It's only a dance...

Melina Sedo said it of tango, but I wonder...

'Only a dance': isn't dance important? At some point in time humans found they could make marks that resembled things they saw around them, and they also found they could communicate with movement, playful movement without the urgency of fleeing rabid wolves, and we've done these things ever since. Birds, bees and some mammals dance to communicate. Dance brings order and regularity and mindfulness into the chaos of movement, and we value it for that.

A good friend I dance with whenever I can works in a bank, of which she says that anyone who works in a bank, herself excepted of course, must be either stupid or crazy. 'I read an article that said there are many psychopaths working in the City: it's true! My office is full of them! I told them all one day, 'You should all learn to dance tango!' and they looked at me as if I was crazy!' I'd guess she's not the only tanguero out there to think their office would be better off if everyone went out to milongas in the evenings. (Not sure the milongas would be better, but give it time.) & that quote from Moliere: 'All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing'. Maybe spoken by a dance teacher and intended as a comic exaggeration, but there's a kind of exasperated truth about it. The world certainly wouldn't be worse if everyone danced more. Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozi after a day's heated debate on the Euro... Yes! Give it a whirl: why not?

But tango adds the embrace to the great enjoyment of moving to music. People pay to go to hugging workshops because enjoying the touch of other humans makes them feel better. Hugs lower blood pressure and reduce stress, while oxytocin, a hormone that triggers caring and bonding responses in men and women, is released. It's why some think of tango as healing. And of course Ricardo Vidort said that 'Tango is a therapy for the soul', a grand statement, but he'd lived with tango much longer than any of us are likely to.

This apparently chance discovery by the good citizens of Buenos Aires, partly as a result of dance floors that were too small, and driven by an irresistible music, still has plenty in it to make us all feel good and more human. Did their 20-year tango fiesta/party help them? Politically things fell apart badly after 1955, but I think the problem was just that not enough people were dancing.

It's not that dance is unimportant; the problem is that not enough people think that dance is important.

Performances

Quite a few of us find tango demos a wearying waste of good dance time. I've no doubt the various organisers know this, and may even sympathise, but they know that a good display brings people in, and this is reflected in the takings. I like to watch choreography, and I've enjoyed many great evenings at Sadlers Wells, but the technique and choreography I enjoy there are usually used creatively, and aren't just displays for the sake of display. I can't see anything much more than self-advertisement in most tango demos, and a dance that's little more than a technical display is just a bit too limited. I prefer the custom of the Cachirulo milonga in BsAs, where the regulars celebrate their birthdays and other events by dancing a tango with a partner of their choice, for everyone to watch. Of course, they are all excellent dancers, and everyone is likely to know them personally, or at least to have danced with them, as there's a feeling of family there, and the dances have heart. & of course it's a long night of dance, so it's no imposition to sit out for a while and watch.

The main reason for linking this video is that I've always enjoyed watching it. It's a choreography performed by technically brilliant dancers, but it feels fresh, while the agility in both high heels and polishing pads is both alarming and funny.

Happy new year - and some bits and pieces

A rather grim-faced picture of Nestor La Vitola has headed my blog for too long. Afraid I have no control over the photo chosen. Time for a change.

A happy new year to everyone who comes across this, and may your best wishes come true in a peaceful and wonderful 2011!

Just back from a post-xmas milonga at the Festival Hall. It's a great space, and one of the best ballroom floors in London. There must have been well over 100 people there to dance – and it lasted just one hour. Well, it was free. So one of my wishes for the new year is at least one decent milonga post-xmas!

Three films to escape into, post-xmas. Talking Heads Stop Making Sense with David Byrne in his massive suit: a great concert, wonderfully filmed. Then the reworking of Sleeping Beauty by the Swedish choreographer Mats Ek, which is funny, constantly inventive, colourful and full of breathtaking full-on dancing. I've got it on an old tape from TV, from the days when UK TV broadcast dance: in fact I discovered over an hour of video dance shorts on the same tape, all experimental film-making and choreography. Nobody would broadcast that here today.

