© Asya Verzhbinsky 'Plants and Ghosts' reviews recent Siobhan Davies reviews more Catherine Hale reviews

But Plants and Ghost’s real journey, for me, was to the dawn of time. In The Beginning, as they say, was not The Word (that came later), but Henry Montes, splayed out on the floor like a new born colt. His head and limbs twitch feverishly; or rock dysfunctionally with inchoate angst. Then, with flickering consciousness, he slowly registers a world outside him. As his voracious gaze pulls him upwards we witness this bundle of randomly firing neurons coalescing formidably into biped.

Siobhan Davies' Plants and Ghosts
Photograph by Asya Verzhbinsky ©

Was evolution the theme of the evening? For the reductionist Davies it features only in the choreographic sense: as a process of generating complex movement from simple beginnings. But in this creature’s genesis through expansion outside of itself I saw a whole story emerge through the work: - a story of Mankind’s development from single-cell to world domination.

Max Eastley’s deep-bellied soundscape was the perfect accompaniment. His “sound installations” (think extruded latex blowing on a beach) sound like the acoustic debris of a big bang rattling around the stratosphere. It seems to whip up the eight dancers in its channels of turbulence and propel into their increasingly complex vocabulary and configurations. They collide - moths to a flame – and find the brief release of intimacy, or coagulate on mass and dissolve again with the frenzy of molecules on fast forward.

Siobhan Davies' Plants and Ghosts
Photograph by Asya Verzhbinsky ©

Later, they emerge self-possessed, some of them with extensions to their limbs in the form of poles, reedy and tenuous at first, then rigid and unyielding. Like the tools with which Man began to master Nature, they mediate the dancers’ bodies in space, extending their range and lending a sedate gravity to the dance. The final image of Sarah Worsop floating majestically across the ‘stage’ on stilts at the end is hauntingly prophetic. Transformed through technology, she seems to exist on a higher plane but is alien and alone.

Sandwiched in between primeval soup and super-being was the ‘word’ section, a specially written text courtesy of Caryl Churchill. Her monologue, sweeping extra-marital affairs, immigrant labour and gay dentists into a teasing jigsaw puzzle of a narrative, mirrors the syntax of Matthew Morris’ quirky moves. Neatly formulating the relationship between words and movement - with sign language bridging the two - this section could, and perhaps should, have stood alone.

In fact, so dense and polyphonic were the bodies’ own stories in this work, that all else seemed superfluous. Was the ghoulish atmosphere of the hangar, extraneous to the work itself, worth the considerable production effort and expense? Only repeated viewing of Plants and Ghosts in all its variously alternative forthcoming venues could tell – but I certainly wouldn’t mind that job.