Past Thoughts on Dance (Originally in The Shimmy)

Gareth K Vile gets down to specifics.

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 09 AUGUST 2009

Once dance has been stripped of the “universal language” rhetoric, it entertains more personal potentials and becomes about shared learning rather than confirming consensus. By drawing on traditional movement vocabularies, it studies concepts that are so often excluded from the bland consumerism of modernity, echoing the conflicts of the past and present through an accessible symbolism. 

Anwesha Dance Company, with their North-East Indian inspiration filtered through Watford, make the battle between freedom and tradition explicit in A Mind's Journey in Search of Destiny. Pulling on the themes and style of Manipuri, it captures the tension between modern openness and ancient discipline in a throwdown between a ferocious contemporary dancer and a decoratively costumed Manipuri conscience. 

The text which leads the story deals with big issues in a leaden tone – as if to emphasise the contrast between the fluidity of the body and the dullness of mere words – and the young company are still evolving: yet this visceral war for identity is compelling through its exquisite video and dynamic structure. Manipuri, rooted in devotional worship, offers a foundation that happily evokes big ideas: the contemporary lends aggression. 

The story itself is intensely personal; dance training is used as a metaphor for the individual’s journey to integration, with the competing pulls of past and present beautifully represented in footage of the dancers performing in tube stations and shopping malls. 

Boh, on the other hand, does not pull on any particular past, using contemporary dance as a vehicle for confusion and crisis. A single dancer rotates personalities, flirts with a cupboard that holds memories of lost love and hope, hurling herself across the stage and channelling superb technique to a series of buzz-cut sketches. Italian in origin, it escapes the problems of translation by dealing with familiar matters – romance and social pressure, loneliness and the need for glamour – without ever being trite or obvious. Again, a specific story is told, making the particular comprehensible and expanding the debate around the pressures of female identity. 

Iona Kewney is an even more extreme example of freedom. Her Self-Interrupted Exhibition comes from her gymnastic training. Taking something usually so showy, she delves deep into a feral agitation that removes the gloss to gradually entrance with ecstatic dance. The loud music, the intensity of her actions, the awkward stumbling and impossible contortions: Kewney is utterly original, stunning and exhausting. Relentlessly idiosyncratic, her work is essential and maps out the outer-edge of possibility. 

Dance is always a dialogue, between audience and performers, between technique and expression, between the idea and its expression. The Fringe, when it is not a series of late night parties and drunken antics, is a hothouse of alternatives and invention.

Iona Kewney - Skinny Selections

Iona Kewney performs at The National Review, in the space where dance touches Live Art

EVENT PREVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED 26 FEBRUARY 2010


Audience reactions to Iona Kewney are always similarly varied. Some people cover their ears from Joe Quimby’s guitar loops. Others look sore offended at this gymnastic tour de force, asking where the technique has gone. A few are puzzled. Then some people realise that the immediacy of Kewney’s movement, the impossible contortions and moments of livid ecstasy are the fulfilment of contemporary dance’s promise to escape ballet’s restraint and to forge new art from the potential of the body and the depth of imagination.


Within fifteen minutes, Kewney asks the big questions: how free can we be? What is choreography? Why has dance become so polite, and couldn't we do with more work that crosses psychedelic distortion and physical presence? While it is possible simply to marvel at her prowess, the moments of elegance that slip between her feats are shining drops of revelatory grace.




There are few originals in any art form. Gareth K Vile meets a dancer who has the unique combination of skills and experience to count as one of them

FEATURE BY GARETH K VILE.
PUBLISHED 09 AUGUST 2009


“My work is balanced between dance, madness and performance art: the mentality of taking things beyond the limits of exertion, testing human will and physical endurance, bordering on the compulsions of madness.”


Iona Kewney was once a member of the Scottish gymnastic team. Yet her unique career has taken her from art school through circus training to the extreme creativity of the Belgian contemporary dance movement. In conversation, she is enthusiastic and passionate, drawing connections between different genres and artists, almost paralleling her dynamic performances with a distinctive flexibility and energy.


Self-Interrupted Exhibition promises to surprise and challenge, even to disturb. Her wide range of influences makes her work difficult to define. “I don’t choreograph,” she states. “Its not in my vocabulary; I improvise in the overall context.” However, having worked with Belgian luminaries such as Wim Vandeykebus and Alain Platel, she connects more readily with the European experimental tradition. “Europe has emotional guts. Dance in the UK is conservative, mostly. So, no, I don’t identify with UK performance at all.”


The last time Kewney performed in Scotland was with Platel’s Les Ballets C de la B, a company that happily integrates multiple approaches to dance and allowed Iona to express her own technique and experiences within a group context. Self-Interrupted Exhibition is a solo work, with sound support from Glasgow’s Joe Quimby. However, she acknowledges that her time with Platel and other choreographers has influenced her.


“I did my own things on stage - just strengthened my own ideas by being able to do them fully. But I saw much, and thought in other ways. The touring and mixing with diverse personages all over world is a teacher in itself.” Yet it is not just dance that feeds her work. “I think training as a gymnast, playing countless tennis competitions and playing squash, badminton and biking gives a competitive drive and hunger to perform at best or lose. Sport is a performance of a kind.”


The restless energy that courses through Kewney’s performances reflects her own path. “Initially, I trained as a fine art painter and printmaker at Duncan of Jordanstone. Eventually, the anatomical distortions of detailed realism in my drawings and the constant excessive physical training I was doing in sport - and interest in dance and other crossover ideas- drove me to physical statements and images in movement and endurance performance.”


This direction encouraged her to leave for Europe, to postgraduate study in new dance and improvisation. “One thing led to another, and I continued to perform improvised solos with musicians live on stage and improvised text.”


Her grounding in visual art, however, continues to define her creative process. She compares her work to “creating a canvas, but the composition is in time and the texture is of body in space”. And despite her rejection of UK performance, she admits an affinity with UK painters. "I do identify with their figurative style.”


From these sources, Kewney has developed a style of dance that is idiosyncratic and thrilling. As if trying to escape the limitations of the body, she twists and distorts her shape, testing its possibilities and establishing a distinctive vocabulary of movement that shames most modern dance for its lack of imagination and force. There is a sense that she is transferring the spirit of contemporary visual art, which refuses to be pigeonholed, on to the stage and abandoning pre-conceived notions of elegance and beauty.


In the past, Kewney has performed at the National Review of Live Art, and enthusiasts of free and provocative dance will be not be disappointed. At the same time, the specific aesthetic of her work does not make it unnecessarily dense or confusing: it is, at once, a laboratory of future possibility and an immediate physical expression of an interior, emotional universe, the very qualities she admire in her earlier collaborators.


“I liked the raw, animal, manly, powerful physicality of early works of Wim,” she explains. “With Alain Platel - it is the emotional psychology of movement.” Platel, in particular, has forged a distinctive path, describing “the oddities and beauty, drive and deformity and the power/weakness in states of hysteria” which has obvious similarities to Iona’s own pieces.


Kewney is “not interested in just exterior aesthetic shapes, not just what you can do”. Rather, she examines “mechanisms used to the extreme, abused to limits of hysteria”, discovering the rules of movement and then using and abusing them as she needs them to express an idea.


Undoubtedly, Self-Interrupted Exhibition will be a powerful, polarising show, refusing to bow to notions of traditional technique and allowing Iona to take her explorations of physicality into uncharted territory. Her connection to European companies is both a seal of quality and a promise of imaginative play.