& Flamenco by Carlos Sauros. I have to admit I was very turned off by his Tango which seemed to lack any real substance. I understand he went to BsAs to film Copes and Maria Nieves, but couldn't persuade them to dance together. I know people who think it's marvelous, but it somehow seems to have missed the point. Only the scene of eight-year-olds learning tango in school seemed at all realistic, and I couldn't help wondering about kids of that age being taught tango: it looked like a school exercise, a cultural heritage class, strange. But Flamenco is another story altogether. He got together some of the best flamenco singers, dancers and musicians and provided them with a succession of stages to perform on. I know very little about flamenco except I love the music, and I watch this film again and again. The emotional intensity of it is extraordinary, and the colours are warm throughout. Another great concert for the north-European midwinter.

Curious that Flamenco shows the dance as something the whole community, young and old, are involved in and enjoy, whereas tango solemnly performed by schoolchildren looks incomprehensible to them.

& a new blog on the block. Many thanks to Bora for her wonderful account of a visit to BsAs. This is her first day: a wonderful breathtaking, breathless read. A lot of the blog is taken up with detailed descriptions of classes and technique, but then one uses – well, I use – a blog as a way of keeping track of oneself: I go back to posts from a year or two ago to remind myself of what I was discovering then. Interesting how younger teachers, both European and Argentine, are working on trying to improve the interaction between partners, the mechanics of lead and follow, of the embrace. So long as the musical passion that has sustained tango for so long doesn't get forgotten amidst the details of a recently-elaborated technique. Perhaps it needs to retain some rough edges.

This email arrived recently:

'LES CIGALLES MILONGUERAS in the wonderful south-west of France from 20 to 23 May 2011 in Eauze (Gers). A meeting with a total immersion in Tango: 50 hours of dance on a parquet floor during four days, with first-rate Djs, food and lodging on-site in a 100% Milonguero spirit of sharing. The complete programme soon on our site.' (Which is here.)

Choreographing You

I know 'choreography' isn't a good word in social tango circles: performance of planned, well-rehearsed sequences, danced with great skill and watched by a passive audience, doesn't fit into the free flow of a milonga.

But in the 1960s visual artists and dancers began to see choreography more broadly, looking to renew the sense of the body by intensifying the relation of an 'audience' to the environment, to heighten self-awareness of the body in space and time. Choreographing You (Hayward Gallery, London, till January 12) is about this.

A lot of the show is like a gigantic playground, great fun for physically adventurous and curious people to explore themselves in unexpected physical activities. & at the heart of it, when the fun of tilting platforms, the claustrophobia of enclosed passages, and the effort of negotiating hanging hoops wears off, is a massive archive of dance film, 147 films available to browse. Wide-ranging: among much more, there's film of Jackson Pollock painting, the records of Allan Kaprow's 1960s 'happenings', film of Pina Bausch dancing Cafe Muller, of Trisha Brown improvising a dance/drawing, and of an extraordinary 2½ hour solo performance by La Ribot (I cheated and watched it on fast forward). An archive of film from the 1960s to the present, more than can be watched on a cold London afternoon.

In the end it palls, and it's good to move back to physical engagement with unusual and sometimes challenging environments. If our 'comfort zone' of habitual bodily and mental activities is extended, habitual reserve starts to break down in a way that never happens confronted with a normal exhibition of dance or artwork. It felt cheerful and friendly.

A German theme

There's been a German theme recently. I was honoured to host the interview with Melina Sedo, which was very interesting and illuminating.

I watched Over your Cities Grass will Grow, a film by Sophie Fiennes (who is English, sister of Ralph), watching German artist Anselm Kiefer, who grew up in the ruins of post-war Germany, at work. Offered an extensive property by the French government, he developed a landscape of his own work, as well as a studio and library. Erudite, but also at home melting a vat of lead with a large blow-torch, or creating a mound of broken plate glass around a sculpture, a huge book made of lead. Everything is physical and on a huge scale: heavy lifting gear is needed to move the paintings. When you see the works in a gallery they can be massive, but always look refined and poetic, informed by layers of allusion. The film is still showing in London.

& I saw the Pina Bausch company in Iphigenia in Tauris, a dance set to the 18th century opera by the German composer Gluck: the 18th century, the best century for opera! Stunning: a full orchestra, a chorus of 24 soloists and singers on the sides of the stage, with the dance on-stage. To obtain a fair wind to sail to sack the innocent city of Troy, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia. When he returns home, his wife murders him to avenge her daughter, and his son, Orestes, murders her to avenge his father, and exits pursued by Furies. Of course, none of this happens onstage. In Euripedes' version, the goddess has saved Iphigenia from sacrifice, but doesn't inform her family. We meet Iphigenia some years later, and there's a sense that we are in the land of the dead. The mad Orestes turns up, and brother and sister recognise each other: it's hardly a resolution. But the music and the dance are beautiful.

