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One Up One Down

 
Leon Conrad Review by Leon Conrad 3 Published: 21 Aug 2009 Show Dates: 31 Dec 1969-31 Dec 1969

In this highly energetic performance, dancer-actor John Macaulay welcomes the audience and ushers them in, attempting to build up a friendly rapport. It feels rather like stepping into a US shopping mall, where politeness and over-white-bright smiles glisten on the outside, and boredom and emptiness gape dark on the inside. This, it turns out, is exactly what the intention is.In this performance, dance, song and performance poetry (rather good performance poetry, as it happens) are used to make a hard-hitting social comment on materialistic values in contemporary society – from credit crunch to catwalk; sales to self-worth. The conceit of having three mirrors in the background designed to reflect the audience and their values on stage is intriguing, but when the three female dancers appear, and are themselves reflected in the mirrors, the metaphor collapses. The mirrors are later covered up with white cloth.There is a certain lack of consistency in the production. While the costumes are worthy of special mention – fashionable outfits in wonderfully coordinated pink and black, the dancers’ ensemble work is poor. Their singing works better in stylised numbers than in freeform scat passages. The dance number which has them wearing pink rubber gloves with one dancer parading the carcass of a chicken which has to be unwrapped from layers of cling film packaging, into which it is lovingly restored at the end of the number, falls short of being moving, shocking or funny. It has nothing of the raw quality of extreme Butoh, nor the gravity-defying quality of classical dance. The quality of the dance is eerie at best, but mostly bland – maybe the chicken had cold feet. It was hard to tell what the concept behind this piece was. However, other numbers, particularly where the dancers use their eyelids and evoke belly dancing with the music, but play against that with their bodies, are very effective.The best part of this performance is the way the poetry is performed. John Macaulay brings Tawona Sitholé’s words to life, Sitholé bringing every trick out of the bag, allterating to the extreme, drawing on exaggeration, irony and hyperbole as if they are second nature to him. It is an impressive marriage of talents which results in a commanding performance.

Amir Nisi

Leon Conrad

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Performances

The Blurb:

Three women fired up by the goal of flawless beauty or preoccupied by job promotion, worship at the altar of consumerism as it falls to its knees in the current economic climate. In One Up, One Down, personal and global perspectives collide as the characters, caught up in their quest for perfection, sway dangerously between reluctant adoration or bitter condemnation of one another. Caught up in the clutches of consumerism and base values, three women struggle to create a sense of their own worth and identity.

Choreographed by Gilmore Productions’ Artistic Director, Natasha Gilmore, One Up, One Down builds on her artistic relationship with Scottish composer, Quee MacArthur of the maverick Scottish band Shooglenifty, and introduces the element of spoken word with Zimbabwean performance poet, Tawona Sitholé. Working with three dance artists - Jade Adamson, Charlotte Jarvis and Tara Hodgson - this funny and topical work blends complex choreography, comedy, music and poetry to deliver a piercing assessment of where ambition, desire and greed has led us.

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