Choreographer: J Neve Harrington
J Neve Harrington’s company is already in performance mode as the audience enters the Lilian Baylis studio. Each dancer has a long band of fabric in bright lime green, and each takes their turn in taking the lead on what to do with it. Whether folded into triangles, then thrown to unfurl in the air, or laid out on the floor in various shapes, the neon colouring of the fabrics emphasises the actions of the dancers; never quite in unison but always together.
Harrington’s company of six experienced dancers is supplemented by an eight-strong youth community cast. After all the performers participate in a freeform expression of dancing, singing a flower-themed song, the young dancers leave, allowing the main company to move to the principal component of the evening, good luck dinosaur.
Kneeling on all fours and initially motionless, the six dancers begin to move glacially slowly. Against a moodily atmospheric sound design by Dan Nicholls and under a projected sphere of abstract shapes suggesting rock strata, the performers occasionally complement their movements with single words, seemingly unrelated but gradually revealing a connection to time spans, tenses, and evolution. As if they are tectonic plates, when their slow movements occasionally cause two dancers to collide, they begin to rise up, human mountain ranges forming and deforming.
There is a meditative air to the pacing of the piece, which ends as the brown-hued lighting begins to burst into green and the planetary evolution the company represents moves into a new ecological era – the time of man, just a few ticks of the clock compared to the life of Earth.
After an extended break in which the sound and lighting displays continue, the company returns, their pastel outfits replaced by bright metallics and lamé. In this closing piece, paced by one dancer clapping in time, there is an organisation to the company’s skipping choreography that has echoes of country dances; two trios will dance together before breaking apart, switching and curving until recombining into new trios.
As this final work continues, the pattern changes, refocusing the dancers into a circle in the centre of the space. Still, there is a strong sense of organisation within the piece, but the pastoral nature of the dance becomes more mechanical. This time of man hits the industrial era, perhaps. The whole evening can be seen as a history of the planet in microcosm: the green fabric opening is a coalescence of the first microscopic life, perhaps, and the junior company’s dance is a representation of Earth’s bloom into varieties of flora.
Whatever the meaning – and as with so much contemporary dance, the meaning is as much the responsibility of the audience as it is the dancer – Some Times offers us an intriguing connection to the planet and our small place along its timeline. With it, a small reminder that our reckless abandon may not always be in lamé – but we too are only showing up at the end.
Continues until 13 October 2023