& German film-maker Wim Wenders is completing a film on the work of Pina Bausch – filmed entirely in 3D. He says that 3D can show dance with an immediacy never possible in 2D. This seems to be the future: one day soon we'll upload our 3D vids to YouTube, and watch them in 3D. It won't be long now.



Jericho: Anselm Kiefer at the RA Summer Exhibition 2010.

Learning tango 2

Just a thought: there is a dance that's improvised to music, that many of us are familiar with from childhood, and certainly from our teens, by which time it IS social dance; that arm-waving, body-writhing, jumping dance of discos, clubs and parties everywhere.

Has anyone tried it to tango music? I have, but what I do is conditioned by what I've been taught to do to tango music. But it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what people with no knowledge of tango music would improvise to it. & then it occurred to me that this might be a good way to introduce people to tango music. The activity is a familiar one, but the music is unfamiliar, so it would be necessary to listen to it, to find the beat, the compas, and then possibly feel the melodic flow of cadencia too, and respond to it perhaps with the torso and arms. In any case, to explore this new music with the body. A teacher who knows the music should be able to suggest, by body movements, what is going on in the music, and ways to respond to it. Learning directly with the body rather than through a verbal explanation might be a useful path for people who've never listened to the music and who want to dance to it. The dance itself, the embrace and ways of movement possible in the embrace would still need to be explored, of course. & this could be extended to vals and milonga: here's something different, try and work out for yourselves what is going on. What we find out for ourselves we usually know better than something that's explained to us.

If anyone's ever tried this, or tries it, I'd love to know if it works.

Slow Dancing

High-speed, high-definition cameras recording at 1,000 frames per second have been with us for a while, showing astoundingly beautiful details of sports events. Artist David Michalek uses this technology to make video portraits of dancers, and shows them in installations using a number of screens, one per dancer. A short movement phrase of perhaps 5 seconds, is played back in 10 minutes of extreme slow motion, enabling the viewer to see the complexity of the simplest gestures, catching details that would normally escape the naked eye.

London has been a bit slow to catch up with showings of dance video made with this technology, but Slow Dancing is now in London in Trafalgar Square, from Tue 6 - Fri 9 July, starting at 9pm, and it will move on to the Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, London EC2A 3PQ, from Tuesday 13 - Saturday 24 July. The list of participants in this unique installation reads like a who's who of dance talent, including Wendy Whelan, Shantala Shivalingappa, Judith Jamison, William Forsythe, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Alexei Ratmansky.

This is another free dance event.

What fascinates me is that this use of technology completely removes choreography from dance. Choreography is something that happens in time, whether in five minutes or in the hour or two that a 'show' takes. This technique strips away choreography and shows us dance simply in terms of body movement. & (to me, anyway) the body in movement is one of the most beautiful things there is. There are choreographers I admire, but to me they are best when they show the freedom and complexity of movement. &, of course, my favourite dance is choreography-free! But nevertheless I find Slow Dancing a very beautiful and fascinating project.

Here's the 2007 installation at the Lincoln Centre. The video is the Sadlers Wells presentation for the project in London.

Cool!

Free Open Air Performance
1-4 July
Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court
Somerset House
Strand
London

'Come and watch a powerful all-women cast, made up of five extraordinary professional dancers and fifteen of the UK’s exciting emerging talents brought together especially for this unmissable event. Shobana Jeyasingh's dramatic choreography, together with the unique talents of designer Ursula Bombshell and sound artist Cassiel, promise an intense and water-inspired dance performance for visitors to Somerset House.'

Thurs & Fri at 18.00 & 19.00
Sat & Sun at 12.00, 13.00, 15.00 & 16.00

The Craneway Event 2

An astonishing feature-length film in which little seems to happen, and yet one watches in a kind of relaxed attention, oblivious to the passage of time. It just looks beautiful.

