I was invited to write a week’s worth of diary entries for the Dramaturgs’ Network in their ‘Invisible Diaries’ series, from 5- 11 May 2020. In these posts, I reflect on my dramaturgy practice through the lens of my lockdown experience. I use the starting point of noticing my body’s actions in space and time; different rooms of my house are jumping-off points which I use to explore and muse on what dramaturgy for dance means for me, and how the lockdown experience has influenced this.

Follow this link to find all seven posts.

Review of Gregory Maqoma’s Cion: Requiem of Ravel’s Bolero, Barbican, Dance Umbrella, 17 October 2019

Review originally published in The Theatre Times, 23 November 2019

In darkness, a quiet sobbing, acutely intimate in the vastness of the Barbican main stage. Now crying, now whimpering, the amplified voice grows in aching graduality. I can’t but reflect on the pain that I feel on listening to another human being’s voice of sorrow. It’s uncomfortably long, uncomfortably obvious, and it reels me in.

This is an extraordinary beginning to an extraordinary piece. Gregory Maqoma is a prolific and successful South African choreographer who has a well-known presence in the UK through collaborations with choreographers including Akram Khan and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, as well as a recent high-profile collaboration with Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah in Tree. He founded Vuyani Dance Theatre 20 years ago while undertaking a scholarship at P.A.R.T.S. in Belgium under the direction of Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker.

In Maqoma’s choreography, all the performers exude an assuredness which is completely gripping, whilst presenting theatre that embraces, grapples with, and (oddly) celebrates grief. This is not an easy thing to do in theatre – the obvious pitfall is simply awakening sympathy in spectators or in beating the same drum for a one-dimensional presentation of human experience.

Cion: A Requiem avoids this. Oliver Hauser’s set consists of a number of crosses, suspended from the ceiling and around the edge of the stage evoking the graveyard setting. The theme of death is unavoidable. But as the keening noises of a shuffling, bent-over man turn improbably into melody as the mourner becomes a singer, nothing is quite what it initially seems in this piece.

The ensemble presents a satisfying rendition of Maqoma’s signature choreography: stark, sharp, but hugely detailed. They stand in a menacing group before breaking into poses, then ceaseless movement centering on spinal fluidity, complex hand movements and a connection to the floor. The dancers remind me of zombies, hands outstretched as they rise from the ground; of a congregation witnessing an exorcism; of slaves on a plantation. There is an assured violence about the choreography, more obviously with the floor-slapping, tumultuous moments and the strange, torturous ear-pinching inflicted on the central character by a crazed priest character as the others look on in greedy judgment. But the violence lurks in every thread of this piece.

Maqoma dances a central character, inspired by the figure of Toloki, a professional mourner, from Zakes Mda’s novels Cion and Ways of Dying. Dressed in a blanket-like overcoat, leggings, and shoes, he is an oddly clown-like figure, vulnerable and ridiculous, at times milking the pathos. This is the genius of the piece: it places in a single moment the paradox of a heart-ripping response to the millions of lives lost, black lives in particular, to “greed, power and religion,” (from Maqoma’s program notes) and the humor, beauty, and awkwardness of everyday human life.

The music probably deserves its own review altogether. Astounding in all respects, the continuous score is performed by four singers, under the musical direction of composer Nhlanhla Mahlangu. They do things with their voices that seem impossible. Snakey, slithery clicks, sucks and breaths create a beat-boxing effect, unlike anything I have ever heard. There is rapping, harmonic choruses, sorrowful poetry, and dancing and body percussion. In a demonstration of louche confidence, they also take on Maurice Ravel’s famous Bolero. The sparse snare drum which underpins the very beginning of the piece returns as three singers hold heavy scorebooks, singing the overlaid and repeating melodies in somewhat ironic, though no less accomplished, operatic voices. The fourth singer unapologetically holds a megaphone, and with complete virtuosity, raps out the famous bolero rhythm using words.

Different sections of choreography seem to tell a mixture of personal stories of the Toloki character. At one point, he is held back from a woman, perhaps lover or mother, by a group of people who could be a ship or could be jailers, all wearing white gloves in a strange and angry form of a minstrel show. Later on, there is a pas-de-deux between Toloki and one of the female dancers, who speaks a text about slave mothers learning not to love their children, while evading the overbearing advances of Toloki amongst floods of giggles. It’s an effective and jarring piece of text, but this section sits oddly amongst the rest of the piece, perhaps because it feels like a revealing of an otherwise mysterious hand.

Mannie Manim’s lighting design in conjunction with the set provides a series of otherworldly settings; lit from below with red and orange tonalities, the backdrop gives the sudden feeling of a grisly tomb full of skulls and bones; later, it is a stony rock face, perhaps underground, running with water in Ntuthuko Mbuyazi’s intricate sound design, as the dancers smack the floor with cloth sacking.

At the end of the piece, crosses cover the stage, transporting us right into the graveyard which we have contemplated throughout this cathartic “lament” of a piece (as described by Maqoma in the program). The dancers return to the stage, now dressed outrageously with copious black netting covering their faces, topped with large black Stetsons. They wear tap shoes on their feet. Stalking in, they channel a camp Fosse at the same time as providing a deadly serious comment on the expendability of all the lives brutally ended. We wait for it, and it comes: fully deserving of the clichéd term coup de theatre, the group tap out the rhythm of the Bolero, getting faster and faster as they stamp it out, literally dancing on their graves.

