Absolute Solo II is a sequel – 22 years on – to the first solo show by Birmingham-based choreographer Rosie Kay. If time has changed her, this three-part performance also shows what has endured: a full yet disciplined physical style, limbs snapping and sweeping around a pliant spine; a love of dancing with or about music, emotion, even beauty; a woman’s struggle to define herself, inside and out.
These are already apparent in a video of Kay performing Patisserie from that early 1999 show. It’s a 10-minute tussle between phrases she had gathered from young female contemporaries about the beauty industry, and her own body, flexing crazily as it fails either to bat aside or to embody such banalities as “dress to impress” or “a woman must take care of herself”. Even meditation becomes beset with self-improvement anxieties, less a retreat from the beauty business than an extension of its reach.
Before this comes Artemis Clown, a 2018 solo originally created for dancer Gemma Paganelli that meshes imagery from the life and work of Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi with the spirit of Artemis, maiden goddess of the hunt. Initially undercutting its own composure with slips and missteps, it cedes to a more introspective mood that culminates with Kay luxuriating in cascading piano glissandi.
The highlight is her new Adult Female Dancer, which makes these themes explicitly autobiographical. Kay imparts her ever-physical style with the gravitas of age and the force of experience. The story turns on a single axis: what keeps her dancing? Passion, family bonds, career highs, fascination. What stops her? So much. Sometimes dance itself: her list of injuries is long and brutal. Also, childbirth: she and her baby nearly died, an experience reflected in a transfixing sequence where Kay caves in on herself, as if blindly yet deliberately digging into darkness. Also: sexual harassment, starting from pre-puberty, a whole continuum from everyday antagonisms to separate incidents of assault, abduction, rape.
Adult, female, dancer – the tensions within and between those terms leave Kay sloping off, hunched, diminished. A pause. A turn. It’s Patti Smith’s rock anthem Gloria – and it’s comeback Kay, kicking and pumping so fierce and so fine that you know, absolutely, that adult plus female plus dancer adds up not only to strain, but to strength.
At Salisbury Playhouse on 16 June and Edinburgh Festival theatre on 24 July.