The 'event' isn't really a rehearsal: the dancers have already rehearsed, and choreographer Merce Cunningham is spending three days prior to performance locating the dance in the former Ford assembly plant, an enormous hall, glazed on three sides, right on the quay-side, separated from the sea only by the craneway, the iron tracks once used by the cranes. To the sides, the hills of San Fransisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Ships; a container vessel inches past, yachts breeze by. The floor of the hall is huge, probably three or four times bigger than any stage, and covered with a semi-reflective surface of dance mat. The folding doors at one corner of the hall must be 20 feet high.

Three days, the fresh clear light of morning giving way to the diffused warm glow of late afternoon sunshine. The dancers work through their sequences; their pacing and angle to the audience are changed a little by Merce Cunningham, wheel-chair bound after, he has said, too many years dancing on concrete. But he was 90 when the film was made and sadly he passed away during the editing. The film does have an elegaic quality. There's no music, just the sounds of the dancers on the floor, occasionally of boats and the sea. It's very quiet. The cameras never move; no pans, no zooms, just cuts from angle to angle, long takes, the visual style of film-maker Tacita Dean, who was invited by Cunningham to film the event, although she chose rather to film these final rehearsals since Cunningham himself was present.

In a way it's unfocussed, or rather the focus is on everything. It's certainly not a film about a dance performance as it doesn't show us clearly all the dancers' moves. It's not a film about Merce Cunningham, who is present throughout but not as a character in a film or documentary. Or rather it is all these, and more too: it's a film about the building, about the birds, the sea and the ships, the bridge, the city and above all the wonderful light. It's a wonderfully calm film. At the end of the third day, there's a long take, looking from end to end of the hall, against the warm blaze of the setting sun, the dancers little more than silhouettes, the vast building full of movement from end to end, the floor reflecting the light and the dancers. The final rehearsal finishes, there's a little laughter, voices and relaxed movement, and with that the film ends.

Details of the screenings are here. Three screenings a day Tuesday to Friday, and two on Saturday, until June 26. & it's free. (& if you click on that link, have a look at the line of dancers in profile. Que postura!)

Kontakthof, Van Gogh... and tango

(The connection is linear: they came one after the other.)

Kontakthof ('courtyard for meeting') is the first Pina Bausch piece I've seen on stage. The setting is a bare dance hall. Originally (1978) it was created for 27 untrained performers aged 65 and over, just local people. Untrained but not unrehearsed: the piece, which is 'dance theatre', is long and complex. The gestures and acts we perform in dance halls, the preening, clothing adjustments, plays for attention, rejections, even our unexpressed thoughts and desires, which would normally remain unnoticed, are the substance of the piece. [PS. There's little actual dancing.] It wasn't made clear at booking that two groups were performing at separate performances, and I found I'd booked for a group of teenagers, 14+, a later idea, it seems. I'm not sure the bare dance hall and the music, German 1930s dance music, sounding (except for the vocals) rather like tango vals, really suited them, and they have much less 'history' to bring to the performance. Pina Bausch grew through the harsh post-war years, and her vision of human nature is unsentimental and unsettling.

Van Gogh I could hardly see, they've packed the show with so many 'customers'. You see the backs of heads of people trying to see beyond the backs of the heads of people crammed together looking at a Van Gogh. The drawings were easier to see, and I liked them. There's a kind of compulsiveness in them, skies filled with thousands of tiny dots, but I suspect that these textures are an attempt to suggest colour in monochrome drawing. The energy in the drawings is magnificent. The drawing of a cypress seemed much more direct and forceful than the modelling (literally) of it in paint. I was surprised to be less impressed by the paintings. I can't help thinking of Cezanne, who also looked at southern landscapes and people. But Van Gogh died at 37, at which age Cezanne was still a relatively clumsy painter. Only in his 50s did Cezanne start to make those astonishing constructions of line and colour, which seem both solid and insubstantial, and which take my breath away.

& tango (at the Crypt) confirmed my observation a while back that dark and unevenly lit dance floors host the most careless dancing. I was told there was a lot of bumping and a lot of complaining about bumping, and I was hit by people taking long steps backwards. I'm all for the socialising area being dark, but the floor needs adequate lighting. It's so obvious! It's not rock'n'roll, where people dance on the spot! Leaders need to be able to register clearly and in brief glimpses, and often out of the corner of an eye, where all the nearby dancers are, what they are doing, and even their skill levels. In the dark, with a partner, people can ignore the possibility of other people being around, but that adds to no-one's comfort. & the (recent) addition of a glitter ball is truly depressing...

