m.guardian.co.uk It began in a vaulted church hall in the East End. According to the email sent to a select band of dance aficionados, the underground event, the Trip the Light Fantastic Junk Jam, would be a "sweaty journey from foot-stomping tribal madness into the twilight zone".
First, a shiny black membrane was laid over the floorboards. Then the instruments were laid out: xylophone-like creations fashioned from toilet pipes, cymbals made from bicycle wheels, daisy chains of spanners for chimes, and piles of rubbish to be battered with whatever was to hand. As soon as the musicians arrived, the event burst into life, the junkyard orchestra sending waves of noise through the room. The dancers began tentatively, but, as the music took hold, they were soon hurling themselves around. Those with children released them into the mix, spinning, grinning and whirling like crazed little dervishes: "Something like this can only happen here," said dancer and organiser Giuliana Majo. "Only in an alternative space like this, where there are no restrictions or expectations, can people feel completely free." The Junk Jam was one of high points in my quest to discover the UK's underground dance scene, by far the most elusive, ephemeral and camera-shy of the UK's subcultures. Having interviewed such great choreographers as Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch and Trisha Brown, I'd always been fascinated by the legendary underground movements they sprang from. Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and the outlandishly hip beatniks who gathered there in the early 1950s, practically gave birth to Cunningham, introducing him to "happenings" and the chance methods that came to dominate his work. Judson Church in New York, too, launched the careers of such towering figures as Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. Leading British choreographer Rosemary Butcher, a life-long disciple of Judson, feels the indomitable underground spirit that was unleashed there is "the secret way forward". But finding the UK underground dance scene wasn't easy. My first enquiries hit a brick wall. "There isn't an underground in any coherent sense," said Thom Shaw, an editor at Dance Theatre Journal. "What we have here is just a collection of individuals producing a disparate selection of work." Even those who passionately believe in the alternative scene weren't happy about the Guardian poking around. "If you write about it, it will no longer be the underground, will it?" said the director of the Chisenhale Dance Space, Bryony Kimmings, who calls herself haphazard, dangerous and loud on her website. "So don't do it. Stop it right now. Go AWAY!" The UK has already enjoyed its very own – brief – golden age of underground dance, though. Moving Being, founded in 1968 by former art student Geoff Moore, pioneered experimentalism with anarchic works incorporating texts (Plato, Shakespeare, Germaine Greer), films, slide projections, music and (just a little) recognisable dance. The Village Voice called it "the most committed attempt in England to refertilise the archaic notions of dance". Another force was Limited Dance Company, founded by Sally Potter (better known now as a film-maker) and choreographer Jacky Lansley. They specialised in immersive happenings such as Lochgilphead, performed in an icy loch in the Scottish highlands in 1974. "We emerged out of the loch in black evening dress and flippers," says Lansley. "Then we met a corresponding couple in white coming down the street. It was about beauty and ugliness, using space in a radical new way." Perhaps the most iconic of all the 1970s groups was X6, formed in an old tea warehouse in the London docklands. "It was all about living and working together," says founder Fergus Early. "We wanted to forge a fundamentally new approach, to fuse dance with politics and performance art." Pieces such as Bleeding Fairies in 1977 deconstructed the ballet stereo-types of swans, nymphs, sylphs and earth mothers in a menstrual riot of radical feminism. Other works, such as By River and Wharf, took the audience on a queasy journey through the dance undergrowth: "We brought them on a tour of the derelict dockland," says Early, "including part of the river and the surrounding housing estates. We performed on the roof and in the park. The audience didn't passively watch – the dance happened to them." Today, there is no shortage of pretenders to this experimental crown. At first, my quest threw up a blizzard of troupes, including Dog Kennel Hill, a group making esoteric, site-specific pieces whose latest work will be performed on a barge drifting along UK waterways. There was Robin Dingemans, a New Zealander whose volatile, grandstanding style has earned him the title of "the wild man of British dance"; and the Institute of Crazy Dancing in Leeds, who create dancescapes in post-industrial settings. I also attended a mini-festival of alt-dance in the attic of a decommissioned police station in