Creator: Lewys Holt
Camden Fringe is often home to offbeat shows, but perhaps dancer Lewys Holt’s Phrases is the strangest show this summer. An intentionally low-tech performance tackles social anxiety through the media of dance and PowerPoint.
Most of the first PowerPoint presentation is blank as Holt, dressed in t-shirt and jeans, begins to dance in front of the screen. His flowing, if jagged, movements often get stuck as if they are a visual stutter. It takes effort to restart the sequence of moves, to come unstuck. The first of two phrases eventually appears on the presentation: ‘Did I leave the oven on?’ We realise now that Holt’s stop/start dance could portray a person with acute anxiety or with OCD where thoughts can threaten to overwhelm the self.
The best part of the 45-minute performance is a tragi-comic story of when Holt’s character went to hospital to have surgery. After he was fully recovered, the doctor jokingly told him that “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” But Holt’s character is confused by this maxim; will the doctor hassle him if doesn’t eat an apple – and only an apple – a day? Will the doctor turn up on the doorstep if he doesn’t comply?
It could be a funny scenario but the earnest way in which Holt relates the story through words and dance provides an almost heart-breaking loneliness to the situation. However, there are points where Holt also ensures there is a distance between him and the audience as in the section where he shouts loudly over Bach who plays loudly on the speakers. Holt will only let you in so far.
Much of the movement seems to be improvised rather than precise choreography or it looks this way on purpose. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this approach but it means that the dance remains separate from the presentations or the audio. Perhaps in some performances, there is a unique, accidental and transient synchronicity between the movement and the words or pictures on screen but there wasn’t this afternoon.
Phrases doesn’t outstay its welcome but at times it does lack substance and the transitions between the sections could be better managed. At the moment, Holt has to huddle in front of his laptop to search for the right files to bring up. Could not the audio and presentation be collected in a single file and run interrupted?
But as the title of one of his files is called All These Bloody Interruptions it seems certain that this unevenness is deliberate. Holt definitely knows what he’s doing, even if sometimes his audience doesn’t.
Reviewed on 13 August 2023
Camden Fringe runs until 27 August 2023
