Resolution!, The Place, London
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Your support makes all the difference.Resolution! is an an annual festival of new choreography. Over seven weeks, the Place presents 102 companies, most at the very start of their careers.
On the first night, the highlight was That Was the Time I Stopped, a sharp, sarky duet by Amy Bell and Valentina Golfieri. Dressed in orange cardigans and sequined knickers, the two women mix power games and deadpan comedy. The performances are beautifully focused: Bell and Golfieri are dignified throughout, even when hitching up their knickers. During one of the blackouts, we hear scuffling and an outraged squeal; when the lights come back on, they're walking primly forward. There are inventive images: a frog-hopping step, the practised way the two women work around or manhandle each other. And it's very funny.
Guerilla Dance Project's Time Lapse is about dance in public spaces. Laura Kriefman's 10 dancers stroll like pedestrians, then bend and fold into attitudes. Sitting on benches, they become the passengers of a busy Tube train, straphanging or perching on each other's laps.
Sometimes, the same steps appear on stage and on screen. Emma Sampson's video shows Guerrilla Dance Project dancing in public, sitting and scrambling around real park benches, as the live and recorded dances move in and out of sync. Kriefman is most inventive in her dances for confined spaces, scrums and crowds. Longer, more open sequences lose focus.
Augusto Corrieri's Dance Company looks at what makes a performance. These performers are a company for one night only. At each performance, this show has a new cast, who have learned their routines at home from YouTube instruction videos. They come on in street clothes, take off shoes, run carefully through Corrieri's patterns.
The routines themselves are warm-ups and theatre games, building up repeated patterns of simple movements. The dancers aren't a trained company; even in unison, they all move individually, with normal human casualness. The theatre goes tense when one woman, obviously pregnant, has to follow her colleagues in a fall. Experiments in "pedestrian" choreography have been around since at least the 1960s; over 40 minutes, Corrieri doesn't find anything new in it. His cast are engaging, but his experiment feels aimless.
To 20 February (020 7121 1100)
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