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Walker DanceOctober 2002 London, The Place by Catherine Hale |
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When Fin Walker talks about making dance as “seeking the essence of an experience as it appears in that moment” it’s like the only reality she deals in is the body’s immediate sensations as they arise. Everything else is “dishonest”, she says. In a sense she’s a true existentialist. And, just as JP Sartre and his pals were an angst-ridden lot back then, Moment to Moment, Walker’s opening solo in this triple bill at The Place, is dark with neurosis. Maybe that says more about my response than about her – she disavows narrative. But the dogged repetition of violently unnatural movements, the gasping breath like an aerobics victim on the treadmill of doom: how else should we read them? And the breast-beating; the obsessive-compulsive gestures of a person seemingly alienated from their own limbs? It cried out with the malaise of a modern world and I recoiled in distress. Only Bruno Poet’s lighting, providing an occasional glow of solace, and Ben Park’s accompaniment, enveloping her stubborn discordance in the balm of its coherence, saved the work from self-destruction. Once again, although The Self is a highly-strung duet, its title tells us that it’s not “about” a relationship but bodies in the crisis of being. In fact, the formidably adaptable ex-RB Jenny Tattersall has two interchangeable partners (Lee Clayden and Gildas Diquero). That ambiguity between figurative (the story) and abstract (anonymous bodies) works well here. Locked in a sort of arm-wrestle throughout, the pair thrash out their co-existence so unremittingly that when they stop still in embrace we’re not sure whether it’s the intimacy of surrender or just refuelling for another round. Tattersall’s steely ballet legs, scissoring and splaying unyieldingly as she is perpetually thrust off kilter, give this piece its power. But it really took off when Park’s vibrant cacophony of a score gelled into syncopation with the dancers’ antics. In fact, Park, her partner and long-term collaborator, is the mainstay of Walker’s artistry throughout. He complements or contains its excesses with music that is also a pleasure in itself. The Three of Us, blessed by his exquisite Schoenberg-like score for tenor, percussion and bass, explores the ménage a trois. Its first section for two women in black leather skirts and a man in scarlet has one of them always on the edge of the action yet integral to its momentum. Here Walker’s tight, razor-sharp movement grows more painterly in its composition, structured by a series of freeze-frame tableaux that cut through rhythm and space with exciting theatricality.
Things had definitely brightened, but the thrill of the evening was the final male trio for Clayden, Diquero and Scott. Clad in matador red and helped in spirit by Lucy Carter’s ecstatically crimson floods of backlighting, they hustled, scrapped and capered their way to exhaustion with infectious energy. And with this lovely comic strip edge the angst was dispersed and entertainment briefly reigned.
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