Bristol. But there was no trace in any of this of the boundary-obliterating spirit and collective energy that is the signature of the underground. "I don't feel we're part of any movement," says Henrietta Hale of Dog Kennel Hill. "We don't live together. Everyone is trying to earn money and we are all relentlessly busy. There's not enough hanging out." According to Early, the conditions that facilitated the earlier movements no longer exist in the UK. "In the 70s, you could – and we did – live off the dole," he says. "Squatting was an option, and there were these artist schemes where we just had to pay £5 a week for a whole house! We were free to create." But, as the history of the underground has shown, it only takes one visionary to map the way ahead. X6 is one organisation still operating that can boast a direct, organic and elemental link back to the 1970s experimentalists. After being evicted from Butler's Wharf, they moved into the top floor of a derelict varnish factory called Chisenhale, a grimy red-bricked edifice in Bow, east London. They surgically removed their magnificent old maple floor, on which they had created so many iconic underground works, and grafted it onto the new location, where it still remains – transferring that experimental spirit up through the feet of a new generation. Although familiar to dance devotees, Chisenhale Dance Space, as X6 became, almost never get mainstream coverage. It's a troupe with a swaggering self-belief, a devout secret society with young, fashionable disciples and a progressive agenda. Its alternative bluster is infectious. "We're starting a revolution," says Kimmings. "Our mission is to provide a home for those who create innovative, experimental or risk-taking work. We're the antithesis of The Place." She's referring to the home of the London Contemporary Dance School. Chisenhale showcases edgy work including, at the events I attended, Iona Kewney, whose improvised work features acrobatics and contortionism, to the deafening sounds of guitar feedback; and Joseph Mercier, who blends classical ballet and leather harnesses, provocative nudity and queer politics. Of all the organisations I visited, the Chisenhale alone felt like it might be the "secret way forward". As the irrepressible Kimmings says, "There is a scene. Being uber cool and hanging out suits this generation fine! Talking about work, learning from each other, looking towards Europe for hope." 'Just 30 of us in my living room' There is also, however, the phenomenon of experimental dance and live art platform evenings now sweeping through east London, not to mention cabaret. As well as the astonishing Trip the Light Fantastic, regular nights include ParkRoadPilot. This began back in 2005 as an impromptu gathering of likeminded experimentalists in the flat of Brazilian dancer Rebecca Bogue: "It was an environment where you could literally try anything," she recalls, "Just 30 of us in my living room doing all kinds of crazy shit." Now monthly, ParkRoadPilot takes place in venues so subterranean I've had to swear not to reveal them. It's invite only. The show I saw began with a startling display of avant-garde belly-dancing, courtesy of Anokha Coxe, before moving on to an immensely silly piece of description-defying crockery-smashing dance poetry centred around Cinderella's incarceration on a space station. "There is plenty of room for disaster, equally there is plenty of room for the sublime," says Bogue. "That's the fun of it. The artists simply email me and I put them on the list. Half the time, I have no idea of what I'm going to see." The upsurge of new monthly showcases includes Air Supply, whose inaugural Test Launch event took place at the end of 2010 with a mixture of living sculpture, mud-smearing, frenetic dance and comedy; and Art Evict, a pop-up evening of live art and dance in derelict spaces. Even Chisenhale is getting in on the act with its new Art Club, on the first Wednesday of every month. "These nights are to open minds and inspire people," Kimmings says. "Vital to keeping the scene transient and alive, they're about creating something new, risky and different." I can only conclude that the UK does boast a vibrant, if modestly sized, dance underground: you've just got to be on the right mailing lists. Could it snowball into a dance phenomenon? As cuts slice into the mainstream, we may yet find that this anarchic underground is the future of dance – the breeding ground of its hottest new practitioners. "I believe the scene will develop," says Kimmings. "I hope the changes within the arts at the moment inspire new artists to take control of a situation they don't like. The only way they can be successful is to make their own scene." -- http://m.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jan/30/underground-arts-dance-counterculture?cat=stage&type=article Via InstaFetch -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Sixties-L" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sixties-l?hl=en.
