Dance – Live Art Alive

Between Tiny Cities

Aaron Lim and Erak Mith. Image credit Prudence Upton

Devised and Directed by Nick Power

CONTACT THEATRE

Between Tiny Cities is the creative vision of Australian hip hop dance artist and choreographer Nick Power. He has previously worked with Aboriginal communities, and his other productions have included works such as Two Crews which brought together Sydney’s Riddim Nation and from Paris, all female crew Lady Rocks. This interest in exploring diverse cultures, languages and geography through conversations in dance has culminated in the four year project that is Between Tiny Cities. This production brings together Darwin company D*City Rockers and Tiny Toones from Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

Dancers Erak Mith and Aaron Lim square up to each other in the centre of a circle surrounded by their audience. Will this be a classic hip-hop dance battle, a war of clashing cultures or miscommunication due to language barriers, a fight of masculine prowess or even some form of mating game? Will these two young men find a commonality within this dance space? Being in such close proximity to the performers means the audience get a real sense of connection to the dancers. We see up close the glistening sweat on their bodies and the wary looks that later warm and then become humorous and collaborative.

At one point the dance moves from street dance styles that are similar filled with young male posturing and impudent intensity to the commonality of two breathlessAt CONTACT Theatre 10th -12th May 2022CONTACT THEATRE 10th-12th May 2022, exhausted performers who simply sit down and share water. This shift in pace cleverly brings the men together as their breathing synchronises. This is also when Erak Mith steps out of the circle to briefly sit in the audience as though to say we are all one…we breathe and we need water to survive…these are universal needs.

The sound design by Jack Prest and lighting design by Brosco Shaw work perfectly with the choreography as the dancers change pace, explore each others style and learn from each other before merging and forming a new shared style. The spotlight focus on Lim and Mith highlights the differences and the similarities but as the lights warm and mute down towards the closing sequence. There is a dreamy quality as movements become increasingly obscured and finally it is simply two young men inhabiting and sharing the same space. As this piece moves through the rituals of their individual cultural experiences and their shared knowledge of hip hop dance culture, we witness a sharing of journeys and styles leading to a genuine appreciation of each other.

CONTACT THEATRE 10TH-12TH MAY 2022

The Global Playground

Children's Theatre, Dance, Physical Theatre

Director Sue Buckmaster

Choreographer Gregory Maqoma

Composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson

Great Northern Warehouse

Manchester International Festival 2021

A family theatre show in the midst of an ongoing pandemic is special for so many reasons. In a MIF programme that is for many alarmingly short on theatre and dance, there is no small pressure on Theatre-Rites to use their 25 years of experience to make something very special indeed. The focus of The Global Playground is all about the joy of unfettered play. It is all about exuberance, collaboration and celebration. A show for families can often appear off putting with the assumption it will be either saccharine or heavy handed or sadly both. However Director Sue Buckmaster and MIF have a proven flare for family programming that can appeal to all ages in ways that delight and inform. The Global Playground delivers on entertainment with a neat look into the world of creative film making.

The Global Playground. Theatre-Rites. MIF21.Jahmarley Bachelor and Sean Garratt ©Tristram Kenton

This is a show within a show as it unfolds, it is clear that we are the audience watching the filming of a show for children’s television that reflects diversity in dance. It soon becomes clear that we are also witnessing the lovable flustered Sean Garratt as an inexperienced film director faced with mounting challenges as dancers and musicians drop out due to travel restrictions and other issues that neatly reflect the last year of a global pandemic. Creative solutions abound as Kennedy Junior Muntanga dances a duet on Zoom with Thulani Chauke who genuinely couldn’t travel to Britain as originally planned. Merlin Jones takes the reins playing all the live instruments when composer Ayanna Witter-Johnson is also unable to appear.

A circular stage has a flavour of the circus and certainly this is a performance filled with clowning and buffoonery but the staging also creates a feeling of safety for all in this new world of covid safety. This is a set filled with film equipment which is introduced and explained to the audience. Above, in front and behind there is always stuff to see. Images are projected on walls, a drum kit looks down on us, a talking camera is sometimes like a chatty ventriloquists’ dummy or becomes snake like and sinister as it darts a red light across the stage like a beady, disapproving eye. This is a fun way to learn about sound and lighting on a set.

The dance performances are uniformly excellent and varied. There are flavours of a range of styles including contemporary with hip hop dance offs and moments of clowning. The sheer exuberance and joy of movement is palpable and shines through in the facial expressions of all the performers particularly Annie Edwards and Jahmarley Bachelor. Puppetry and ventriloquism also feature and are seamlessly interwoven into the story by choreographer Gregory Maqoma.

