|
|
|
|
|
Pictures: Dan Tucker Hidden Warwick Arts Centre ***** Leamington Spa and its environs has emerged as one of the outstanding cultural centres not just of the blossoming Midlands, but as one of National status. Just think: its sparkling new Royal Spa Centre, home to theatre, opera and a wide span of the Arts; there's the historic Pump Rooms, the Bath of the Midlands, flourishing even before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, and ideal for chamber music. There's the Loft, riverside home to true theatrical excellence. Add to that nearby Warwick - St. Mary's Collegiate Church, which dates back almost to King John, and hosts many of Leamington Music's endlessly appetising (not least choral) concerts, long pioneered by Richard Phillips. And in this case, Warwick Arts Centre - creative hub of the University, one of Harold Wilson's six new foundations hence this year celebrating its 60th anniversary. Christopher Monks' Armonico Consort has progressed not just to phenomenal musical quality at every stage, and achieved deserved International fame, but has reached out to create children's choirs (surging into primary schools to excite children into singing), youth choirs, choirs for the elderly and retired, choirs for any of those somehow impaired. But one of the most stupendous, daring, challenging, creative, positively explosive arts projects to hail from Leamington - in fact 37 years ago, in 1988, and what a record that represents - is the dance (or dance-circus) ensemble Motionhouse. Do people, especially the young, know about them? You bet. The Theatre at Warwick University was packed to the gills - I've never seen it so full, not a seat to be had, for the first night of Artistic Director Kevin Finnan's - and, he would modestly emphasise, his young Assistant Director Daniel Massarella's, another life and soul of the party - and yes, this was a party – new creation, entitled Hidden.
If anything even more luminous than Finnan's last big touring show, Lumen. Three more shows to go at Warwick, three more sell-outs. This seething young audience certainly knows when something's not just good, but exceptional, dazzling, enthralling. In many respects it's a young person's show. But we can all, even geriatrics, if we want to, become a young person. Motionhouse's magic makes us so. We applauded - how could one not? - Armonico's outstanding outreach programme. But reaching out, fulfilling its own dream, is precisely one of the most important things Motionhouse undertakes. Look up its Dance and Circus classes: 4-year-olds; 11s; Teens Dance and Circus; Grown-ups Dance. Behind its shows - one like tonight's, is a profound moral sense. Some of its aspirations - inferring duties and responsibilities and a World view from the essence of the riveting dance it stages - may be a little optimistic, for this is Art, not preaching. Yet the aim it rates highest, and hopes to share, involving and inviting in a diverse audience, especially the young, the juvenile and adolescent, eager to devour Motionhouse's vision, its example - and yes, its wisdom - is that of the joy, the satisfaction, the spirit of service, the beauty - and the love - that it feels drawn to counter: the vilenesses of the present world we see around us today: dead Ukrainian (and Russian) boys; massacred Palestinians in the name of smug (I didn't say neo-Nazi) vengeance; the dead of Sudan or the Congo; the misery wrought by possibly avoidable natural disasters. What this audience was feeling was sheer wonder. What it was witnessing, in Hidden, was a miracle. Well, seven miracles for a start. I kept wondering, in the first half, about its silvery costumes (Cathy Eddolls), abetting so ingeniously all the twisting and turning, vaulting and catapulting, wriggling and shaping and reshaping and re-reshaping: "Omegatech Oxo-Biodegradable Stretchfilm" - sounds like an advert for Silvikrin shampoo and conditioner - material that somehow underwrote the staggering impact and awesomely devised neutrality of our Magnificent Seven. And yes, there is a huge multitalented backroom and backstage team that makes all this possible. I particularly liked 'Fabric wrangling' and 'Metal fabrication'. But you see the point: Motionhouse's aspiration to, the company's gift of, promulgating togetherness, collaboration, the opposite of stand-offishness, isolation, spurning, hostility, loathing, rejection, is promoted by the team behind as much as by the fabulously expressive septet onststage. When we marvel at the acrobatics (the circus bit?) we are cheering on the whole faultless ensemble, fronstage and backstage alike. I found myself puzzling why seven onstage is such a brilliantly sensational number. A whole kaleidoscope is what it audaciously generates. It seems possible to achieve astonishing variety with this septem, șapte, ephta, siete. These wonderful, ever-angular dancers looked, especially at the start of the astounding shorter second half, as if they were attached to the 60+ (more like 75%) degree rake - Simon Dormon has designed, wonderfully, for Motionhouse ever since its second year - which constituted the whole Act II set, by retainers made of velcro. Yet having ascended this tempting Everest, or Kangchenjunga, they slide down like human hailstones: no velcro there. The music matches it, too. Modal descending octaves, Minimalism writ large, yet ever so impressively restrained. The effect of classical "minimalism" is that it runs along like a skein of yarn. There is constant movement, yet everything seems to stand still. It works at times; some composers' results are more stimulating than others'. Here (Tim Dickinson, Sophy Smith, both Motionhouse regulars) the effect was perfect. It complemented the stagework. It lent the visuals one might almost say, meaning. Like Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the music lent the scampering protagonists just the supernatural feeling, and commentary, they needed. The dexterity - the knack, proficiency - of Motionhouse in action is the phenomenal range of its interactions. The unbounded high spirits. The frankly gobsmacking precision, accuracy and finesse. The power of the invention, by which (as Finnan points out) the performers take an idea from the director and mould it, plasticine-like, into the unpredictable, the astonishing, the radiant, the courageous, Their own fresh take on the overall intention. Nothing like your Swan Lake., even Matthew Bourne's (Billy Elliott) all-male corps: back at the Hippodrome, Saturday 8th to Saturday 15th February. No. This is an experience incessantly, unceasingly, out of this world. One is constantly aghast, and not only when they throw each other into the air (they're fond of that, though manage to catch one another), but at every single interlocking: of legs, of pliant arms, muscled shoulders, of engaging naked torsos that could be amorous, naked torsos, boy-girl, boy-boy gay, girl-girl: a flood of love-making, of fondness while interlocking, of mutual daring, of unnerving shared risk. Fair youth, comely wench, if you believe you know everything you can do with your body, think again. To 09-02-25. Roderic Dunnett 06-02-25 Hidden returns to the Midlands later this year appearing at Malvern Theatres, 13 May and Birmingham Hippodrome 10-11 Ociober |
|
|
Index page Warwick Arts Reviews A-Z Reviews by Theatre Tweet |
|
|
|