Context

'All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.'

I'd be inclined to say amen to that, but it's a quote from Moliere. The BBC website quotes the words but not the context: more than likely it wasn't intended seriously. It could almost be a dance teacher talking up his importance...

But I'd still say amen to it.

Tango past and tango present

Dance is strange. Unlike an artefact, it exists only in the moment it is made, then it vanishes out of time and into memory, leaving, hopefully, a sense of order, of happiness. Its forms might be judged old-fashioned at one time, then a bit later as 'contemporary' again, but the dance itself is never older or newer than the moment we create it in, and we create it out of old forms, with our contemporary sensibilities.

It's too easy to assume that 'estilo milonguero' is old, and it would be tedious to try and preserve something exactly just because it's old. We don't learn to do something as it was done 70 years ago because it's old but because there's a good reason to do it that way, and that reason is almost always a technical reason - and because we enjoy doing it that way. If we want to bake bread, play an instrument or print an etching we need to learn techniques, and there are good practical reasons for the techniques; they work, they get results. It's always interesting to break the rules, but you have to know the techniques, the craft, to begin with. In classes, we can learn what generations of dancers have discovered and refined, we can learn about the possible movements of two bodies close together, the requirements of improvisation to the music, dancing on crowded floors. & on YouTube, we can watch video, like youngsters at milongas more than half a century ago watching the great dancers, getting the feel of it. Then we go out and make it for ourselves, and become part of the present and the history.

We're fortunate that some of the older dancers continue to travel and teach, and are welcomed wherever they are invited. I've no doubt money is important to them. State pensions can't amount to much in Argentina; people who might have spent a lot of their lives dancing might not have extensive savings and if they had savings in Argentina they might well have lost them in 2002. But I'm sure they travel primarily because they love what they do, and they enjoy the company of other people who love it too. Tango has given them more than pleasure, and they wish that for us. They love tango and want it to continue. Thanks to all of them!

(This was prompted by a recent, rather thoughtful post by Elizabeth Brinton, Muma. Apologies if I seem to disagree on one or two things.)

In the Spirit of Diaghilev

Sadler's Wells offered four choreographers, Wayne McGregor, Russell Maliphant, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Javier de Frutos, the challenge Diaghilev offered choreographers: 'Surprise me!' Four short works resulted, four world premieres in an evening.

The one that remains vividly in mind is Russell Maliphant's AfterLight, suggested by the geometric drawings of Nijinsky. The sparseness of it focused attention totally on the one dancer. Casually dressed, he stretches and turns within a pool of flickering light. There's nothing to distract from the dance; there's just music, light and a moving body. It was extraordinary.

Sidi Larbi used two dancers and a painted backdrop, a dance suggesting the discovery of eroticism, and its intoxication. I wonder if a dance performance isn't something of a ritual; we gather for a journey out of verbal reality. A dance is a dance, but when it tries to tell a story, when the stage setting tries to describe a place, there's too much superfluous information and something doesn't quite work. It becomes more of an entertainment, the focus is lost.

Judith Mackerell's review is here. And here there is an article about research by cognitive scientists into dance, how it is created, developed, remembered, with dancer and choreographer Wayne McGregor and his company. & here is a short video about that research taking place during creative rehearsals. Not like any dance class I've been to.

PS. It was on my mind while writing this that it was an all-male list of choreographers, and yet I've seen exciting work from female choreographers: Cathy Marston, Siobhan Davies and Shobana Jeyasingh to name contemporary women just in the UK. Diaghilev himself encouraged and commissioned Bronislava Nijinska, Nijinsky's sister. Then I saw an article reporting on a recent symposium on the low visibility of female choreographers.

My guess is that the four males have a higher box office appeal and they have international reputations. Not that their work is necessarily any more interesting.

Cristal Pite and Kidd Pivot

An extraordinary evening at Sadler's Wells. Cristal Pite has been a dancer and choreographer since she was very young, now working with her own company, Kidd Pivot. She worked for some years with the Forsythe company, therefore at the most cerebral, physical and imaginative edge of dance, so that's the tradition of her own company.

