© bhf www.bristolharbourfestival.co.uk Copeland in reviews Gomes in reviews recent Bristol Harbourside Festival reviews more Erin Whitcroft reviews

Performances from local and international dance artists were showcased on the Cathedral Walk stage at the Dance Village and on Saturday as I stood in the crowd awaiting the beginning of the festival, audience members argued over umbrellas and the crew scurried across the stage with mops and towels as the rain pelted down. The gathered crowd were thinking one of two things: the British Summertime is dead or, as the volley of chants suggested: ‘We want Hype’, We want Hype! The Hype Dance Academy did not disappoint, as soon as the stage had dried, the local street dance company slid onto the stage into the splits, heralding the start of the dance festival. A series of four different levels of dance groups were each given the opportunity to ‘bust a move’ in a variety of co-ordinated outfits including purple satin tracksuits, camouflage and leather. Three other youth groups were seen throughout the festival including the Swindon Youth Academy of Dance and Julia Thorneycroft’s Youth Group while the Kinesis Youth Company had the opportunity to present a choreography consisting of Hofesh Schecter style movement vocabulary as taught by two dancers from his company.

One of the highlights of the festival was the premiere of Bristol based Laila Diallo’s new solo Imprint exploring the nature of identity and according to Diallo herself, ‘the marks left on us by things’. Placing a wind up chicken and a pair of yellow shoes on stage Diallo moved in an expansive and fluid way to the tapping of the chicken’s tin beak and the percussive sound of an old telegraph machine while flower petals, soundless as they fell from her shoes, made no sound at all. Trying to fit her feet into her yellow shoes Diallo’s hands become feet for a moment in the confusion. Diallo’s attention to detail and use of colour (mint pencil skirt, yellow shoes, purple petals) made Imprint a real joy to watch.

The choreographer Adam Hougland, earmarked by critics as ‘one to watch’, provided an untitled commission for the festival. The piece, a contemporary pas de deux with a strong balletic influence, carefully evoked both the playfulness and uncertainty of a first love. The dancers waver for a moment as though looking down from a precipice and take each other in a ballroom hold the female dancer’s head pressing against the boy’s chest as though both resisting him and shy at the same time. Strong performances from Jo Meredith, who embodied the delicacy and tentativeness of a young lover and Murilo Leite D’Império were all the more impressive given the 18 hour creation to performance time span. D’Império should also be considered ‘one to watch’ given his magnetism on stage.

One of headlining performances of this year’s festival saw the dancers, Misty Copeland and Marcelo Gomes from the American Ballet Theatre perform Twyla Tharp’s cross-over ballet Sinatra Suite. Tharp’s piece has been experiencing something of a renaissance in the last few years with quite a few American ballet companies revisiting this eighties work. Tharp’s use of popular music is a characteristic element of her ‘cross-over’ style having choreographed dance to Billy Joel and Bob Dylan and she draws heavily on a variety of different dance lexicons: jazz; social dance, tap, pantomime to name but a few. In the Sinatra Suite Tharp draws on the principles of ballroom dancing while reconsidering and manipulating each transfer of weight, dip, glide and swoon in a way that is new. In an interesting footnote to the piece’s performance history Tharp herself performed the Sinatra Suite with Baryshnikov in 1984. Tharp’s performance foregrounded and exaggerated the subtle element of parody that is often missed when the piece is performed by others. However, over the weekend Copeland danced the role originally created for Elaine Kudo with gusto. Misty is clearly a star on the rise, her muscular legs and calves scissoring and enveloping Gomes while never loosing the sparkle and cheekiness that is needed to pull off this piece in a small scale venue. In contrast, Marcelo Gomes seemed somehow deadened by the smaller venue of the Dance Village. Gomes wasn’t helped by having split the seat of his trousers in the midst of his solo, and having to dance under the burden of audience murmurings as each pirouette revealed the true extent of the strain of his performance. Ballet dancers adhere to the ‘swan theory’ and hide the physical strain going on below the surface but on Saturday afternoon the run in Misty’s nylons and Gomes’ split trousers were a testament to how hard ballet dancers are working even when they’re trying their best to hide it.