The Global Playground by Theatre-Rites. Annie Edwards and Jahmarley Bachelor. ©Tristram Kenton

The dancers increasingly take charge doing their own thing and left to play something new and beautiful emerges. The set is deconstructed and props and equipment are repurposed as lighting equipment become skirts and a wonky tripod covered in duct tape becomes the choreographer. There is an anarchic element yet also an underlying message that if we embrace the chaos we may create a new order that has its own intrinsic value.

Unit 5, Great Northern Warehouse 2-18 July 2021

TORO: Beauty and the Bull

Dance, Small Theatres

THE LOWRY

DeNada Dance Theatre

Choreographer Carlos Pons Guerra

Dreamy and ethereal, Toro opens with a delicately beautiful girl lying on the Stage like the eponymous Sleeping Beauty while two brothers play Rock, Paper, Scissors. The traditional themes of fairy tales are subverted throughout this performance. The heroes and the monsters overlap, blur and change places. This opening scene is not that of a sleeping heroine about to be awoken with a kiss by a handsome Prince, but two brothers performing a perfunctory, machismo ritual to decide who gets first dibs on the young prostitute.

DeNada Dance Theatre are a young independent company who focus on exploring and subverting Hispanic and Latin culture. There is great theatricality in their work which looks and feels sumptuous and decadent. They use storytelling in dance to make bold political and social statements. In this piece they explore persecution and ostracism using fairytales focusing on themes of transformation. The lush, dreamlike imagery has elements of Angela Carter’s fairy tales, and the filmic feel of Guillamo del Toro or David Lynch. Toro includes fairy tales, circus sideshows, freak shows, animalistic orgies, vogue balls, monsters and beauties, poignant tenderness and brutal violence.

The performance has six dancers – four males and two females. Emma Walker and Marivi Da Silva are the Girl and the Bull, both performances are incredibly powerful and emotive. The scene where they unite in real tenderness and harmony is profoundly moving and deeply sensuous. The coming together of the dispossessed and “other” is truely beautiful. In this moment the Beast gets the real, red blooded woman whereas the men who are the real monsters of this piece have had nothing but a broken doll or marionette.

The four male dancers play a number of roles as the Brothers, as Matadors and as fantastical creatures – the Dragimals. In the machismo roles they are all rippling, twitching muscle and brutal intent. As the Dragimals they are all sinuous, luxuriating flesh and gleaming bodies. They are spectacular and animalistic moving harmoniously and curiously as at a great feast and celebratory orgy.

Warm, lush lighting and decadent costumes, a rich Hispanic soundtrack of pasodoble, mariachi, bull fight music and Unchained Melody to set off beautifully choreographed dance….I would watch this again in a heartbeat. Closing scenes show Jonathon Luke Baker portraying a mortally, wounded dragimal evoking Swan Lake, while the Girl is trapped struggling against the ties of patriarchal matrimony while her glorious Minotaur or She-Bull is dehorned and weakened. There is no Disney happy ending to this fairy tale yet this is still a powerful and uplifting tale of the transformative effect of love, tenderness and acceptance.

Tour details

Hot Brown Honey

Cabaret, Circus, Dance, Large Theatres

HOME

Briefs Factory presents Hot Brown Honey

Six vibrant First Nation women wearing identical shellsuits on a stage dominated by a huge gleaming, pulsating honeycomb hub. Our MC is Busty Beatz (Kim Bowers) a co-founder of Hot Brown Honey and she is loud and proud and magnificent towering above everyone astride the honey dome. Below is the other founder, Director and Choreographer Lisa Fa’alafi who I met briefly as I took my seat in the theatre. These women are chatty and welcoming as they stroll around the aisles before the show. They are upfront and direct, almost immediately the audience is told a collection toward their childcare will be passing through the aisles because as Lisa says The Revolution can not happen without childcare.

Suddenly the performance ramps up the energy. I can’t fully hear everything. I’m blinking as the lights flash powerfully on the honeycomb dome. The performers are hi octane and nothing is going to stop them. It’s too loud!! It’s too bright!!! It’s too……DO NOT ADJUST YOUR SET. WAKE UP. GET ON BOARD. ROCK THE BOAT. THIS MAY JUST BE THE TRIP OF YOUR LIFE.

