Press Reviews
The Observer, Sunday 9 March
TAKE YOUR PARTNERS? NO THANKS
The joy of the solo, for performer and audience, is underlined in three different ways
By Luke Jennings
Sheffield-based Charlotte Vincent is one of the most challengingly theatrical of the UK's choreographer-directors. She tends to use the same performers and in her double bill at the Place, she allots solo pieces to two stalwarts, Janusz Orlik and Aurora Lubos. Test Run sees Orlik dryly explaining the absence of the rest of the Vincent Dance Theatre ensemble - 'Two with broken legs ... one in rehab' - and rejoicing in the chance to dance 'without the usual things getting in the way. Other dancers, for example'.
As two violinists play, he launches into an extended sequence of scooping turns and torso ripples intercut with snatches of classical dance. But he soon finds himself competing for space with the attention-hungry musicians and forced into ever-more exhibitionistic poses to hold the audience's attention.
Look at Me Now, Mummy presents a fragged-looking Lubos surrounded by the detritus of motherhood: burst balloons, soiled clothes and saucepans, rubbish all over the place. Everything, that is, except a baby. So during a series of mundane domestic tasks presented as bravura performances, and interspersed with jags of quiet weeping, Lubos makes one out of wrapping-paper and slips it in the microwave. Out it comes when she's made a cake, but the birthday candles set it on fire, so she douses it, now messily disintegrating, in the dirty casserole.
Vincent has long felt that female directors are second-class citizens in the dance world - left to mother their companies, never fast-tracked - but this feminist subtext never overpowers Lubos's exquisitely pitched performance or compromises the choreography's harrowingly sustained focus. Small but beautiful.
The Herald Friday 1 February
ACT ONE, TRON THEATRE, GLASGOW
By Shona Craven
THE three performers of Vincent Dance Theatre's Test Run - one dancer, two violinists - shuffle onstage with nervous expressions, a plastic carrier bag and apologies for their lack of preparation. It's daft but perfectly pitched; the kind of thing a director might do playfully to lull the audience into just the right frame of mind to be blown away by what follows. It works.
As dancer Janusz Orlik positions himself and musician Patrycja Kujawska begins to blow into her violin, all signs point to a comic pastiche. Then Matt Howden picks up his violin and as his bow deliberately scrapes the strings, Orlik's limbs begin to flex. From that moment on Test Run is a tremendous fusion of virtuoso musicianship and mesmerising dance. Orlik initially seems to be a marionette controlled by the strings of the instruments, but then the roles switch and he takes physical revenge on his tormentors. The trio's abrupt exit is even more low-key than their entrance, with barely a backward glance at the awe-struck audience.
In contrast, Aurora Lubos can't keep her eyes off us, the imagined audience in her balloon-strewn bomb-site of a kitchen. Even when she's playing a sleeping beauty she can't help but sneak a peek, just to check we're still watching. Look At Me Now, Mummy is a piece about the conflict between maternal and exhibitionist instincts. Its protagonist delights in eliciting laughter and gasps of surprise as her behaviour becomes ever more erratic, but an inevitable descent into melancholy follows, which feels all the more harrowing thanks to our complicity in what has come before.
Music - and Dance!
By John Highfield
Even though he's a musician, violinist Matt Howden would concede that's he's not much of a dancer.
'I've seen myself on film,' he confesses. 'I'm like a badly wound up broken toy. There's a slightly jagged edge to it.'
Nevertheless, when Charlotte Vincent - founder of internationally-acclaimed Sheffield company, Vincent Dance Theatre - saw Matt perform, she took a rather different view.
'I saw him and if I'm honest, it wasn't only the sound he was making that drew me but the fact that his body moves in a particular way as he plays and I was totally transfixed by this.'
What was particularly interesting for Charlotte was that she had actually been working with strings for the past four years so the foundation of a link between VDT and Sieben, the project name for the work Matt does with his songs, was already there.
The result of that collaboration is Test Run, a 30-minute solo for dancer Janusz Orlik, performed live on two violins by Matt and VDT regular performer Patrycja Kujawska.
'I think there is something very special about string instruments and how heartfelt they are,' says Charlotte, though before anybody gets an idea of soaring romanticism in his work, Matt quickly steps in with: 'I just close my eyes and play!'
He's been developing Sieben so that he can play live without any backing, using a loop pedal, a violin, and his own voice, starting with a simple melody, adding a bass part or two and even a drum effect by playing beats on various parts of the violin - kick behind the strings, snare by slapping the body, and shaker by scratching the pickup with his chin. Harmonies and melodies are then layered over the top, with Matt then adding his own voice to complete the live performance.
'Matt can become an orchestra on his own,' Charlotte says. 'What he did when I first heard him play live was fill the room with many, many layers of sound.'
'What he has done for Test Run is basically to create an arc of sound which starts quietly, crescendos in the middle and then goes back to stillness and silence.'
'It is music working alongside dance and that's why I invited Matt to become a much more collaborative part of the performance.'
The piece, the theme of which is who leads who as the balance shifts between the music of Matt and Patrycja and the performance of Janusz, grew out of a tight four-week development and rehearsal period, an entirely new process for Matt, who is more used to working in the recording studio than the dance studio.
'I thought I've never done this before but I'm always up for a new challenge,' he laughs. 'And now I'm discovering muscles I never knew I had - or I'd forgotten about at least!'
Test Run, Crucible Studio
By Ian Soutar
The distinction between contemporary dance and multi-performance and physical theatre is becoming increasingly arbitrary and Sheffield's Vincent Dance Theatre continue to push the boundaries.
Here we get mesmerising movement, haunting sounds and constant humour.
The short piece, commissioned by Dance Umbrella for a performance in London and due to tour in a double bill next year, is ostensibly a solo dance by Janusz Orlik.
From its shambolic start when the dancer and two violinists amble on stage, shuffle, bicker and then commence their 'test run,' it is obvious this is much more as the musicians gradually enter the performer's space.
At first he seems to be directing them but eventually the musicians are surely determining the movement. Or are they simply all of a piece?
Sheffield musician Matt Howden is not a natural mover (that's the point) but finds himself part of the action.
Patryjca Kujawska has done that often before but she is also required to do a spot of comedy acting (in her second language). There's multi-skilling for you.
Vincent Dance Theatre and Sieben
By John Highfield
Here's a surprise, a piece of contemporary dance that is both short and to the point and, even more strikingly, extremely funny.
Dancer Janusz Orlik and two musicians - VDT regular Patrycja Kujawska and Sieben guest Matt Howden - wander on stage and begin to bicker between themselves about their lack of facilities, the absence of set, the size of the company.
Then the music begins and what develops is a completely hypnotic fusion of music and movement, a beguiling, brisk piece of dance theatre in which boundaries are increasingly blurred.
So although Orlik is the centre of the dance - an intense, captivating stage presence combining great physicality with a touching lyricism and sense of drama - the two musicians are unstoppably drawn into the heart of the action as a violin duet becomes a violin duel.
Classic and contemporary collide as Orlik seems to be manipulated by the music but, at the same time, Kujawska and Howden too seem to be controlled by the sound they create.
It reaches an exhausting crescendo in less than 30 minutes and then returns to normality with the three picking up the pieces and ambling off stage, leaving just the delightful memory of an outstanding piece of new work.