Whim W'him's Choreographic Shindig

Whim W’him’s annual Choreographic Shindig provides a platform for early-career choreographers who are selected by the company dancers, this year from a pool of 200 applicants. Some years the result is a pot pourri of pieces, prismatically illuminating something of the current moment in contemporary dance. Last night, the three new dance works offered the appearance of thematic curation progressing from Stegall’s evocation of ritual and ceremony in the face of forces beyond anyone’s control, through Farrish’s exploration of the ‘undoing’ of society, and culminating in Rigney’s musically lush and dramatically expressive meditation on, in her terms “existential dread”.  And how could it not be thus? Violence and precarity are not new but they loom forcefully into consciousness. I found myself thinking often of the short story “Le Songe” by Vercors, written in 1943 in response to the holocaust and collective trauma of World War II.  The writer makes tangible the immense and ceaseless suffering of the masses, normally masked, or simply ignored. 

Stegall’s Good Measure offered taut rhythmic gestures, skilful partnering, and some curious activity with small white pebbles and a stone basin of water. Spidery fingers, slow chicken-headed propelled struts (redolent of the signature move in Christopher Bruce’s 1991 hit Rooster) and origami arm-folding linger in my memory as does the diamond-precision of Aliya Janov’s performance. I love watching movement that is highly active in Space and Time, and Janov appeared to assert those qualities to great effect here. However, the blind-eyed baby-doll blinks will unnerve and amuse me forever. A man and woman enter early in the dance, while a group of dancers downstage left are seated on a bench executing unison gestures and postural shifts. The woman is piggybacking the man, her hands—palms outwards—placed like giant eyes on his head, blinking and staring as they approach the stone basin of water like a singular troodon or a jabiru. Soon, they cease to be one creature and join the shifting allegiances with the 5 other dancers and I find that I am intrigued and impressed through to the final moment when a woman plunges her head into the water.  I don’t know why or how the pebbles, the water, the wooden bench are significant but that seems just fine, not an impediment to appreciation. 

ALMOST lingers least in my recollections. I remember being impressed by the skill of the dancers—they move like a company but without renouncing their individuality—and reflecting a lot on how phrasing and form have shifted so radically since I first studied choreography. I could be wrong, but my impression is that phrases of movement rarely unspool and resolve now. Things explode only to retrograde, they stutter and restart in a new direction, they neither build nor fall apart. It’s often sinuous and powerful, but also distended and fraught. The dancers acquit themselves with grace—there’s nothing to doubt in terms of their technique and execution--but it must be hard when momentum is somehow your opposition rather than your partner. Of course, it all makes perfect sense. What place can there be for the kind of late twentieth century movement logic I grew up with, now that nothing makes sense? 

 

For the final performance of the evening--“We must believe it’s true.”—the dancers rushed onto the stage from two doors at the rear like a crowd of bright young things storming into a party. The mash-up of symphonies collaged by Luciano Berio in his piece “Sinfonia” was probably enough to put me in mind of late-era Ballets Russes and Powell and Pressburger’s homage in The Red Shoes. Whim W’him’s dancers play deftly with all the sinister clownish humor and melodramatic expressionism that Rigney alludes to. They caper, twirl, pose, and preen. It’s exhilarating to watch right up until the moment the dancers flee in quick succession through a door at the back and the world goes black.