Dancers are always living with ghosts. In any repertory-based classical or contemporary company, the dancers are in the footsteps of previous interpreters and the comparison can be both haunting, and liberating. For a company making its debut London performance, and a choreographer with a vibrant perspective, musing on lineage might seem irrelevant. But it’s this relationship between past and present that makes any piece of art, especially dance, good.
Choreographer Liam Francis, formerly a dancer with Rambert, produced an evening at The Place that demonstrated what he has absorbed from inhabiting a life within the British dancescape. What thrilled was how reverence was transformed into fuel for new pulse. In the audience, you got the sense you were watching an event; something coming to the fore.
In two parts, the evening’s title Alchemy speaks to the idea of creating great riches from something else. It also nods to the palpable chemistry between Francis (who danced in both works presented) and his three fellow dancers Eloy Cojal Mestre, Jacob Wye and Stephen Quildan, who appear in A Body of Rumours, the latter half of what was an autobiographical evening. Set to live electronic music by Chloe Mason, a graduate of Guildhall School of Music, A Body of Rumours’ broad subject is identity. Francis begins on stage in sneakers sketching movement out in big circular foot plans, like he was figuring out how his body relates to the ground. The sounds of his dance are recorded and then played back over the course of the piece, manipulated live by Mason as the work unfolds so there is a sense of something breathing in front of us.
It also means no two performances are the same. Francis is joined sequentially by the three other dancers and movement phrases in different rhythms are swapped back and forth. Revealing an unusual understanding of how solos and group work inter-relate, Francis’ patterns orbit in and out of each other, to be punctuated by a single dancer’s own personal inflection. Francis and his dancers are beautiful: the contrast between their lithe bodies and the rhythmical footwork helps promote what we’re told in the programme note that this is a piece celebrating brotherhood.
Yet in this collective male energy, tension exists amongst the exhilarating flow, and a sense of these dancers inner world comes out. A duet for two dancers, where gestures bounce from inquisitive to defensive could be read a variety of ways: we can’t know if they’re platonic or erotic. These questions of interpretation are what make abstract dance scintillating.
Where A Body of Rumours displays a choreographic voice, the evening’s first work, the solo Lyre Liar, gives us context to what trained that voice. Combining choreography from Kate Prince, Merce Cunningham and Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui with his own, Francis uses spoken word to reveal the alchemy it takes to transform into a dancer. With a playful wit, the piece uses a study of the Australian Lyrebird to reveal how dances are passed on from one interpreter to the next.
Though its main currency isn’t choreographic invention (since it relies on the presentation of other choreographer’s dances), the work’s success is its unique weaving of personal history with performance, stretching the boundaries of what traditionalists might call theatre dance. Francis reveals his stringent intellect in his selection of dances rich with meaning: Cunningham’s 1968 Rainforest, demonstrates Francis’ skill, and excerpts of Cherkaoui’s 2009 Faun, reveal not only fluidity of movement, but an understanding of the subtext always present in dance.
Lyre Liar integrates its audience into the work in clever ways, which reveals Francis as a dancer’s choreographer in how he can succinctly reveal the experience of being a dance artist in the 21st century. Two heart-piercing moments exist in Lyre Liar. The first encapsulates everything there is to experience about learning your craft as a dancer: Francis takes us up to the moment he got to inhabit his idol Dane Hurst’s role, and his inner voice asks if he thinks the audience believes his performance? The skepticism of Francis’s reply “yeah?! I think so?” is devastatingly honest.
The neatness with which Francis explains a culture dancers know intimately to unfamiliar theatre goers makes me eager to see more. His movement style has an infectious musicality and melds contemporary, ballet, hip hop and pedestrian-style to reveal a broad palette at his command. But it’s Francis’ mind that I’m most interested in: he’s a choreographer treating dance both instinctively and intellectually. This first viewing shows Francis deeply in step with what it is to be an artist of colour today, and what it is to be an artist dealing with a treasure trove of pieces behind them. How do we curate those going forward and how do our voices sit amongst those sacred monsters? Watching Alchemy, we understand Francis is keen to uncover where he fits.