There is zero tolerance of stereotyping as MC Beatz quotes from the 2009 TEDTalk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie The Danger of a Single Story. There are no single stories here and this is reinforced by a show that defies any genre. This is burlesque, cabaret, song, beatboxing, hip hop, poetry, hula hooping, aerial silks, sermon and comedy. This is an EVENT and like its orchestrators it cannot be pigeonholed.

This is an intelligent, passionate celebration of womankind in all its colours, shapes and creeds of politics, religion and sexuality. There is a strong burlesque influence running through all aspects of this show. This is burlesque as gender politics defying any attempts at body shaming. Women standing proud and celebrating perfect boobs, giant inflatable boulder boobs, pussies that may or may not have seen childbirth, giant padded feline pussies, bodies curvy or lean, skin that gleams or has cellulite or skin blemishes. Women using burlesque to own their own bodies using the frequent vivid costume changes to drive the stories. Fa’alafi describes the experience as the decolonisation of our thoughts and inhibitions. The poet and playwright Maya Angelou was also a burlesque dancer in her early years; and it a very powerful tool of expression and liberation.

There are group sequences ramming home the message We Are Not Maids. Shellsuits are shed to reveal cheeky Princess Megan t-shirts then shed again to reveal maid costumes. MC Beatz dons a massive Afro for the anthem Don’t Touch My Hair. Fa’alafi delights with a reverse striptease parodying the fantasies of bare breasted Polynesian maidens in grass skirts. This is no coy blushing maiden or unskilled island girl. Our Lisa is surrounded by leaves but deftly fashions shoes and bags like a fashion forward icon. The glorious voice of ‘Ofa Fotu rips apart the James Brown anthem It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World while she wears a stifling costume that clearly alludes to a golliwog doll. Elena Wangurra battles the confines of the Australian flag and triumphantly emerges as a superhero in the vivid colours of the Aboriginal flag. The beat box skills of Hope One pound through the speakers while Crystal Stacey spins hoola hoops with the dexterity that most women multi task. Domestic violence is portrayed in a way that is gut wrenchingly shocking. Crystal Stacey performance was my personal highlight as she escaped violent assault by using aerial silks. Her performance was exquisite and horrifying and incredibly poignant. Literally hanging by a thread this was a truly visceral evocation of desperation, determination and resilience. We do this for the Women who cannot speak. We are taught that silence will save us. But we will make noise.

The Speaker of this Hive asks Will you stay the same or rock the boat? The Hot Brown Honey mantra throughout this amazing show is DECOLONISE AND MOISTURISE or as Fa‘alafi says We want to decolonize the World , one stage at a time. The audience are on their feet dancing. The atmosphere is electric. The Party Manifesto is clear and this is one party you won’t want to miss.

HOME until Saturday 23rd Dec

We Are Ian

Dance, Physical Theatre, Small Theatres

In Bed With My Brother

HOME

Ian is real, so real it turns out he is sat in the audience tonight. For the show he remains a voice pulsating as a bare lightbulb, while he reminisces about the Manchester rave scene of the Eighties. Three young women crowd around the bulb listening to his Mancunion words of wisdom like he is a Messiah and they are his disciples of dance. Ian says, “Its 2017, we got fuck all. Let’s have a party. Party like it’s 1989.”

The show is a blend of thumping music, smoke machines and frenzied dancing to club classics like Hallelujah – The Happy Mondays. There is projection screen with dance instructions, lyrics and footage of political speeches and events from the last 30 years. The performers do lots of lip syncing and are incredibly facially expressive yet barely speak. The gurning and munching and spitting of so many biscuits is bizarrely completely engaging.

This is a mainly young audience who like IBWMB were not even born when Ian was raving, getting wankered and feeling the love on brown biscuits. Quick learners they follow Ian’s journey and it’s a fun trip to take with neon instructions for Hot Potato/Cold Spaghetti. Fun til the politics kick in and images of Thatcher and May appear in black, white and grey to the sound of Dominator by Human Resource. They are interspersed with footage of the old Hulme being demolished and Anti-Austerity marches etc. This is a timely history lesson about the unifying power of music and dance and its impact on civil unrest.

Dora, Nora and Kat (IBWMB) repulse and beguile in equal measure but by the end of the show I might just be a little in love with all three, biscuits crumbs included. Their capacity to physically engage with the audience is impressive as by the end of the performance they generate a love in the space that their mate Ian would approve off. They even manage to do it without illegal brown biscuits!!
We Are Ian is a masterclass in clubbing and a political call to wake up and make change happen. The end of the performance is pure exuberance and the scenes on stage may be my best ever memory of being in a performance.