As Tharp’s choice of ballroom style glamour demonstrates, the general public have been increasingly turning to Broadway musicals and film for the theatricality once satiated by the elaborate productions of the Ballet Russes. However, in Europe choreographers such as Pina Bausch and Jiri Kylian have continued to explore the spectacle inherent in an abstract, symbolic form of dance. In Jiri Kylian’s Bella Figura, the Czech choreographer further explores the dichotomy unknowingly displayed by Copeland and Gomes; the gulf between the dancer as flawless performer and the physical and emotional effort it takes to dance. Set to a varied selection of Baroque music (Vivaldi, Torelli, Pergolesi) Bella Figura, first performed in 1995, complicates the traditional performance structure of beginning and end with the final pas de deux continuing after the music ends. Kylian’s movements are angular and gymnastic, switching between romantic lyricism and comedy; the female dancer lopes off the stage like a dog while the make dancer holds an imaginary leash. Bringing Kylian to Bristol were Ema Yuasa and Georgi Milev both principle dancers at the Netherlands Dance Theatre and their performance of Bella Figura in the sparse setting of the harbourside provided an opportunity to reassess Kylian’s choreography away from the theatrical paraphernalia (scenery, lighting, topless female dancers, billowing red skirts) that make up the work as a whole. On a rainy day and on a small bare stage Kylian’s piece remained ‘theatrical’ in the purest sense of the word; it was movement plus something else. This ‘something else’ was not the elaborate mime of a Pierrot but a movement vocabulary that embodied the characters and emotions of a world beyond the limits of the merely physical.

Helen Wilson’s piece for the Bristol Dance Collective took nightmares and sleep as its subject. A piece for five dancers in bedroom nighties Wilson captured the spasms and flinches of a bad night’s sleep and the lack of control that is produced by the unconscious mind. As one dancer’s spasms become uncontrollable she collapses in exhaustion and is carried off stage in a fireman’s lift. Kompany Malakhi, another locally based dance company fusing urban and contemporary dance presented an excerpt from their latest full length work about misapprehension and prejudice called ‘boxin’. Wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, at first wrapped around her neck and then worn over her head, a young woman and black male dancer edged nervously around one another while sitting on a wall, which then became a see-saw. They balanced on the teetering see-saw, hovering, trying to make a connection and failing. The piece had, in fact, very little dance movement in it. However, given it was presented as an excerpt it would be interesting to see Kompany Malakhi at full length where hopefully they would fulfil the promise of fusing urban and contemporary dance.

Tolo Ko Tolo, a Bristol based company exploring contemporized pan-African dance forms, cannot compete with the blockbusting names of the American Ballet Theatre or Netherlands Dance but regardless of this proved for me to be one of the highlights of the festival. With musicians on stage providing both vocals and drum music the three female dancers presented three different styles of dance; a dance from Guinea; Zimbabwe and finally a new piece of choreography which fused contemporary and African dance. With the drum as their heartbeat the dancers jumped and leaped with ecstasy, contrasting shuffle steps had an earth bound orientation; their knees soft and heads down. There was a swinging quality to some of the steps with the movement coming from the hips and twisting from the waist while quick darting movements from a crouched position and sweeping, circling arm movements seemed to mimic the natural world and the movements of animals and birds. The joy on all three women’s faces was infectious while Denise Rowe stood out as a beautiful dancer both athletic and graceful.

The Floor Technicians, a jazz dance company consisting of four men in pinstripe suits and spats and Physical Jerks a locally based breakdancing collective proved real crowd pleasers, interacting with the crowd and hamming it up for the photographers in the pit. Physical Jerks structured their pyrotechnic moves around the neat conceit of a YMCA like line up of characters including a builder, car mechanic, office worker and old granny complete with walker. Finally, a collection of groups practicing a variety of different partner based dance styles from French Jive, Salsa, Flemenco, and belly dancing performed for the audience across the two days of the festival.

In the end, the chronology of the dance festival’s schedule gave way to an overall sense of having witnessed a micro-plotted history of dance over the two days. The rhythmic movement of Tolo Ko Tolo provided a reminder that the origins of dance lie in the natural world while The Cat’s Whiskers managed to persuade the audience, beer and blackberries in one hand, to participate in country line dancing from the Elizabethan era. The Floor Technician’s jazz laid the foundations for the bboying of the breakdancing collective, Physical Jerks; while Le Roc’s 1960’s French Jive historicised the current craze for Salsa in this country. Finally, Kompany Malakhi’s work and the movements of Hofesh Sceheter as performed by Kinesis reflected dance’s current interest in the politics of identity. Within this ‘history of dance’ the absence of traditional ballet with its tutus and pointe shoes proved a worrying sign that Twyla Tharp’s suggestion in the Sinatra Suite that only the crooning of Frank can make ballet palatable might be a true barometer of public opinion. However, no training other than classical ballet training could have produced a body like Misty Copeland, her arches bulging as she lent forward in a high penché. The weekend proved that it was irrelevant which end of the historical line the dancers stood at; old and new, traditional and avant-garde were words that lost their meaning in the context of pure movement which is timeless. The harbourside programmers may, unknowingly, have provided a historical review of dance styles but they also proved that there is no such thing as ‘historical dance’. Instead, each style invigorated by the bodies of the dancers up on stage seemed as relevant and central to the life of a community, such as Bristol, today as it will tomorrow.