Resolution festival review – scavenging predators and ex machina sirens
For 35 years The Place has been offering up an abundance of brand new choreography at its annual Resolution festival, over 2,000 artists so far. You get three pieces a night from newbie choreographers, some just out of training, some clearly going places. The output and quality varies wildly, but it’s thrown up some real talents over the years.
It’s an event where you can feel the optimism and the youthful ambition and vision. Where a choreographer’s blurb for their piece says it’s going to “transport the audience into a journey of spiritual and artistic evolution”. Yes please! Maybe the reality isn’t as transformational as it hopes, but the piece in question – Anima, by Duran ‘Dee Dee’ Abdullah – does showcase Abdullah as a performer who can hold the stage, with an ancient-ritualistic-drum’n’bass rave mood.
I watched the first two nights of this year’s festival, six shows, all very different. In terms of highlights, one was the dancing of Naia Bautista in Ombra Mai Fu, by Salvatore De Simone. Simone also dances, along with Harry Theodora Foster, but Bautista especially has a distinctive quality built on classical finesse, the dance flowing but never insipid; there’s muscular intention behind every movement. The dramatic arc or themes here are woolly at best, but the mood is engagingly evoked, a low glow of light and haze, gauzy costumes to go with gauzy movement.
There’s real promise in the work of Vasiliki Papapostolou (AKA Tarantism) who builds her piece Lucid Absurdities from an unprepossessing start into something of definite substance. A man (Spiros Paltoglou) and a woman (Papapostolou) are at an airport, their flights delayed. We’re party to their inner monologues, and their dreams about each other as they doze off at the airport gate. The lesson? You never know what someone else is thinking. Or: women, you don’t want to know what some men are thinking about you. They dance out their fantasies and the intensity shifts, from a mechanical duet – he manipulating her body – to one that’s much more human, Papapostolou politely evading Paltoglou’s grasp, to a scene where she is prey and he scavenging predator, her hair clamped in his teeth.
Elsewhere there’s work that has its flaws, or isn’t fully developed, but feels genuinely original. Banquet Theatre’s Feeding Time has more scavenging predators (an unlikely trend) in a surreal piece on the idea of consuming and being consumed. We Are the World sees three women in pale pink negligee, their dance a slow sensual prowl, deliberately voluptuous, but interrupted by droid-like glitches. A comely smile starts to spread on one woman’s face then suddenly jolts to neutral as if someone pressed the reset button. Choreographer Imogen Reeve has absolutely committed to a vibe, a weird, eerie/dreamy one at that, this trio of sirens like the Virgin Suicides meets Ex Machina.
What does this all say about where dance is at? Well there’s plenty of eager talent out there, for sure, but tenacity counts as much as talent in this industry. Which of these weird worlds will we see more of in the future? We’ll see.
• Resolution festival is at The Place, London, until 15 February
