Witty choreography ... Theo Clinkard and Antonia Grove performing This. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
A long time has passed since the words drama and theatre were synonymous, but one of the things I love about theatre and performance at the moment is the way that the neat little boxes dividing art forms are being quietly dismantled almost without us really noticing. Increasingly it is no longer clear - and I for one don't want it to be - what exactly it is that you are going to see. I was thinking about this last Saturday night, watching the brilliant duo Antonia Grove and Theo Clinkard in their mixed piece programme Magpie. It's playing as part of the Spring Loaded season at the Place, where the return ticket deals are such astonishingly good value that it encourages you to take a punt.
Several of the Probe pieces, including the New Art Club's wittily choreographed This and Mark Bruce's brooding Orpheus and Eurydice-inspired The Sky or a Bird, would quite happily sit in theatres with no dance history and with no explanation. Indeed one of the pleasures of Magpie is the way it revels in a theatrical tradition and gives a clever little wink to the music hall or variety show tradition.
For a while now, we've seen theatre and live art practice moving closer together. Of course theatre and dance have always been closely allied whether through the work of companies such as DV8, whose more recent work, including the upcoming To Be Straight With You, has often positioned itself within a theatrical context (playing venues such as the National Theatre rather than Sadler's Wells).
The influence of individuals such as Pina Bausch, Alain Platel and Jerome Bel on contemporary theatre practice can be seen every where from Katie Mitchell to Forced Entertainment. If a bomb had dropped on Sadler's Wells on the night of Bel's performance of The Show Must Go On, pretty well the entire, more radical wing of UK performance and theatre would have been wiped out at a stroke.
I'm not suggesting this ditching of labels hasn't happened before or that companies such as Stan Won't Dance or even Frantic Assembly are unique in positioning themselves somewhere on the cusp between movement and text. But I think the extent to which it is happening is significant. Traditional theatre audiences who might not choose to see a dance show trot off quite happily to see Punchdrunk's Masque of the Red Death or I Am Falling at the Gate. Nobody, as far as I'm aware, comes out demanding their money back because they've seen a dance show in the way that some moviegoers were upset when Sweeney Todd turned out to be a musical. Goodness, you'd think they'd be grateful for added value.
The tiny Gate is leading the way in treating theatre and dance with equal respect and exploring the possibilities of both. The result is an opening up of a dialogue between the two forms and the ditching of unhelpful labels. If you want a taste of some of the kind of theatre/dance performances I'm talking about, then try the Gate's upcoming production The Internationalist, which has chorographer Pedro Pires onboard, call into the Place to see Rosie Kay's Wild Party (part of Spring Loaded) later in the week, or book a ticket to see John Moran and his neighbour Saori which starts late nights at Soho on Friday.
There is plenty more where that came from including brilliant initiatives such as Dancing City, which is part of the Greenwich and Docklands festival, or the upcoming collaboration between Protein Dance Company and The Shout as part of the Brighton festival.
I'm optimistic that this isn't just a blip, but a movement that is gathering energy and that can only be a good thing for both theatre and dance in the long run as they diversify and cross-fertilise audiences. My only caveat is that both funders and critics often seem to have undue difficulty with work they can't easily categorise as falling distinctly into one art form or another and it ends up falling through the cracks. But bringing two languages doesn't diminish either - in fact, the opposite is true: it creates vibrant and interesting new ways of communicating.
