Tue 24 Feb: Siyu Lu, Damara Velázquez and Evie Longstaff

Siyu Lu 《界·流》Interface

Damara Velázquez Shall we...?

Evie Longstaff Order Knows Its End

Translucent silk panels cascade across the stage, reflecting the glow from the stage light. Cocooned in the centre is Siyu Lu, the dancer, choreographer, and musician behind Interface. With a captivatingly expressive upper body, her movements are as delicate as the silk surrounding her. However, is grace enough to sustain this solo performance? Despite the beauty of the performer, the work ultimately lacks dynamism. Lu, for all of her nuanced movement, blends into the background, hiding in the haze and behind the silk.

The second solo work of the evening, Shall We…?, sits in striking contrast to the quiet subtlety of Interface. Performed and choreographed by Damara Velázquez, the work is dazzlingly chaotic. Velázquez pulls the audience into her personal hurricane. The frantic movement is paired with pulsating electronic music that is then overlayed with dizzying projections of black and white images. As Velázquez thrashes across the stage, the projections zoom in and out. We travel from outer space to Times Square in mere seconds. Overlapping elements are as discordant as they are harmonious. As an audience member, it’s an equally confusing and exciting place to be.

Choreographed by Evie Longstaff,Order Knows Its End, opens with a tightly wound trio of dancers. They rise and sink in synchronicity to the thrumming music. What starts out in unison tumbles out into a sea of variation until the music stops and we are met with a single dancer, under a spotlight. She struggles in the silence with a slack jaw that eventually leads to her stumbling offstage. This motif repeats with the next dancer, and the next, with each dancer creating their own facsimile, until they crawl away. Despite claiming to be about the breakdown of systems, Order Knows Its End is as structural as a sonnet, with patterns consistently reappearing, constantly reintroducing themselves to the viewer.

Morgan Holder

My fourth night at Resolution and it proved the one packed with the most dance movement with lots of very unshabby and well-executed professionalism. But which works connected with my emotions and left me yearning for more? Here, the three pieces fared rather differently.

The smoothest and most polished dancing came from Siyu Lu in her solo 《界·流》 Interface. It was billed as an exploration of the body in a landscape, partly of fabric, drifting between visibility and concealment. The performance begins with two long lengths of gently curving silk being hoisted to the rafters as Lu fluently weaved a fusion of oriental and contemporary movement to her own beat-driven oriental/electronic soundtrack. All pleasantly innocuous. Subdued lighting and haze largely contributed to the sense of concealment, but the silks were disappointingly underutilised. Partway through, the smooth karma was destroyed by a section of wild, jerky abandonment, which seemed at total odds with the aesthetic thrust of Interface.

Closing the night, Evie Longstaff'sOrder Knows Its End also felt like two distinct works rather than one. Tantalisingly, it addressed entropy - "the natural tendency of systems to move from order to disorder." For three (well-cast) dancers, it began and ended with sharply precise abstract movement that looks interesting, but loses focus when the three dancers engage in their own rather chaotic interpretations. The other part of Order was very human, with the dancers breaking down before us, happy souls collapsing into destitute, crawling wrecks. Longstaff certainly has arresting ideas and movement (bravo!), but one felt that the pair of ideas here would have been better explored separately and with less repetition involved.

A superabundance of ideas was the hallmark of the middle work of the night: Damara Velázquez's solo Shall we...? It simply explored what the body can do as the ultimate form of expression. Nothing simple about it, of course, but Velázquez is an effervescent stage magnet and knows how to seduce us visually with a mix of mini-scenes, some involving only her fingers, all the way through to dancing with several projected cartoon versions of herself. She seamlessly fuses contemporary dance, belly dance, vogueing and a myriad of other styles into a Pina Bausch-like stream of consciousness. An original voice, it made me smile and count me very interested in what Velázquez does next.

Bruce Marriott