Leigh Warren Dance: A Dying Swan -
Leigh Warren Studios, Adelaide, 18 July 2015 -
It has not been smooth sailing for Daniel Jaber since he took on the artistic directorship of Leigh Warren Dance (LWD) in January of this year. Since LWD lost its Australia Council Triennial funding in 2012, it has depended on project grants. However, with all applications for this year being unsuccessful, the works that Jaber had planned for his inaugural season, some of which were already in development, have had to be postponed. As an alternative, Jaber has had to rely on crowd funding to mount a solo work in the Leigh Warren studio itself.
Whilst this might be making a virtue out of necessity, the premise of this particular work suits such a minimalist approach. In the program notes, Jaber writes that A Dying Swan is about loneliness, inspired by his recent experiences of working overseas whilst trying to sustain a long-distance relationship, and even by the stresses and strains of trying to find his feet in his new role as artistic director. In dealing with “the confronting intimacy of loneliness”, Jaber writes that he has experienced “feeling heartbroken, defeated, insecure, resentful, dangerous, light, joyous, and lost”, and these conflicting and contradictory emotions come through in the dance itself.
In Kialea-Nadine Williams, Jaber has found an extraordinary performer who is able to convey this range of emotions through her powerful physicality. The dance takes place in the round, with the audience seated around circular white flooring, which symbolizes the lake on which our swan will metaphorically die. Although snippets of Saint-Saëns's score to Fokine’s The Dying Swan play as we enter, there is no reference to that famous work in the choreography. Rather, it stands as a model for the loneliness of the dancer in front of an audience. Instead, the score comprises pop songs by Bjork and Anthony and the Johnsons, among others, along with spoken text about the psychological, physical and social impact of loneliness from psychologist John Cacioppo.
When Williams entered, her movement was initially restrained and exploratory - she seemed locked up in herself, almost frozen emotionally. These restrained segments were interspersed with bursts of explosive physicality, as she leapt, fell and tumbled, and literally threw herself across the space, several times crashing down on audience members who cradled her carefully. At other times she walked or ran around the periphery of the performance space appearing in search of something or someone. Interspersed with all this activity were moments of rest, when she listened to Cacioppo’s voice over whilst resting on the floor, sculling water from her drink bottle and even at one point taping up her feet. In the first part she was dressed in a short white skirt and singlet, but toward the end changed into a long filmy skirt and fringed top (courtesy of Adelaide designer Catherine Ziersch), but the significance of this costume change was obscure.
A Dying Swan flirts with commerciality in its choice of music and also the choreographic response to it, which, as Jaber admits in his notes, is a “return to commercial roots.” Yet it eschews the clichés of the music video through restraint, both in terms of its movement vocabulary and also in William’s avoidance of overt emotionality. Paradoxically, through keeping her face blank most of the time and letting her body speak, William’s performance was all the more powerfully affecting.
- Maggie Tonkin
Photos: © Chris Herzfeld Camlight Productions.