Sat 21 Feb: AmyFoskettDance, Host Bodies Dance Collective and Antonello Sangirardi

Antonello Sangirardi Leoni da Tastiera

Host Bodies Dance Collective Anatomy of a Siren

AmyFoskettDance MORE

Tonight was perhaps my favourite review evening of Resolutions thus far, with three distinct choreographic voices emerging. In a time of increasing political polarisation, where our digital realities can dictate the everyday, Antonello Sangirardi’sLeoni de Tastiera (meaning Keyboard Lions) exposes the futility of such online conflicts. The two performers slope between archetypal braindead cavemen and trigger-happy Twitter trolls. Their thumbs twitch at their phones, and the preceding exchange is projected up, exposing the rage baiting in all its hateful, self-righteous, and comedic glory. A bizarre, parasitic relationship is revealed: each screen slave relies on feeding animosity with the other in order to promote their own belief. This co-dependent image is brilliantly underlined as the pair suddenly become stuck together. At every escape attempt, their fate is re-consigned by another body part becoming magnetised. All in all, Antonello Sangirardi presents a well-crafted performance which engages and entertains.

Host Bodies Dance Collective generates strong imagery and a powerful sense of discomfort through Anatomy of a Siren. In a rich aesthetic universe of silicone pregnancy bellies, fur panties, and Shibari ropes, the two dancers and musician establish a multilayered legacy of the siren, with themes of motherhood, lust, and the human-versus-creature. Pious singer Emily Izen Row sits beneath a cradle, her Mary Magdalene aesthetic disrupted by the satanic smile of crotch-forward dancers. The duet flex into hyperextended poses where limbs merge and cackle with unease. Many of the scenes feel somewhat disconnected, with the relationship between the pair unclear, and the conclusion left unsaid. Where Anatomy of a Siren has the power to generate an overwhelming discomfort, I ask with what message? The performance was the most thought-provoking of the evening.

Positioned firmly as a contemporary dance piece, AmyFoskettDance’s MORE utilises fluid floor work, soft-flow acrobatics, and contact work to comment on the dangers of greed and excess. The performers seamlessly switch between rolling, lifting, and demanding unison. Gradual pulses of power build until the cumulative effects of ambition pit the dancers against each other. Where the trio earlier lifted each other up, the dancers now drag anyone in front to the ground. AmyFoskettDance leaves us with a simple but effective final image: a lone hand, fingers splayed and reaching up into the darkness. To relate to the programme note given, MORE requires a grittier exploration of human nature and the destructiveness of greed.

R.E. Pegg

Antonello Sangirardi’sLeoni da Tastiera levies a crisp charge against the polarisation of social media, where extreme views flourish under the cloak of anonymity. Sangirardi and Luigi Nardone fire off irate comments from dark bedrooms, one home to Free Palestine flyers and the other Confederate flags. In between tweets projected onto the back wall are tight, vivid injections of dance, some lithe, some fractured. Sangirardi reimagines these keyboard wars in the physical realm as a clash between stooped cave men and, later, chest-thumping chimps – a funny, perceptive devolution of tact. Less incisive is the equal weight he gives the opposing sides, clinched in their mutual destruction. Why the moral neutrality when racism and homophobia are at play? Given the accompanying disclaimer that the artists “stand in solidarity with marginalised communities,” surely more fault lies with the attackers of these groups than their defenders.

Anatomy of a Siren explores womanhood in various casts of vilification: “sanitised, sexualised, weaponised,” as an early voiceover puts it. One of the dancers channels a sex doll with her nude unitard and Shibari rope; the other writhes in panties lined with fake pubic hair. In between spells of crotch-forward choreography and eerie live warbling from a third performer, a silicon belly is produced. The image of pregnancy suggests a journey with an endpoint, but the work meanders on this point, pivoting between different conceits that muddy the characters’ already-vague relationship. It’s packed with intriguing hints about the performative and the consensual; a sturdier framework might give these more shape.

I wouldn’t have guessed ‘greed’ as the theme of AmyFoskettDance’s MORE without its mention in the programme notes, although the revelation casts a telling light on some of the visuals, from the green hues of the opening moments to the Gordon Gecko blazers on two of the three dancers. The trio move like a single organism, never still and almost always touching. What begins as mellow shapeshifting escalates into fraught, fissured groupwork, the progression steady and unyielding. The work closes on the dancers clambering to get ahead of one another, solidarity abandoned. They’re a collective only so long as it serves them – avarice shrewdly rendered.

Sara Veale