Dance
Spring Loaded (The Place)
Humdrum journey
Sophie Constanti
Cross-London rail travel doesn't come much more humdrum or uneventful than a journey from New Malden to Upminster — as is proved by Gary Lambert and Ben Craft's ineptly titled From New Malden to Upminster, performed by the four members (all ex-Rambert) of Small Axe during the current Spring Loaded season of contem- porary dance at The Place Theatre. Over the course of what felt like a very long hour, Lambert, Craft, Cathrine Price and Christopher Carney treated us to some predictably fine dancing which, it soon transpired, was going nowhere.
While Price and Carney remain closest to the Cunningham-based Rambert style developed under Richard Alston's director- ship, Craft and Lambert have absorbed other influences, such as martial art forms, alignment techniques and meditative body- work. All this makes for interesting varia- tion but does not mask the deficiencies of Lambert and Craft's choreography. How either man was able to find even a jot of inspiration in the concept, or reality, of trekking from the dullest suburbs of Surrey to the semi-gentrified badlands of Essex remains the biggest mystery of all. But from the simple fact that it takes, according to Lambert and Craft, 'a whole evening to get from New Malden to Upminster', the two men claim to have elicited the starting- point for a full-length, three-part dance- work. This perhaps explains why the piece is rarely able to transport its audience beyond the zones of Network South East. Has it not occurred to the choreographers that, on journeys like this, sensible com- muters either read or fall asleep?
Small Axe's dancing passengers exercise side by side, drift in and out of fruitless encounters with each other and indulge in a little strap-hanging during more quiet moments. Stuck in a tunnel, Lambert and Craft engage in a tense, quirky, shoulder- to-shoulder duet driven by Miles Davis playing 'Chocolate Chip'. A poem by Ghanaian writer Dons Tettey is used to breathe sanity into the minds and bodies of harassed travellers and prompt sentimental dreams of a return to nature. A description of the rush hour in Accra would have been more gripping than the I 'n' I (Rastafarian- speak for 'we') fixation of Tettey's ram- bling, repetitive text. By the time we pass Barking, things begin to lighten up: Craft nonchalantly rotates his hips to a scram- bled confusion of radio frequencies; the other dancers — all now emerging as indi- viduals — dip into the action at random. As Rambert dancers who, in works by Alston, Siobhan Davies and Merce Cun- ningham, illumined some of the best chore- ography created, or acquired, during the Eighties, the members of Small Axe appear under-employed and under-challenged here. Given better material they would at least be filling time, rather than killing it.
At 43, Emilyn Claid is one of Spring Loaded's more mature participants. But in her new solo show, Virginia Minx at Play, she frequently regresses to childhood, ado- lescence and the negative realms of a femi- ninity she had every right to reject or outgrow. Although Claid is still actively and openly defining herself — and her position as a woman in dance — she seems reluctant or is perhaps incapable of updat- ing her crude, rigid notions of feminism and liberation, dragging her audience into a Seventies timewarp of her own making. In Virginia Minx she builds upon the same tired old stereotypes: the downtrodden, chocoholic housewife, a sex slave impris- oned in her own home; the fat, frumpy, screeching diva; the evil-eyed madwoman dressed in a nightgown, hair flowing wild, drooling over an arsenal of knives and dag- gers before slicing up her own body in self- hatred. Anyone with a fascination for Claid's models and a wish to deconstruct the dogma of militant feminism would have a far better time with Germaine Greer's writings of 20 and more years ago.
Claid has a large lesbian following (as well as a following of large lesbians), by whom she appears to be worshipped. Dur- ing the interval, the group (or groupies) sit- ting behind me wasted no time in decanting a bottle of something bubbly into paper cups. Had they found cause for cele- bration in the erotic overtones of Claid's onstage relationship with her musical accompanist, Heather Joyce? Or in her smirking, tight-lipped parody of machismo delivered in the gender-bending manner of K.D. Lang? Claid can be both funny and poignant, but if only her vocabulary were more varied and adventurous and if only she would chose a new subject to explore. Nobody is asking her to grow old gracefully — merely to move on to her next mid-life crisis.
'I'm appealing.'
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