Dance
Rosemary Butcher Company (Nottingham) Yolande Snaith (The Place Theatre)
Site and sound
Sophie Constanti
Structure, time, colour, expression, silence. These words punctuate Simon Fisher Turner's sound-score for the first section of Body as Site: Image as Event Rosemary Butcher's new four-part dance installation — and urge you to see move- ment and the body anew. In Butcher's work, such words are not lightly chosen, empty directives: they are essential truths, translated to, and by, the body. Performers like Michael Popper and Gill Clarke can imbue the slow elevation of an arm, or a barely discernible stretch of the torso with a simple, prehistoric beauty. At Notting- ham's Angel Row Gallery, the six members of Butcher's company led the audience on a one and a half hour journey, allowing for levels of contemplation rarely experienced in the empty entertainment of most dance. In Butcher's choreography, movement develops and mutates unhurriedly but is not without a driving, internal energy.
In Body as Site, Butcher's collaboration with visual artists Ron Haselden, Anya Gallaccio and Paul Elliman, and architect John Lyall, has produced four distinct spaces through which the dance progresses. The programme sheet doesn't tell you which artist is responsible for which space, but I would guess that Elliman's (the first site) featured the life-size photographic reproductions of Popper and Fin Walker; that Gallaccio's (the last) was the area car- peted with ankle-deep, white, synthetic yarn; and that Haselden (for the second `Listen, you're worrying unnecessarily. That isn't an albatross.' location) had set up the large, overhead mirror in a corner, reflecting a pool of con- stantly modulated yellow light within which Clarke, her movement superbly taut and woozy by turns, performs a solo to the incessant buzzing of a wasp. Lyall's contri- bution, a grouping of four, movable, ply- wood boards — huge, oblong, curving structures, each partially stabilised with a criss-cross of black rope — provided the most immediately transformative environ- ment.
After 15 years and some 35 productions, Butcher still, remarkably, manages to wipe the slate clean with every new work she produces. She is one of the few real experi- mentalists in British dance today: Body as Site is further proof that habit, laziness and accumulated artifice have all failed to infil- trate her clarity of vision.
Yolande Snaith is a dance artist who is capable of lending magic to dance. And, since the days of her early solo pieces and duets, the imaginary worlds created by this 33-year-old, independent choreographer have become increasingly sophisticated and intriguing. Like Butcher, Snaith trained at Dartington College in Devon. While Butcher's style is minimalist, pared down, postmodern, Snaith is more overtly theatri- cal, favouring elaborate sets and novel props. And while Butcher's world is con- ceptual, systematic and reined-in, Snaith's is topsy-turvy, without boundaries and unpredictable.
In Diction, her latest work, (which, like Butcher's Body as Site, is funded by a Bar- clays New Stages Award), Snaith turns her focus to language, her association of ideas providing a rich flow of mutually repercus- sive sound and movement. Few of the sen- tences or words issued by the two speaking players (Andrzej Borkowski and Catherine Howarth) are logical or comprehensible.
Slumbering in their towering umpires' chairs as the work commences, Borkowski and Howarth come to life like a pair of mechanical toys. But before long they have assumed control in the manner of a couple of tyrants, delivering a torrent of Slavic- sounding instructions to the six dancers who occupy Robert Innes-Hopkins' che- quer-board floor-space. In response, Snaith and her fellow pawns in the game — Jordi Cortes Molina, Lauren Potter, Julia Clarke, Jamie Watton and Trevor Waldron — follow every rasp and hiss of the invent- ed language, skipping and leaping across the black squares, before tumbling into the heaps of roughly shredded paper used to to form the corresponding white squares.
At a stroke, the delineated and orderly visual world is temporarily destroyed and the dancers enter into a series of frantic games and strange rituals. Locked in an alien wonderland which is brutal one moment, dreamy the next, the inhabitants are forced to obey the wittering, shouting, muttering, whistle-blowing and rattle-wind- ing of the two umpires. But in the ensuing battle for power between the two rulers, Snaith and her team stage a timely coup, with Potter and Clarke clambering up the chairs to assume leadership and introduce a new language of gesture.
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