Connor Scott and Vidya Patel were both winners at 2015’s BBC Young Dancer competition, she taking the South Asian dance category, he the overall title. It’s not the kind of contest that offers the equivalent of a record deal and a No 1 hit, but their careers have been steadily on the rise, Patel collaborating with choreographer Richard Alston, Scott touring with Michael Keegan-Dolan.
They’ve also worked together, and the resulting duet, About the Elephant, was filmed in 2018 at Newcastle’s Dance City and is available online from The Space. There are no flashy competition moves here; the shooting and staging are unfancy. There is no set, just an empty stage bathed in blue light, but when you’ve got two people and a connection, you don’t need much else.
Patel and Scott come from different dance styles (Patel from kathak, Scott from contemporary, although he originally started in Latin and ballroom), but they’re both very precise dancers and their energy is as closely matched as their identical wheat-gold tunics and skirts. At first they face one another, not touching, but moving with the same breath. Their arms circle each other, skirting the currents of air, then Scott gently grabs Patel’s wrist and her hand flutters like a fledgling’s wing. Patel’s hands are beautiful, that articulacy ingrained from her kathak training. No matter what she’s doing her hands are always composed, in the way a ballet dancer’s toes are always pointed.
The connection between the dancers isn’t romantic, but it is tender and very present. Sometimes they move exactly in unison, sometimes tiny details deliberately diverge (Patel’s fingers stretched out, Scott’s folded to his palms), elsewhere they digress into their own modes – Patel’s tight corkscrew turns versus Scott’s more expansive curlicues – before returning to the fold.
The third person on stage is musician Shammi Pithia, creating an airy soundscape with bansuri flute. The blurb says this is a piece about looking for clarity in a world of noise, and yes, you can see that clarity, for sure. But more simply it’s a conversation between two styles and two people, a palpable meeting of energies between two bodies – all the more potent since it’s just the thing many of us are missing right now.
