REVIEW: NATIONAL YOUTH DANCE COMPANY (IN BETWEEN) & RIOT OFFSPRING -SADLER'S WELLS
Two performances which harnessed young energy and creativity, from the calm and reflective (in-between ) to the explosive RIOT Offspring , made for a Saturday night full of vitality and was a tribute to the many people involved.
The premiere of National Youth Dance Company’s ( in between ) by their first Guest Artistic Director Jasmin Vardimon is an impressive display of team work as well as individual skill. Thirty teenagers from a variety of dance and cultural backgrounds find common ground in simple strategies like shared breathing and the rhythms breath can generate. The result is a noisy but fluid and deeply connected performance. Vardimon works with the theme of a forest, the felling and re-generation of trees – a fitting idea for environmentally switched-on young people.
Against a backdrop of a towering forest, the dancers balance on tree stumps, swaying and gesturing with their arms. Two angry men cut them down, until they are all felled – even the woman with Rapunzel-like hair who repeatedly returns to her stump in defiance. Bauschian repetition and the utilisation of sequences performed in a chorus formation, create a gratifying tension and powerful suspense. Although a state of meditative calm is brought about by the sound of the dancers breathing and wafting their arms, like the wind sighing through trees, the quality changes to one that is more thrusting and percussive as the ‘spirits’ of the trees re-group and reclaim their roots.
RIOT Offspring which is the community project offering to celebrate the centenary of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, pays further testament to the virtues of team work, with 100 dancers, from between the spectrum of amateur and emerging artist, five choreographers [Sébastian Ramirez, Mafalda Deville, Pascal Merighi (guest artist, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch), Ivan Blackstock and Simeon Qsyea (BirdGang)] and theSouthbank Sinfonia. What the creative team do so effectively here is to show the interaction between different generations, the mature Company of Elders, children from the local community, teenage mums and babies and emerging artists as they explore their reactions to London’s 2011 summer riots.
Children buried under shredded paper unfurl their bodies and emerge slowly as tiny tots tip-toe over the debris. The elders calmly arrive to meet them with gentle and embracing movements, a presence of stability and wisdom. Then to the first ominous random beats and repeated discords of Stravinsky’s famous music score, the young people swirl on stage in their numbers, all anger and angularity. Each have their own style of moving, some are hip hop experts, others athletic or balletic, but each performs to his or her eclectic strengths. While they break out in attitude-fueled solos, some of the most effective choreography is in the unison. The young dancers form long lines and undulate through their bodies, sending rippling Mexican waves through the crowds, either standing or lying on the floor or travelling across it. It’s a strong spectacle, that of all 100 performers on stage together, staggered spatially on different levels.
Amidst the rampage and aggressive confrontations between the young people there are touching moments such as when the elders, quietly assertive, softly pursue the stampeding teenagers. Or when a young mother patiently helps her toddler walk over the backs of the crouching youth, as they form boundary lines across the stage. A reminder that innocence exists in the most unlikely situations.
The climactic ending is memorable: the frenzied teenagers run in a huge circle around the victims, then suddenly cluster around them in a mob. After repeating this sequence several times they close in and, joined by the the whole cast, form a human pyre which agnites as leaping flames are projected onto it.
Josephine Leask is a lecturer in Cultural Studies on the BA (Hons) degree course at the London Studio Centre and London correspondent for The Dance Insider.
Photos: Bettina Strenske
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