DREAMTIME, LINK, SCRAMBLE, ODDBALL VARIATIONS
FOUR women choreographers have contributed ballets to the second season of Pact Dance Company this year, but only Elisa Monte’s Dreamtime foregrounds a woman as her subject matter. Candice Johnstone’s Link is loosely anthropological, and Mandy Rabin’s Scramble and Susan Abrahams’ Oddball Variations not only have titles of similar bent but can be described as a species of social dancing set to compendium music.
Both Rabin and Abrahams, among many other local choreographers, show an inexplicable persistance in stringing together a few musical numbers for which they cannot find enough choreograph invention to sustain interest. There is a similarity, too, in their choice of costumes. The youthful dancers are clad in egalitarian and interchangeable garb: tank tops, vests, cycling shorts, trainers, berets and caps.
Rabin acknowledges in the programme note that Scramble took eight days to compose. This is one day more than needed to perform a miracle, but the miracle does not happen. At least Oddball Variations has some charm and is occasionally decorative.
Johnstone has reworked Link, which was first seen at Dance Umbrella last year. If perhaps some of the pure logic of the work, the suggestion in the choreographic patterning of evolutionary process, has been lost, Johnstone’s treatment of our forebears in the ape-like contractions and movements remains amusing and the links — intended or not — to Stanley Kubrick’s Dawn of Man sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gvorgy Liqeti’s music compel attention.
Like Johnstone, Monte has chosen music (by David Van Tieghem) which has entity and is meaningfully part of the thematic and choreographic structure of her ballet. Refracted beams of light and the evocation of a primordial world suggest the habitation of the unconscious which belongs to the female protagonist (Althea Knight). The work ends with Knight at the head of a composed line of dancers who have peopled her imagination and who, together with her, have danced the ballet with atavistic intensity.
Stanley Peskin