Styled by the Vivienne Westwood studio and throwing shapes to the thrash and shimmer of Mica Levi’s electronic score, the eight cowpunchers of Holly Blakey’s new work look as though they’d be more at home in the pages of Dazed magazine than in the wild west. Blakey has good reason for using Cowpuncher – the not-so-gender-specific variant on “cowboy” – as the title for her piece. Although she’s taken the rogue, rootless outlaw of cowboy legend as her basic inspiration, she’s used that image to celebrate a far more generalised world of outsiders, especially those who live on the fringes of sexual definition.
Her dancers – five women and three men – are costumed by Andreas Kronthaler across a free-floating spectrum of possibilities. Some of the women might be dressed as raunchy barmaids or western belles, unambiguously girly in laced-up bodices, flounces and chintz. But one of the men wears a flowered tea frock and has his hair in a plait, while another sports the challenging combination of cowboy boots and Lurex-spangled loincloth.
Blakey’s choreography is similarly rooted in classic cowboy motifs – and similarly fluid with gender. The five women open the work as if to the prairie-born, hunkered down in the hips and going through the stylised motions of hurling a lasso. If the men initially dominate the stage, with their strutting, trigger-happy machismo, Blakey has them join the women in fleet-footed line dances and allows them moments of revealing, delicate sensuality, or crumpled pain.
I love the premise of Cowpuncher, and there are sections where Blakey and her collaborators make it fly. Jenni Pystynen’s lighting is particularly fine, baking the stage in desert heat and giving it a smoky sunset glow. Ultimately, however, it feels like a production in thrall to its own image. Too often the choreography settles for the striking picture when it should be mining the riches of its source language; too often it opts for the superficial attitude when it could be probing more deeply beneath the skins of these stylishly equivocal, postmodern outlaws.
