I remember reading a piece of criticism from a haphazard collection by Next Wave in 2010, where Brooke Stamp wrote of a young dancer performing his first work, that “standing in front of me, J was perfect as he was”. I feel like this about Brooke in Tearaway, but I want to qualify the flattery.
Tearaway is Brooke’s enquiry into the hauntings of ancient (comparatively speaking) choreographies – Akarova, Martha, Isadora. Bitches be present, and the aim seems to be a kind of honorary exorcism. It’s a great premise, and so indicative of Brooke’s preferred approach to dance making – that a dance can only really come from within you, from the way you feel, from the way you and only you perceive yourself, and that that information listened to carefully is worth sharing with the world. Brooke isn’t really a choreographer, she’s more a dance maker in fullest and most affirming sense of that term. If you think that distinction is a pejorative snark, it’s not – I say it more to point out a semantic difference between the two: choreography is ultimately the formal arrangement of motion. Something wilder and altogether more difficult to deal with is happening in Tearaway, something that is not always easy nor necessarily easy to look at – this work carries the potential for second to second failure with its outbursts of intuition driven accessings of past and present, and that is often difficult to watch.
In her program notes, Brooke talks about the process of performing Tearaway as interested in generating elemental qualities, something deeply basic and profound. Placed all around her on the floor within the warm confines of the studio space at Dancehouse, unfortunately backed by a large and creased white cyc, but I’ll forgive one abhorrence, are a number of white A3 pages, and written on these pages are poetical phrases: ‘PHASE SOLID’ ‘THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS GOING ON’ ‘THE CRATER OF MOTOR POWER’.
These papers are part of a larger visual proposition in the piece for imaginative, psychic and physical integration, an attempt to unite the past, the present and potentialities, acting as conduits for integrated ideas and actions across time and space. I want to talk about these pages later on – being a wordy person, they were keystones for how I began to think about the piece.
The movement that spins out of Tearaway‘s cosmic set up is beguiling, loose and relaxed and complimentary to past practices even as it clarifies its own territory. Triplet bobs a la Martha Graham Appalachian Spring; the effervescent jumps and ever so particular inertia of Isadora Duncan; a balletic-ally informed body and extraordinarily free moving facility particularly through the hips and ankles. The work is highly sectional, and the variable and energising movement vocabulary, pin-wheeling arms, feet easily moving into fifth position only to step out and find balance in a wide square legged stance, hands clenching, perfect post-modernity-plus, enhances the sense of differentiation, of moving through concepts and ideas working eventually towards a promulgation of pure internal energy pushed OUT: the sonic scream, Brooke’s voice amplified and fed back into the space as a kind of catharsis. I think of primal therapy, and see that moment as the blast wave which makes possible the clean(er) re-incarnation of DANCE Brooke, also in her program notes, says she wants to achieve in the performative space.
What I feel the most interesting aspect of Tearaway to be is its cosmic proportions, its spaciousness and its invitation to treat matter as uniform through the integration of multiple forms of matter manipulation, its invitation to see the world as constantly active in sympathy. Sound, set, visual pieces, lighting, costume. As much as matter, inaminate/animate objects, Tearaway is also a product of collaboration with Agatha Gothe-Snap and Kevin Lo, animate/animate objects. Energetic relationships are found between the ringing of numerous sources.
But what about words? What’s in a word? What I like about dance is that it so clearly interrupts that idea that language is the most formative aspect of who we are. Dance can be a radical opposite proposition to language. So when words are present among movement, they tend to stand up with powerful visibility, purely for their comparative sense of clarity. The direct-ish information they offer is present, and a clearer component of the aether. I saw words in big black script, around the room on the floor, and was provoked by their poetical dis-junctions. The question came to be: where in the dance is this idea, is that feeling, are these expressions?
‘PHASE SOLID’. Another dance, a beautiful dance, by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker to Steve Reich’s ‘Violin Phase’ deals with changing primacies in tempo and rhythm. The dance there is enabled by the musical information, embodied, grabbed onto with a tight hold, and picked-up over and over again as the position of ‘first’ changes in cycles. Anne says that without Steve’s music, such a dance would never have been possible.
What I wondered about Brooke’s piece was how in the midst of its complex propositions, ‘PHASE SOLID’ being one, a comparatively clear one to look at, it is possible to keep track of all this input. There are indeed ‘A LOT OF THINGS GOING ON RIGHT NOW’.
The challenge of this Tearaway seems to be the constant, and I mean constant as it’s not a phone-it-in kind of work, integration of source with presence. I guess the problem to solve is the very phenomenon that the work proposes to explore. In a way, I am overloaded by Tearaway and can quickly short circuit when its charismatic force falters.
This is enormously powerful dance making. Don’t close your eyes.
Tearaway was performed as part of the Keir Choreographic Award
Dancehouse, Carlton
3-13 July
http://brookestamp.info/
