The Place’s Autumn season sparked into life with an intriguing show, Choreodrome: making progress, allowing choreographers to showcase their “beautiful, bold and bonkers experiments” – and it did not disappoint on any of those three counts.
Opening the second evening of this two-night event was Kesha Raithatha’s Threads, a piece that began with the striking, yet gentle, image of a silkworm before spinning out into a wider commentary on how clothing shapes us. Using lighting and fabrics to accentuate movement, the performance led the audience through our complex relationships with clothes, whether we are trying to escape the wrappings of its exploitation or glide through its liberating joys. The choreography mapped this journey from traditional Indian weavers to the exploitation of modern-day fast fashion, before ending beautifully with a dance that seamlessly sewed traditional Bollywood together with contemporary styles.
Then came two brief excerpts from you’re a man now, boy by Isaac Ouro-Gnao, a performance designed to explore childhood trauma and how it manifests in adult mental health. Through hip-hop and Africana dance, the three performers used synchronised and conflicting movements to capture a range of struggles, including the strains of conformity, the feeling of falling behind one’s peers, and acts of rebellion and resistance. This fascinating and excellently presented piece shone with interesting lines from the trio of performers.
The show closed with Joe Moran’s Now We Are Dead, the most abstract and jarring of the three pieces, aiming to tackle themes of grief and dislocation. It began, somewhat uncomfortably, with one performer kicking and scuffing away at the floor for close to three minutes before the three performers came together – climbing on top of each other to create physical structures of tension, connection, and sweat. These human structures, much like chosen or found families, carry their own inherent frictions but ultimately create a resilient new foundation. If this description is failing, you might be best to imagine it through the lens of Peaches’ Fuck the Pain Away.
Yet, the piece ended in whimsy as the performers covered themselves in blankets and raced around the stage in an almost childlike game, which the audience were then encouraged to join.
Choreodrome: making progress may have left audiences feeling just as perplexed as they were provoked. Nonetheless, it offered a thought-provoking opening to what promises to be another exciting season at The Place.
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