Tue 23 Jan: Chi-Hsuan Lin, Nicola Adilman and Sara Augieras

Chi-Hsuan Lin Attached
Nicola AdilmanAs of Right Now
Sara AugierasGlimtar

The night began with Attached by Chi-Hsuan Lin, performed by Amelia Macqueen, Diana Snizhko, and Yun Cheng. The dancers emerge on stage, inspecting plastic bags and cardboard boxes, choosing to inhabit and later discard them. Through incoherent mutterings the performers create a wall of separation between the audience and themselves. This distancing proves to be an interesting effect as it is followed by voiceovers that subtlety but clearly draw connections between the audience, performers, personal journeys of migration, and the experiences of hermit crabs. The compositional choices of the work are successful in highlighting the distressing impacts of housing crises, pollution, and environmental deterioration.

Sara Augieras emerges from the enveloping darkness with a small light in hand. It feels as though we have exited the theatre and entered the journey of a deep-sea expedition. Skillfully invoking contrast between light and darkness, Augieras and Madeleine Klintenberg Jonsson create a vast world of enchantment in Glimtar, the second performance of the evening. This enthralling duet between them is one of mastery and risk, shown through their elongated and entangled movements on a water covered tarp on stage. While no narrative beyond the discovery of one another is established, the luring gaze of Klintenberg Jonsson juxtaposed with the impassioned countenance of Augieras amidst their movements suggest exciting discoveries to unfurl in future iterations of this mysterious and captivating work.

As of Right Now by Nicola Adilman stands out as a highlight of the evening. There is a moment where Adilman is instructed by the visual artists sketching her naked body, that it is time for her to change pose. As she descends into an awkward position, her inner thoughts communicate instant regret and the audience bursts into laughter at the relatability of the situation she then finds herself in. This is the skill that Adilman employs as she establishes a connection that draws audiences into her world. And while humor is used, this is no light work, as Adilman provokes audiences to think critically about surveillance, consent, agency, and control over one’s own body.

Keith Alexander

Dance performance has no formula but, for me at least, it should do one or more of several things, key amongst which are to entertain, fascinate, challenge and/or inform. Each piece on this programme, devised and performed exclusively by women, managed to achieve at least one of these measures of success within a unified feeling of femininity, both in creative design and execution, strongly emphasised in the final work’s forensic examination of the female form.

Challenge came first in Chi-Hsuan Lin’s informative docu-dance about the hermit crab (definitely a first) where a Siri-style voiceover railed against the damage caused by said crustacean’s ingestion of microplastics (it weakens their shells) or the tragedy of them becoming trapped inside plastic bottles (it takes a week for them to die). While Nicola Adilman took a late swing at the ubiquitous intrusiveness of CCTV cameras with her naked life model preferring to mask that vulnerability in the intimate security of the studio.

Voiceover humour brought entertaining light relief. The hermit crab’s hunt for a suitable shell was linked to ironic commentary about the human property market; and Adilman’s thoughts during her various poses hit the laugh-out-loud button more than once - her best “thought bubble” being “did I really choose this pose” as she tried - with gradually increasing body tremors - to hold a plank position. Two excellent quick-draw artists switched from easels to life-sized canvases which were then laid on the floor for Adilman to roll in. The transfer of these still-wet images onto her naked body gave a new meaning to living art.

Glimtar held a spellbinding fascination. Opening in darkness, the only light coming from hand-held torches, it took a while to realise that the two dancers were performing, with slithering softness, in a puddle of water. Their tightly controlled movement accelerated over three movements from slow eroticism to frenetic unison in a polished and well-performed piece.

Graham Watts