Maqoma writes about the piece as a “catharsis” of “universal grief,” and that “it champions our ability to bend together to share the burden of grief”. In this, I find him hugely generous. The piece is no less angry for being generous, no less outraged for being inclusive, no less sorrowful for being open-armed. In the strength of its own paradox, I find that this piece works on me, continuing to “permeate the living who are plagued by deaths that are not their own.”

Review of Oona Doherty: ‘Hard to be Soft’, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Dance Umbrella, 11 October 2019

First published in The Theatre Times, 3 November 2019

My senses are all awakened. It begins in the darkness. A curl of smoke rises from a dimly lit bowl at the front of the stage. The smell of incense hits my nose. Three dark, hooded figures stand around the urn, hands clasped in front of them. Thin, sharp shafts of light gradually appear, a light sense of menace. The vastness of tall, arhythmical bars crossing the front of the stage makes me wonder what lies behind. Three figures warming themselves in the dark.

Then suddenly, my ears come to life. A figure dressed in white thumps loudly to the floor center stage. I hear an unrelenting, persistent song of three female voices intertwined. The rhythms of the Belfast accent awaken the figure on the floor. It’s Oona Doherty, in ‘Lazarus and the Bird of Paradise’, the first of the four parts that make up her work Hard to be Soft, at London’s Dance Umbrella Festival.

Doherty moves through an astonishing set of physicalities, her face and body taking on the characters of the speakers that are heard, muffled, alongside the music, in a ‘soundscape’ by David Holmes. First, a young man, fists thrust into the front of her tracksuit bottoms. Cocksure. An older one, shouting with a twisted leer on her face. She cuts between dizzyingly fluid movements of falling backward, melting, and losing definition and structure before bouncing directly into the next character.

I have the sense of a dream – or possibly nightmare – where the dreamer spools through memories, stories of laughter and violence. I can’t make out much of the words these voices are saying; for my English ears, the Belfast accent is thick, and heavy with political resonance. I wonder whether Doherty has deliberately chosen for me to feel not quite in the know. A Christ-like image recurs, accompanied by a sobbing woman’s voice; Doherty on tiptoes with arms outstretched.

In the dark, again we hear a suddenly clear voiceover: a woman describing how women like to get dressed up and look ‘fabulous’ to cope with the everyday shit of life, and ‘scumbag’ men. Get made up, look amazing, and it’s empowering for women, she says. We hear the swishing sound of sweatpants material as ten young women march on the stage, for ‘The Sugar Army’.

Dressed in sporty, bright clothes, and heavily made-up, they perform an unapologetic routine ironically resonant of dance videos, looking sometimes fierce, sometimes fiercely, disingenuously happy. The odd ballet-inspired moment enhances my feeling that I am witnessing layers of simulation. Are the women empowered, or controlled by the regimental behavior of their compatriots? Occasionally, an individual will break out of the tight group routine to wander, or wonder, before being angrily sanctioned or brought into line by her companions. At the end, they break out into laughing, giggling, and showing an almost childish response, as they walk off stage and leave us wondering whether the whole thing was a joke at our expense.

The third piece, ‘Meat Kaleidoscope’, is a duet between two large, topless men. It is, for me, the least convincing part of the piece, mostly because I am consistently distracted by a projection of close-up shots from the duet we are seeing, employing kaleidoscopic effects to abstract it. The two shuffle slowly, heavily, towards each other from the sides of the stage, accompanied by a backdrop of two men’s voices arguing – perhaps a father and son? Again, I can only make out a limited amount of the content of the language, although I strain to understand. On meeting each other, they hug, unexpectedly and uncomfortably; sure enough, the hug becomes a wrestling grip but a strangely tender one. The piece leaves me needing more: there is something being communicated about two men who can only interact with the language of violence, but I’m not sure what else there is to it.

At the end of the evening, we return to Oona Doherty alone on stage with the solo ‘Helium’. My fellow audience members tangibly recoil as bright lights hit our dark-adjusted eyes. Reprising ideas from ‘Lazarus and the Bird of Paradise’, Doherty portrays a character who has certainty about their movement, a swagger, a march to the side of the space, confident about what is next – only to forget, wonder, or lose track of their line. Here, the cage-like structure of the set (by Ciaran Bagnall) contains the character, leaving me wondering what is on the outside.

Doherty brings back some of the characters from ‘Lazarus’, often employing quite gestural, mime-like movements. She evokes an infant being encouraged to walk, a child told off for something they didn’t do, a woman who’s putting up with life and smoking a cigarette, as well as men full of borrowed confidence. The work ends with a long poem played on voiceover – I wonder if it’s Doherty herself speaking – with what could be a commentary on the work itself. The voice speaks of a ‘black box’ full of emotion, of ‘man, woman, beast, song’.

The work receives rapturous applause, with the performers apparently unexpectedly delighted with the response. I find myself edgy about it. I have been irritated by the feeling that ideas are presented but not developed, especially in the two pieces that are sandwiched by Doherty’s extraordinary solos. Some creative choices, such as the gigantic, overpowering set, indicate a scale of ideas from this choreographer perhaps too big to have been quite formed into a cohesive voice. But there is a voice, coming through loud and clear. I would happily watch Doherty’s own performance for longer, with her blend of silky fluidity that threatens at any turn to jolt into a punched-out, unapologetic statement. Is this the softness and hardness of the title?