DryDance

DryDance is a new departure from the DryWrite girls: three original dance pieces inspired by a text written specifically for the occasion by playwright Simon Stephens, intriguingly entitled T5. The idea is to approach this text, which isn’t revealed to the audience until the end of the evening, through the imaginative responses of choreographers and dancers, the ideas, patterns and images arising from some very different interactions of sounds and moving bodies in time and space.

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.