Given the secrecy with which Rachel Whiteread's new installation arrived at Tate Modern, it is doubtful that choreographer Rosemary Butcher had any idea of what kind of backdrop she'd be getting for her scheduled performances on the wide bridge spanning the Turbine Hall. As it turned out, the pallid glow emanating upwards from Whiteread's boxes and the atavistic geometries of their piled up pyramids and towers were an eerily sympathetic background to a show that was itself about space, form and memory.
Butcher has, of all her generation, remained truest to the minimalist ethos of the 1970s, and this programme was characteristically spare. It featured only one dancer, Elena Giannotti, and in each of its three works an uncompromisingly distilled movement concept was worked over and over again.
Images Every Three Seconds was based on photos of Afghani women under Taliban rule, yet Giannotti's tight, self-duplicating gestures of anger, bafflement and resignation were designed to express only a trace memory of oppression. In The Hour her moves were freer but the focus lay in formal contrasts of scale, as her figure was juxtaposed against film of vast landscapes and flickering ghost figures. In Hidden Voices Giannotti ran on the spot, while light playing over her body and a soundscape of whispers made it seem as if she were travelling a lifetime's distance and accumulating a lifetime's memory. Giannotti is an extraordinarily profound performer, subtle and intent, and Butcher uses her body in profound ways, yet this work was closer to art installation than dance. As such, its location in the Tate should have been ideal. However, the audience were still herded together for this hour-long performance as if they were in a conventional theatre, which was a mixed blessing. There may have been intellectual engagement, but it was set against a backdrop of fidgeting and pain.
