Resolution 2019: Iona Brie / Kayleigh Price Dance / RARE SALT - The Place
Hitting its third week mark, Resolution continues at The Place showcasing intriguing fresh contemporary dance. Following the festival’s usual formula, the evening presents three new pieces by three different choreographers. Looking at highly stimulating work, it is extremely satisfying to note that over half of the triple bill’s choreographers are women. Not only does this hint at the steady increase of female choreographers, but it also reasserts the leading position of contemporary dance in establishing gender equality in the field. The evolution is welcomed, considering female choreographers have been oddly underrepresented in the twentieth century and still are today in certain dance genres.
© RARE SALT - Rachel Elderkin
In I Know Not These My Hands, choreographer Iona Brie sets out movement in a mechanical pattern. As an illustration, the two dancers first appear with pieces of wire art incorporated to their costumes and meshing their bodies. The art pieces are geometrical, highly structural, have seemingly solid foundations and reflect the movements performed on stage. While the many symmetrical passages of the piece instill a sense of harmony and reflect the symmetrical structure of the wire art, it is beat by a stronger feeling of choreographic logic where one step is irremediably interrelated and leads to the other. Thus when the choreography evolves into asymmetry, recalling the asymmetrical form of the wire art, it is expressed as an unavoidable consequence of the previous stages, all the while also being its cause. When finally the dancers remove the wire art from themselves, it is only to allow a precise but threatening work of their hands, where they grab throats and libs. The piece goes back and forth between formal harmony and gripping destruction.
Kayleigh Price delivers an honest and touching interpretation of The Left one out, a work she choreographed and performs. In the autobiographical piece, Price reveals herself in a raw and efficient fashion. She begins by intensely dancing a consuming and nearly marathon-like choreography to System of the Down’s Chop Suey. Once the music stops and Price sits on a stool, she lets her tired breath fill the silence of the theatre accompanied by her grave look. She achieves to bring the audience in on her emotional and physical commitment to dance. When a naïve – or all-knowing – smile then emerges on her face, she communicates emotions better than with words. However subjective these moments of interpretation are for an audience member, I did feel the joy, the exhaustion, and satisfaction of dancing, all the while sensing that Price is fully aware of the emotional charge she delivers. Yet the piece should not be mistaken as a declaration of love from a performer to its art. Much anger is expressed throughout the work: during the opening choreography, through the frustrated screams while sat on the stool, to the fall of a patiently built house of cards. Kayleigh Price’s frustration and rage hits the audience with as much force as her silence, and powerfully embodies her personal experience of being a working-class female artist.
To close the evening, RARE SALT’s Blood in the water stands out by its theatrical completion. The costumes, satisfying to the eyes and ears with their shiny and crispy fabric, accompany the dancers’ movement with sight and sound. The scenography displays dangerously seducing mirror-cut forms that aesthetically reflect the light and connote the harmful use of their sharp edges. The choreography itself makes use of the entire theatre’s performance space, using the backstage brick wall as an element of the two dancers’ struggles. The choreography is sharp, confrontational and merciless. The two dancers Sara Augieras and Giulia Iurza perform a painful fight where both dominance and co-dependence are omnipresent. One dancer lastly drags the other throughout the stage, later also crushingly climbing over her shoulders. Other movements are pacified, with the two dancers leaning on one another, relying on each other to stay in balance. They also appear completely entangled - undistinguishable from one another. Overall, Tom Wohlfahrt gives form to a specific choreographic language in the piece, which at moments slightly recalls physical theatre: one that is visually striking and physically precise.
Edited by Dimitrina Dyakova, Deputy Digital Editor
Resolution 2019
January 11 - February 23 2019
The Place - 17 Duke's Road - London WC1H 9PY UK
Tickets: £16 / £12 Concessions
