Fruitful Ties performed by former Royal Ballet member, Mathew Hawkins and choreographer and teacher Steinvor Palsson, is strangely engrossing. An elegant, disjointed and stylized piece that’s initially so enigmatic it’s incompressible. Danced to a Concerto Grosso by Handel, the soundtrack is also intercut with odd excerpts from apparently random snatched voice samples. The effect is intriguing, if a little jarring, and introduces the concept of escalating memory and connection that is the key to this piece.
The accumulation of time and familiarity is evoked as the movements between these two dancers become increasingly agile, and they’re soon literally entwined, in a cat’s cradle fashion, within the reins that bind and guide them. Their confines are wittily constructed from ties, a pun on the connection between them and echoed in the dancer’s costumes, also beautifully composed of ties, designed by Mister Pearl, emulating 17th century costumes.
The second offering from Lucy Suggate is a joy to watch and her piece, a witty take on a Danse Macabre, is enthralling from the onset. In the dark, a billowing black smog appears: a tutu, from behind which appear pale legs, then a yellowing, grinning skull. Her graceful, lithe movements seem to defy gravity. An ironic and candid monologue follows on the difficult question of how she will dance when she’s dead. Google and Disney can solve the question though, so it’s okay. How wonderfully might she dance if she had no weight, no muscle, and no limits? She just has to tackle the problem of decomposition.
In a final section Suggate playfully explores her skeleton, in blissful awe as though moving for the first time, from single finger stretches to full articulation of every joint and socket. It’s delightful and makes you acutely aware of that extraordinary tool we have available to us, our skeleton.