Until October 14.

Cotton Panic!

Dance, Immersive Theatre, Large Theatres, Musical

Upper Campfield Market

Created by Jane Horrocks Nick Vivian and Wrangler

The old Victorian market space works perfectly as a space for a gig or for an immersive theatre piece. Giant screens either side of the stage project ephemeral images interspersed with close ups of actress and activist Glenda Jackson and other storytellers. On stage is the tiny and feisty Jane Horrocks fizzing with passion and energy. Behind her is a translucent screen projecting more images and seemingly super-imposed behind that is the band Wrangler and their analogue synthesizers.

A mix of folk music and clog dancing blend into tracks such as Billie Holidays “Strange Fruit” and Grace Jones “Slave to the Rhythm” with synth music and story telling of the poverty and political struggle weave together to celebrate our working class heritage in the North West.

Walking through the space feels exciting and quite special. The sense of urgency and energy is intoxicating and moving sporadically from the back of the space I soon find myself front of stage. Watching Horrocks’s character descend into wretched poverty and dependency on the kindness of others is a sharp reminder of the problems inherent in misinformed aid assistance. How often do we make assumptions about the needs of others? When we buy a homeless stranger a sandwich do we check first if they are vegetarian or gluten-intolerant or do we simply expect their gratitude? If we give money for aid do we want to meet a specific need or one which we feel is appropriate?

This is the story of the cotton industry in Lancashire from riches to rags in the industrial carnage that arose from the American Civil War (1861-1865). It is a timely reminder of how any growing economy is intensely vulnerable to over dependency on a single commodity. The lack of cotton arriving in the 1870s crippled Lancashire and created mass unemployment and poverty. It would be good to think we have learned valuable lessons from our social and economic history yet sadly we continue to waste valuable resources and make poor electoral decisions such as Brexit.

Emerging from this performance into the evening sunshine on Deansgate many of the crowd dispersed to nearby bars and restaurants. A lovely way to end a sociable evening. Perhaps the sobering thought being in a coffee or wine shortage how quickly would we be inconvenienced or potentially economically ruined?

Lancashire Cotton Failure

Manchester austerity and homelessness

Ethics and Aid
Potential impact on Manchester of Brexit

10,000 Gestures

Contemporary Dance, Dance

Image Tristram Kenton

MAYFIELD BUILDING

Choreography Boris Charmatz

This is a stunning sensory experience. The cavernous disused space is all shadows and shade. The floor glistens like a still pool waiting for the dancers to plunge in or gracefully thread water. The music by Mozart (Requiem in D minor K.626) is breathtakingly beautiful apart from the occasional puncuations of screams, howls and frantic number counting.

As the dancers flood the space in varying degrees of undress there is a sharp sense of Movement, Movement, Everywhere and not a drop to drink in. 10,000 gestures is ambitious and gloriously absurd in its celebration of the impermancy of movement. There is simply too much to process. Even counting the ebb and flow of the 23 dancers felt impossible at times.

The audience are audibly shocked and discombobulated as the dancers clamber over aisles, seats and audience like semi naked marauding ants then later scatter like ephemeral butterflies.

There may have been 10,000 claps at the end. It was the only standing ovation I’ve seen at M1F17.

My tribute to Charmatz- 10,000 Gestures in 60 words. One for each minute of the running time.

RED. SEQUIN. CIRCUS. GUTTURAL. PLAYFUL. CHEEKY. SWIMMERS. HARLEQUIN. BIKINI. SPEEDOS. BOILERSUITS. MASKS. GRACEFUL. FLUIDITY. FLEXIBILITY. DEXTERITY. JUMPING. LEAPING. GYMNASTICS. GOOSESTEPPING. SPLITS. INDULGENT. LUNACY. SKIPPING. KISS. GLISTENING. SHOUTING. CLAMMERING. DEAFENING. GAGGING. ASYLUM. SCREAMING. WRITHING. DRAGGING. GRABBING. DRAGGING. WRITHING. TWISTING. STILL. DARK. SLOW. AWAKENING. CHANTING. COUNTING. CLAMBERING. MARAUDING. SCRATCHING. TWITCHING. ANARCHIC. TRIUMPHANT. INQUISITIVE. INTENSE. SCISSORING. SCATTERING. STAGGERING.BALLETIC. MUSCULAR. PURE. SPINNING. SPLITS.

Until 15 July