kilometers to the northeast, at the start of what is known locally as the Kagura Trail.

Ground Zero turns out to consist of two important Shinto shrines. One established the regional focus on theatricality through exchanges with Kyoto, the performance capital of the Japan, during the 17th century. (Intriguingly, this is the same shrine from which Izumo-no-Okuni, the founder of Kabuki, made her way east a century or so earlier.) And the neighboring shine was the first to apply the techniques of the Noh stage as the basis for an overnight performance marathon, a step that became the template for Kagura throughout this part of the country.

There is no doubt that the very public process of artistic competition has taken Hiroshima Kagura in a distinctive direction. A sense of disapproval is tangible at some of the more traditional performances in nearby townships. Village Kagura is “true” Kagura, I have been told, not the flashy, Kabuki-esque spectacle found in the big city. Certainly it could be argued that in honing their crowd-pleasing technique, Hiroshima performers have lost touch with the recognition of spiritual forces that has always defined Shinto theatre. And yet the palpable sense of community that both nurtures and is nurtured by this art form is also surely a “spirit” worth recognizing.