'Lost Action' is one piece that lasts nearly 90 minutes without a break, and it didn't seem over long. For a start she and her dancers are extraordinarily supple, and to watch human bodies with that degree of flexibility moving is wonderful. When we watch movement we are involved in it, we follow it in our own bodies. & the choreography was very inventive with movement.

& the 'sense' of the piece? I guess it would be 'death and the dancer', because it's 'about' a dancer and death. The death is relived, replayed, worked around, re-imagined in a variety of circumstances on a bare stage, just in dance. Finally it's as if the dancers just have to accept it. Finally, after an extraordinarily intense male/female pas-de-deux, there's a motionless (male) body that can be lifted, turned, held, carried, but remains motionless.

An amazing feat of memory by the dancers, too, given the complexities of the movements. The sound track is a sound collage, sometimes overlapping voices, beats, just sound, little to jog the memory. I guess there's a sequence to the movements, each phrase leading to the next. A 90-minute choreography. (I'd have problems learning a three-minute choreography, not that I've ever tried, needed or wanted to... But perhaps learning choreographies is a way to develop the memory for movement.)

I wished the lighting wasn't so low throughout. The moving bodies said so much I wanted to see them as clearly as possible.

She's here, talking about her work and rehearsing with the Nederlands Dans Theater. And the Sadler's Wells trailer for 'Lost Action' is here.

I think there's something here for the tango community too: the more supple you are the easier it is to move, and suppleness can be improved. The 'milonguero' community might not pay much attention to stretching exercises, but if you watch the older dancers it is surprising how supple they still are. Impossible to say whether that's because they've danced so much, or whether they've danced so much because they are naturally supple; a bit of both, probably. But if you're not naturally bendy, it's worth trying to do something about it, because bendy people are likely to dance a lot better and look a lot better than stiff people.

Pina Bausch

Pina Bausch was one of the great creators of contemporary dance, running her own company for many years in Wuppertal, the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, which achieved international acclaim. She died at the end of June.

On a visit to Buenos Aires with her company in 1994 she saw Tete Rusconi dance, and they became friends, performing together. The whole story has been added to Tete and Silvia's website, with some good photos: it is here. On YouTube there's plenty of Pina Bausch, and plenty of Tete and Silvia, but sadly there's nothing of Pina and Tete.

You Made me a Monster

William Forsythe again. We are invited on stage at Sadler's Wells, in groups, round tables on which card models of skeletons are joined up in non-sense, grotesque ways, and asked to contribute to the distortion of that symbol of death. The story of the slow death from cancer of Forsythe's wife, by all accounts a remarkable dancer, is projected on the screen. Three dancers appear, and dance out the agony, taking visual cues from the grotesque distortions we have assisted in creating. Their cries are distorted, amplified, protracted electronically.

Obviously a difficult piece but I'm uneasy about the three energetic, young, healthy bodies of the dancers mimicking the agonies of a body racked by cancer. It seemed excessive: it seemed like elaborating and mimicking, hardly re-enacting. Of the three the woman was the most effective, but the piece relates to a woman. I could only think that only one person could really dance this piece. Perhaps one woman since it is about a woman. Or perhaps Forsythe himself, whose experience it is, with just the one, the original, card skeleton that he says set the piece in motion. But it is a scary, challenging piece of theatre.

How can art deal with grief, loss, chaos? The piece seemed too close to trying to depict appearances, suffering, grief, chaos, when what we need, and expect, is resolution, a way of relating to suffering, grief, chaos. But perhaps that grief is irresolute. Perhaps the howling and contortions are cathartic, an exorcism.

A parallel suggested itself with Claire Denis's film L'Intrus, based on the brief study by French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy of his experience of a heart transplant, and subsequent cancer caused by anti-rejection drugs, two 'intruders' into his body, that suggested to him a whole study of the intruder, the 'other', the foreign, in society. L'Intrus is extremely beautiful, thoughtful, and quite mysterious too. But then it isn't about grief, bereavement, about the anger of loss: it is about intrusion. & Jean-Luc Nancy is still alive.

