Director: Dane Hurst
40 Years of Phoenix is an exhilarating evening of contemporary dance celebrating the Phoenix Dance Theatre’s milestone birthday. Artistic director Dane Hurst’s programme consists of five works which showcase highlights from the company’s 40-year history.
In the opening work, Henri Oguike’s Signal, dancers move to the steady, thrilling beat of Japanese Taiko drumming, their red and black costumes complementing the darkly lit red set. Their movements and poses are strikingly angular and spiky. A man and a woman mirror each other, exploring isolated shoulder rotations, while holding strong squats and wide-kneed stances. The ensemble run in and, as the piece develops, the overall look is modernist, suggesting something of Cyril Power’s linocuts of the 1930s with their stylised representation of fast movement in a modern world.
Harmonica Breakdown is a mesmerizing three and a half minute work by Jane Dudley who was born in New York in 1912. She uses the solo dance to represent the struggles of African-American people in the 1920s and 30s. Yuma Sylla beautifully recreates the role. Beginning with a broken-winged position, her movements alternate between seemingly abject, fearful crouches and strongly defiant, even joyful, leaps to the syncopated rhythms of evocative blues and jazz music. It’s a lovely piece, all the more compelling for being so brief.
In contrast Family, choreographed by Danial Shapiro and Joannie Smith, is delightfully playful as well as thought-provoking. ‘There is beauty to be found in the family’s imperfections,’ writes Dane Hurst. The focus is a single armchair around which the seven barefoot dancers leap and somersault to the sounds of a jangly pub piano. They separate and regroup, tensions between adults and children evident as they constantly compete to take the main seat, like the Simpsons hurtling onto their family sofa. For a while the father sits alone, slumped asleep, or holding inverted poses and balances to evocative moody music. His children reappear, rolling across him to the comic blaring of a horn. The choreography is circus-like, acrobatic.
Pave Up Paradise, choreographed by Ben Duke and Raquel Meseguer, is a theatrical piece updating the age-old story of Adam and Eve. A guitarist plays on stage in a pool of light and there is spoken text for the dancers. ‘And the Lord God said – ‘ each repeats, guility, ‘ – Do not masturbate too much’. It’s unscriptural, but funny. ‘It’s my fault,’ the man insists, ‘I got distracted’. The modern equivalent of eating the apple is a heavy night partying. The man holds the woman lovingly as she drunkenly throws up – he himself has vomited earlier. And then it is the woman who effortlessly picks up the man, slinging him again and again across her back. A sly apple rolls on the floor. They move off crab-like and soundlessly into their exile.
The final work, Heart of Chaos by Darshan Singh Bhuller, is a compelling piece about the Galveston Giant – the African-America heavy weight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, set to the evocative music of Wynton Marsalis, Thomas Newman and Louis Armstrong. The scenes in the boxing ring are forceful – we hear the thuds of the punches – and yet they remind us of how dance-like boxing is. Flapper girls suggest Jackson’s taboo-breaking involvement with white women – his three marriages were all to white girls and there are daring scenes of sexual encounters here. Hurst writes that this piece is ‘a story for the present day … we are still dealing with the issue of racism and inequality in sport and in wider society’.
An absorbing, involving, thought-provoking evening.
Reviewed on 30 March 2022