Phoenix Dance Theatre
Performance Reviews || Tuesday, 23 May, 2006
Phoenix offered up a shiny red apple for its 25 year celebrations, but I found myself a more sceptical consumer than Snow White.
Arthur Pita’s ‘Snow White in Black’ looks fantastic, thanks to designer Jim Bausor, the imposing set is all angles, perfectly complimenting the faun-like stumbling of Tiia Ourilia as Snow White on stilts. Well cast, Ourilia has the movement quality of Jack Skellington in Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas’, and with her gentle, tentacle limbs, all that character’s pathos.
Yann Seabra literally had all the best lines as he lip-synched his way through a pantomime Wicked Queen (a remixed Faye Dunnaway, remixing Joan Crawford in ‘Mommy Dearest’). These sections (though a little overlong) where the only bits with any real bite, the continued film references in Snow White’s ‘Midwich Coocoo’ child ‘dwarves’ were fun, but the whole felt a little futile.
Choreographically, Pita never manages to deal with the interesting problems he sets himself (dancing on stilts/hands kept in pockets) and the imaginative richness of the mis-en-scene is bleached by the blandness of his choreography. The piece could have easily been made by ‘New Adventures’, Pita will do very well commercially.
Kimball Wong danced a solo ‘Laal’ (Red) which looked like it could have been choreographed by dance’s own Wicked Queen; Martha Graham. However, Ms Graham would be contracting in her grave at the knowledge that someone was passing off a Graham technique floor exercise as a piece of art. I am mystified as to why Darshan Sing Bhuller, the pieces choreographer and man who has pulled the company up into the stable position it enjoys today (note, I resisted the temptation of any ‘rising from the ashes’ metaphors) should hand over his mantle with such a weak piece.
I was already wary of any piece purporting to be about ‘connotations of the colour red’, but it was thankfully merely an excuse to display the athletic virtuosity of Wong. He performed tricks to the point of exhaustion in a gym floor routine restricted by a box of light. Instead of giving this work urgency the lighting had a tendency to make his movements appear over careful, it ended with the image of a man fighting against the dying light. What is Bhuller trying to say?
The programme was broken up by a film charting Phoenix’s history pictorially, it would have been better situated outside the auditorium, or even as an exhibition of still photographs as the slow camera zooms on each image (think news footage of murder victims panning into the dead eyes of photographs) were extremely exacerbating.
‘Pave Up Paradise’ was ok. A well-meaning, forgettable and timid foray into the gender politics of ‘The Fall’ (not the experimental music collective). The two dancers Tanya Richam-odoi and Kevin Turner handled it well and the gamble on the recently formed choreographic duo Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer (‘Lost Dog’) largely paid off.
‘Nopalitos’ (Mexican cactus pads) was the final piece on show, and created by Phoenix’s new Artistic Director Javier de Frutos. Taking its inspiration from the Mexican Day of the Dead Festival, it featured utterly fantastic ranchero music sung bloodily by Lila Downs which did much to increase my enjoyment of the piece.
The movement material frequently seemed like padding for a much slighter idea, and had little to do with the aggressive world of boxing. Unsurprisingly there was an entertainingly sexual ambiguous trio between 2 male and 1 female dancer, but despite the camp humour and the strength of the performers, it still had very much the appearance of the hetero display of beautiful bodies.
The dancers wore the masks donned by Mexican ‘lucha libre’ wrestlers throughout, bemusedly mistaken by audience members for the chosen attire of the Power Rangers. I was interested as to why the piece didn’t examine the interplay of a luchadore’s mask and their real identity; which is a key feature of Mexican wrestling.
Interestingly, the masks prevented the dancers from facially expressing the emotive subject matter highlighted in the music, but perhaps this was not the occasion to challenge the audience with postmodern detachment. The masks couldn’t hide the mild unease the dancers seemed to have with the material.
Despite the air of celebration there was a more pervasive feeling of stasis in the work shown tonight, de Frutos should hopefully provide the kick that ensures that the company does not now rest on its laurels, otherwise Phoenix could end up with a very sore arse.
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