Company Chameleon was founded in 2007 by two graduates of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, Kevin Edward Turner and Anthony Missen. Based in Manchester, the company has gone on to perform around the world, and in 2015 it won a National Dance Awards nomination.
10, a triple bill from its back catalogue, is a celebration of a decade of its work. It features four technically assured performers, and ingenious, theatrical choreography. So why is this, for all its considerable length (over two hours, including an interval), such a frustratingly incomplete evening? Perhaps it’s that the ideas informing the dance are less well shaped than the dance itself.
Imprint, choreographed by Turner and set to an electronic score by composer Cally Statham, opens with a couple (Maddie Shimwell and Turner) whose relationship is deteriorating. He is petulant and abusive, placing his hand on her neck, throwing her to the ground, and then pushing her away violently when she pleads uncomprehendingly with him. Rejected, she lies at his feet and then crawls after him. It’s horrible.
It’s also confusing, given that Shimwell’s character is initially defined by movement which is grounded and confident. Alone on stage, she executes an impressively lissom solo, folding backwards on to her hands and traversing the stage like a crab. Enter David Colley, who immediately launches into an extended duet with her; and if she appears wary and bruised by the earlier relationship, he eventually wins her over, or perhaps wears her down.
Implicit in all of this is the notion of a woman’s incompleteness without a man. In fact, Shimwell is a much more interesting and expressive dancer on her own than with either partner. Imprint also raises questions about the increasingly contentious notion of male-on-female handling and manipulation in dance. Turner appears to acknowledge this in a sequence where Shimwell briefly lifts Colley, but this is nevertheless a work in thrall to the old balletic-gymnastic aesthetic. Just because a man can lift a woman off her feet doesn’t mean to say that he should.
Trip, which follows, is a piece about the gap between self-image and reality. A solo work by Missen, it’s danced by Theo Fapohunda, whose deluded shtick sees him twitching, flailing and encouraging the audience to “do yo’ thang...”, before musing that “acceptance supersedes the need for self-actualisation”. While the piece contains elements of the pretentiousness it’s guying, Fapohunda is a strong and confident dancer, and holds the stage by dint of sheer likability.
He returns in Rites, by Missen and Turner. A two-hander for himself and Turner, the piece looks at aspects of masculinity, and sees the pair locked into a series of confrontations, by turns yobbish, joshing, affectionate, militaristic and racist. Danced, like Trip, to a relentless electronic score by Miguel Marin, it’s clearly an exhausting piece to perform, but its hyper-physicality expresses little beyond the fact that men can be deeply obnoxious when they choose, which is unlikely to come as a surprise.
The work is grounded in the personal experience of its choreographers, but the result is too long and too diffuse. Other dance-makers – John Ross, Charlotte Vincent, Rosie Kay – have delved much more deeply and revealingly into this territory.
I’m sure that Company Chameleon will continue onwards and upwards, but this programme lacked focus.
