Charles Linehan
The Place, London WC1
Charles Linehan is the ultimate insider's choreographer. A miniaturist, whose work examines the faultlines beneath everyday situations, he achieves his effects by the layering of subtle physical detail.
The Way Station, set to contemporary music from Serbia, divides into two parts. The first, to green lighting, is perkily rhythmic, and shows Linehan regulars Greig Cooke and Rahel Vonmoos proceeding along parallel choreographic tracks and occasionally interacting in a flurry of slicing arms and controlled collapses. As the lights turn red, the movement becomes more apprehensive in tone, with the pair enacting a kinetic duet.
It's more enigmatic than the ironically named Happy Days, set to Jim O'Rourke's composition of the same name. To begin with, we see Cooke and Vonmoos again; then the latter is replaced by Antonia Grove, whose increasingly complex exchanges with Cooke are marked by a frantic, guilty joy. Grove is a more anarchic performer than Vonmoos; at one moment she subverts the blank-face convention observed by the others and flashes Cooke a sly grin - a formal irreverence which clearly signals that the implied narrative is not just in our imagination. As Linehan has proved for over a decade now, the best things often come in the least hyped packages.
