“Five Variations of Equally Exceptional Modern Dance”
Yorke Dance Project’s Modern Milestones is a collection of five pieces of contemporary dance. It places older works by pioneering choreographers in conversations with two new works having their London premieres. In order, they are: Martha Graham’s Deep Song; Liam Francis’ CAST [X]; Robert Cohan’s Lacrymosa; Bella Lewitzky’s Kinaesonata; and Christoper Bruce’s Troubadour.
These works are all modern – in the sense that they ask what dance can be; all expertly danced; and all very beautiful.
It is one-hundred years since Martha Graham founded her company. First shown in 1937, Deep Song still feels like an astoundingly daring piece of dance to make. Made in response to the Spanish Civil War and with a set and costuming alluding to Picasso’s Guernica, it is a dance in which emotional turmoil and vulnerability are made legible through the body. Amy Thake dances it with powerful, moving brilliance. Through Graham’s series of contractions and releases she plots a course that finds countless textures for the emotions Graham is exploring.
CAST [X] is choreographed by the company’s own Liam Francis, who also dances in it. From darkness and the murmur of voices, comes a spotlight and four figures seemingly caught in the act. What this act is and who is guilty becomes the central questions of the dance. In the best way possible the piece is reminiscent (but not derivative) of Crystal Pite’s The Statement. The four dancers are in constant movement – they seem to form alliances and conspiracies that dissolve as quickly as they appear. In a lesser choreographer’s and dancers’ hands this could become a messy swirl – not here. The countless stories he offers and weaves together are conceived and danced with absolute, precise clarity. The beautiful balancing act of CAST [X] is that this precision does not dull the joy and volatility of the piece.
Lacrymosa tells with dance one of the oldest stories we have: after a long time apart, two people reunite. Cohan’s title implies Christ and Mary but Lacrymosa has a universality to it. Eileih Muir and Jonathan Goddard play with this universality – at moments they are a mother and child, at others two long-lost lovers. They become like a binary star, twisting around one another, bound together and yet unable to come to rest together.
1970s Kinaesonata, choreographed by the much-underperformed Bella Lewitzky, finds a joy and fascination in what it is possible for the body to do. In bright costumes eight dancers move in seemingly every possible way. Kinaesonata stuns you with how it keeps finding new ideas to fold into itself, new shapes, new lifts, new rhythms – it grows with these ideas, almost shimmering with energy by the end. It is a technically demanding dance but danced perfectly. It’s not that perfection itself is beautiful but that so many versions of perfection strung together becomes wonderfully mesmeric.
Finally, the longest piece of Modern Milestones is Christopher Bruce’s Troubadour. With a soundtrack made from a live recording of Leonard Cohen in London, Troubadour explores what it means to be on the road making art for a living. But it is not just sentimental homage, whilst Troubadour celebrates Cohen it goes beyond that – it finds misery and sacrifices in this life too. Troubadour becomes about what it means to give things up for one’s art, something which all brilliant dancers know all too well. It is a strangely sad piece but one, as you have surely come to expect, that is soul-twistingly beautiful.
Modern Milestones is brilliantly chosen and danced. It is beautiful but also goes beyond that; it’s erudite and challenges its audience. Perhaps the highest compliment I can give it is that it is truly modern – it stands at the edges of what we know dance at its best can be and looking outward from there. What is that, if not modern?