The Place and Battersea Arts Centre have joined forces this month for a season of work that sits midway between dance and theatre. Last week, Ben Duke delivered mastery of both forms with his one-man version of Paradise Lost. This week’s double bill at the Place is equally novel in concept, but its delivery is less assured.
Nic Green’s Fatherland is about her absent Scottish dad, a man she’s met only once, and her attempt to reclaim a Scottish bloodline of her own through dance, music and words. It’s a disjointed, angry process at first. Green dances a vestigial version of a Scottish jig, sings fragments of Scots ballads and has the audience recite from text that relates to her one awkward encounter with her father.
That audience participation, while gamely undertaken, can be more distracting than involving, but Green herself is an increasingly compelling presence. She starts out dressed in her father’s suit, yet as she strips down to a pair of tartan underpants, her fluent, challenging, triumphant Scottish self emerges, the solo building to a ferocious crescendo of dance, matched by live drumming and bagpipes.
Hannah Sullivan’s Echo Beach is also about dancing as identity. Sullivan is fascinated by what we reveal of ourselves when we’re dancing socially, and her solo opens with a winning series of observational snapshots, from woozy trance dance to disco divadom. We’re all recognisable in there. But when Sullivan narrows the focus to her own experiences, the spoken material lacks theis vivid recall of the dance. There’s one especially poignant scene, however, where Sullivan enacts the one time her parents danced together at home – each on opposite sides of the room, her father laughing, with his eyes open; her mother retreating behind closed lids to her own private world.
- At the Place, London, until 3 June. Box office: 020-7121 1100.
