‘The Line Between Night and Day/ When Still/ River at the End of the Land’

Zoo Venues/ Southside Theatre, Edinburgh
9 August 2006

****

Liss Fain Dance is approaching its 20th anniversary as a contemporary dance company based in San Francisco. This small company of just nine dancers has developed a strong reputation for merging the flow and experimental movement of contemporary dance with the precision and lift of classical ballet through the choreography of its eponymous founder and artistic director.

This Edinburgh programme comprised three of Liss Fain’s works: the first two from this season and the third being reprised from 2003 as a tribute to the composer, Hamza El Din, who died in May.

As one might expect in a company that derives its movement vocabulary from a single source (although Fain acknowledges the extra creative contributions of her dancers), there is a strong, unifying brand that flows through all of the pieces. Fain’s movement is strongly influenced by the music, having an abstract, emotional and melancholic quality, unencumbered by narrative.

The choice of music is clearly fundamental to the creative process: ‘The Line Between Night and Day’ is set to two movements of Olivier Messiaen’s ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, written whilst a prisoner of war during WWII; and ‘When Still’ is created in three separate sections, corresponding to two madrigals from Monteverdi’s ‘Madrigals of Love And War’ and ending with Chanticleer’s ‘Beata’. In fact, these separate works sit together so well that they should be seen as two parts of a whole. The gentle introspective choral music of ‘When Still’ and the flowing, spiritual movement that it inspires, offsets perfectly the anguished images of a disintegrating civilisation in turmoil that characterises ‘The Line Between Night and Day’. It is a sour and sweet combination that should always be seen together.

The eastern rhythms of Hamza El Din’s music for ‘River at the End of the Land’ are accentuated by James Meyer’s costumes, which together conjure up a sandstorm of imagery invoking sun-soaked days and Arabian nights. The choreography focuses on the dynamics of a group with a solo dancer who does not belong in the ensemble. The complex movement dynamics evolve and change, alternating between joy and isolation.

There are several motifs in common throughout the three pieces, which help to enforce the group’s corporate identity but also give the choreography an occasional sameness. Nevertheless, this is a minor quibble of little consequence when set against the mature professionalism, fliud movement and poetic musicality of an excellent little company which stands neatly at the apex of contemporary and classical dance.

Graham Watts

LISS FAIN DANCE - THE UNKNOWN LAND

Zoo Venues, Southside Theatre, Edinburgh, 21st August 2006, 6.05 pm

I too caught up with Liss Fain's beautiful little company at the Zoo Southside Theatre yesterday. The programme included When Still and River at the End of the Land, about which Graham Watts has already so elegantly written. However, it opened with another, delicate piece The Unknown Land, created by Fain in 2004 and which coincidentally was also set to the music of an other composer who died in May, Gyorgy Ligeti.

I was fascinated by Fain's approach to the score (which was Ligeti's Piano Concerto), the way she can at times follow the complex rhythmical patternings, the violent explosions of sound which boom out of the quiet pianissimi, the way the spinning patterns of the piano's cadenza-like passage are matched by a helter-skelter of bubbling movement and the way her dancers seem to treat dance as contemplation of musical score. Fain choregraphed this piece after reading a book by Edward Jones entitled The Known World, which apparently depicts perceptions of slavery and freedom amongst black and white people. Having never read Jones' book (and I must confess not really having the inclination to do so), I cannot tell you how much dance and prose have in common. I can tell you that we see a whole series of pas de deux that range from the intimate and sensual (the use of the collpase/catch motif) to the violent and brutal around which a Greek chorus of dancers wind in and out, observing, but never commenting.

It is amazing how much Ligeti proves to be such a succesful dance composer (as we have seen in Christopher Wheeldon's recent Ligeti Tryptich), in spite of his complex, almost a-rhythmical structures. Perhaps as tribute, Sadler's Wells, or some other such venue, should bring together these intelligent dance pieces, as both exploration of his music and exploration of the choreographers who find him so fruitful.