Siobhan Davies at Victoria Miro

Siobhan Davies started making dance in the 70s. The first piece I saw was the stunning 13 Keys to Scarlatti, played live, upstairs in the Atlantis building on Brick Lane, on an X-shaped stage raised about 50cm, in a huge hall. There were no seats: you walked around and could stand quite close to the dancers. Siobhan Davies says it's a privilege to work close to dancers in the studio and likes to offer that proximity to the public. It was an energetic piece with, I think, three dancers from the Royal Ballet as well as her own group, and to watch dancers like that from a couple of metres away, instead of from a distant seat, was unforgettable.

Victoria Miro moved her gallery from Cork Street to an old warehouse near the canal in lower Islington about eight years ago. It's a wonderful space to wander round and look at what she's showing. She now has an even more wonderful huge room up on the roof, one wall being floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at London skies, and a floor that dreams of milongas. I think this is the second piece she's invited Siobhan Davies to make to complement a gallery exhibition. Called Minutes, the 'dancing' is neither strenuous nor physically demanding: at times it resembled a rather genteel 60s happening, people in ordinary clothes doing slightly unusual things. But it accumulated into a relaxed, enjoyable 40 minutes: Davies sat with a watch counting out the minutes and I arrived as she counted '20'. At '60' all the performers left. The work is continuous, so I guess that after a short pause they start again.

I filmed an installation outside, and a video installation of dance by Idris Khan and Sarah Warsop. Then the batteries died, so I have only how I remember Minutes.



I'd like to add a bit to the above. The dance 'language' used isn't in any way the language you normally expect of highly-trained dancers. There are no moves that only highly skilled dancers can do. This is choreography in the broadest sense of the organisation of movement. There's nothing breath-taking in it, apart from its simplicity. But this actually involves the watchers, the audience, even more, as it's easier for one's body to partake, passively, in something that close to the movements of everyday life. Thus we sit, are involved in small but significant ways, and the minutes are counted as they pass. Some of them seem long, some seem short. Time and movement.

Another kind of dance

William Forsythe: American choreographer who's worked in Frankfurt for many years; not to be confused with an Australian showtime choreographer, or a Hollywood actor... The DVD includes 'Just dancing around?', a docu by Mike Figgis, and 'From a Classical Position' danced by Forsythe and Dana Caspersen. The docu is a straightforward, well-made account of Forsythe, his company and work. Trained in the classical Balanchine tradition, working with classically trained dancers, but expecting just about anything from them. Very creative with movement on an individual level, on a group level, and with the theatrical spectacle, and capable of taking on and dealing with complex and extreme subjects and emotions.

The docu shows clips of 'The loss of small detail' from on stage, a massive, extraordinary explosion of energy, very beautiful. There's a wonderful scene of Forsythe teaching a young dancer a few minutes of a ballet he choreographed to a Handel Concerto Grosso: he dances with amazing fluency and energy, she follows and copies, phrase by phrase. Then she puts it all together with the music for the first time. If you sit close enough to the stage during a performance you hear the heavy breathing and know how much hard work that effortlessness takes. But to be in the studio and watch the mental effort of learning, of recreating something for the first time, is really a privilege.

There are plenty of clips on YouTube, many from the DVD he made to explain his improvisation techniques. Most of the clips are the classical end of his work. This is Forsythe rehearsing 'In the middle something elevated', with Sylvie Guillem at the Paris Opera Ballet, some years ago (dated by an XXXX T-shirt). As the French says, poor quality film but worth watching for the end.

At the Royal Ballet

The Seven Deadly Sins by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weil (1933) a ballet chanté from the start, first choreographed by Balanchine and sung by (who else?) Lotte Lenya. Good to see it onstage at Covent Garden. A new choreography by Will Tuckett, sung by Martha Wainwright and danced by Zenaida Yanowsky. The music stands out, great singing and dancing. The Wainwright voice is excellent, rich in the lower register, clear and bright higher up. She might not be used to singing the longer lines of Brecht/Weil, but it's a great performance. Carmen, Mats Ek choreography, great fun. Inventive with steps and moves as with whole scenes. Synchronised smoking to March of the Toreodores then, having amused and played around with illusion, he can suddenly produce real pathos. Tamara Rojo in red, you (I) watch every moment. In fact Ek makes colour sing too. DGV: Wheeldon choreography to Nyman music. Wheeldon makes great modern classical choreography, but this didn't show me much more than great modern classical choreography, fast, Danse à Grande Vitesse. Enjoyable, and a good evening out.