Although the pandemic scuppered some plans for Candoco – such as those for its 30th anniversary last year – it also gave rise to new ones. To date, the company of disabled and non-disabled dancers has generally commissioned works by established choreographers; In Side Out, an intimate evening of new work, now opens up the artistic direction to newer choreographers and to disabled artists themselves.
As yet, it feels like an exploratory step rather than a decisive move. Seke Chimutengwende’s In Worlds Unknown weaves dance with poetry, its five performers speaking separate stanzas (one in sign language) as the corresponding text is screened behind them. To Jamie McCarthy’s textured score, the choreography sets the dancers in flurries and ripples. Movement, music, text, voice and signing afford many ways to “enter” the piece, but the non sequitur stanzas and density of poetic images suck energy from the other elements; it all feels like too much to process.
Soft Shell by Annie Hanauer is more streamlined. It begins by establishing idiosyncratic signatures for its four dancers, then shuffles them together so that its sass, seriousness, poses, wanderings and twitches meld into a choppy kind of coherence. For all that, it only gels towards the end, when the dancers don fragments of silvered costume so that they look part real, part fantasy – and finally, like the costumes themselves, parts of a larger whole.
The highlight (performed on opening night only) was Kat Hawkins’ bold solo Object Permanence. Solo? It’s more a group piece for Hawkins – a double amputee – and objects that represent both extensions of self and other presences: wheelchair, crutches, prosthetic feet, below-knee “stubbies”. Hawkins shows us the ambulations each combination enables, first slow, then fast, while a narration recounts experiences of time and pain. Then the tables are turned: the words speak of claiming time, and Hawkins enters into less functional, more exploratory, more polymorphously erotic relations with their objects.
Family Home Evening is a foretaste of a work in development by Joel Brown. A wheelchair dancer with Candoco, Brown now turns singer and storyteller, mixing movement into a broader tapestry of his own songs and reminiscences of his Mormon family. He’s a very personable presence, and his performance holds much promise – and warmth.
At Lilian Baylis theatre, London, until 18 November
