Nottdance challenges what dance can be and questions how we might come together in choreography. This year, Nottdance took the form of a season of dance and choreographic ideas that included performances, studio installations, workshops and talks. During a programme that spanned the month of October, audiences and artists came together in listening, participating, questioning, making, walking, dancing and even embroidering. And of course, watching – from afar, from close up and sometimes from within.
Yewande 103’s Fountain, was an immersive and harmonious blend of dance and digital work for screen. It held its audience close. We came together in the dark of the cinema, the camera guiding our view upwards to the dancers looking down, their fluid movements accentuated by swirling hair and costumes. An accompanying series of visual effects flooded the screen and allowed us to soar out of the choreography and into golden, viscous watery worlds. The whole work was structured over a beating soundtrack that was at times urgent and at other times mournful. The corporeal and oceanic movements were interspersed with scattered text that laid further clues to an emergent, metaphorical dialogue between water and Black histories and futures.
In contrast, MINE Collectivo’s Esercizi per un manifesto poetico held its audience afar, but reeled them in through a stolid gaze. As four dancers entered the stage, they stared directly out at the audience and we immediately understood that there was to be an inter-play between the collective action of us and them. With their eyes fixed upon us, the dancers started to jump from one foot to another in tiny, repeated, staccato, reverberating atom-like movements. And they did not stop. For nearly an hour, we were led through a mesmerising and relentless exercise in form and endurance as their bodies shifted imperceptibly around the stage. We were left in no doubt as to whom they were performing for.
‘Breaking the fourth wall’ is a micro-political practice. On-screen, a glance or glare to camera is usually reserved for endearing, comedic, or wry effects (think Laurel and Hardy or Phoebe Waller-Bridge). In live work, however, breaking the fourth wall has a capacity to be something much more dangerous. And not necessarily intentionally so. When delivered as audience participation, it can all too easily strip agency from audiences in the service of a greater concern of the artist, fracturing a collective experience.
Not so in Neve Harrington’s Satelliser. This was a micro-political practice in construction and a truly unique, radical and tender work as a result. No walls. No rake. No spatial distinction between performers and viewers. Instead, rugs, cushions and sofas invited the ‘visitor’ to sit, stand or lie down within the work. Around them, seven ‘co-workers’ enacted a repeated sequence of semaphore-like choreographic movements, overlaid with an improvised discussion on the nature of play, rest, leisure, labour, work, dance and time. Sometimes the co-workers danced. Sometimes they talked. At other times they rested or embroidered. And we were invited to do the same, or not, as we wished. The dual score was carried for five hours. However notions of rest and recuperation took centre stage where the exerted, punished body might usually have stood. Satelliser was emergent work born of moments of live connection where all modalities of participation were valued.
Now, more than ever, we want to come together like this.
Sarah Tutt (2022)
Landscape header image by David Wilson Clarke.