Calling all dub fans, bassheads, anyone with a Trojan Records CD; this one’s for you. Grab some friends, some drinks, and be ready to dance. ShebeenDUB is a world premiere from the Zimbabwean-American, four-time Bessie award-winner nora chipaumire that’s part gig, part club and part performance, with chipaumire as MC. “It’s a dance party,” she toasts. “Put your hands in the air like you just DO care.”
Dub music is a rumblingly loud genre that remixed reggae, pulling out and expanding its sounds, stripping out vocals and ramping up the reverb. Going to see dance can be a kinaesthetic experience but this prompts a different kind of physical response, feeling vibrations shiver up through the soles of your feet to grip your ribs; a sonic boom in the solar plexus.
chipaumire has invited three artists to feel these vibrations too, in a club rather than theatre set-up. American Marguerite Hemmings pulses on the floor, sensing soundwaves; British jazz musician and dancer tyroneisaacstuart scales the mountain of speakers that form the show’s centrepiece, a wall of subwoofer sound. He lounges there peacefully. You could read it as a gentle resistance: no sense of show, or hurry, nothing owed to us; he’ll move when he’s ready.
Dub is a Jamaican music that thrived in Britain and there’s a nod in the programme to its post-colonial politics, but the sheer volume and throb of the sound (or perhaps poor hearing from too many years of standing near speakers) makes it tricky to hear exactly what chipaumire is saying on the mic.
Most interesting from a choreographic point of view is British flamenco dancer Yinka Esi Graves, her body in deep conversation with the music, genres and complex cultural histories meeting. Familiar flamenco shapes melt into the sound, or repeat in riffs. She drills into the rhythm with the drum roll of her heels. Most rewarding is the climatic exchange between Graves and tyroneisaacstuart on saxophone, when the focus zooms in on the interplay between the pair, rearranging rhythms, notes and limbs in real-time responses.
The mood is improvisatory and ambulatory, action (or inaction) scattered around the room, spotted through thick haze. After the dancers, the Trojan Sound System take over – this is not your standard contemporary dance show, and it needs a crowd who’ll make a night of it.
At Bernie Grant Arts Centre, London, until 14 October. Dance Umbrella festival continues until 23 October.
