Take Me Somewhere reviews: Brexit Means Brexit | 21 Pornographies | Sonic Seance
Brexit Means Brexit, CCA, Glasgow **
21 Pornographies, Tramway, Glasgow ****
Sonic Seance, Tramway, Glasgow ***
The dancers act out a relationship that ranges from moments of harmony to tension, aggression, and finally rage; the audience are already holding cards that identify one of the seven stages of grief, handed to them as they entered the space. And all of those stages seem reflected in the movement of dancers Robert Hesp and Tanja Erhart; leaving the audience to consider the powerful emotional and conceptual space created by the title of the show, the movement of the dancers, and themselves, sitting in the dark clutching cards bearing words like anger, bargaining, denial.
Just when the conflict reaches its height, though, Saleh calls a halt; and after some slightly hesitant group movement, calls the audience into a circle to talk about their feelings about Brexit, and the divisions it has caused. The fact that the show foregrounds the stages of grief, though, assumes an anti-Brexit sentiment that doesn’t allow for much real debate or healing with those who disagree; and in any case, the nation is now so exhausted by three years of endless Brexit talk and self-examination that the whole exercise seems pointless, compared with the tougher discipline of creating a more sustained piece of dance, that would fully explore the pain and tensions of Brexit through its own much-needed language of movement and gesture.
Advertisement
Hide Ad21 Pornographies, seen briefly at the Tramway on Thursday, also begins with a voice from the audience; but here, it belongs to the Danish dancer and choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, who soon moves on to the stage to offer an exceptionally intense 65 minutes of theatre and dance on the subject of pornography and power, featuring her extraordinary no-holds-barred use of her own naked body, a stunning cumulative sound design by Peter Lenaerts, and a fantastic poetic script, which she speaks live into a face microphone as she moves around the stage.
There are echoes here of the whole history of pornography in Europe, from De Sade onwards, including a Genet-like feeling for the erotics of power, as generals and presidents indulge in weird humiliations of themselves and others, and a sense of that 1970s moment when, for just a few years, every kind of erotic excess seemed like a game between equals, played for fun.
Ingvartsen’s show is extreme, and not for the faint-hearted; but her brilliance blazes, on a dark stage lit only by harsh strips of fluorescence, leaving everyone who has followed her journey shocked, enthralled, and breathless with admiration.
Sonic Seance, by V/DA, is a lush and fascinating if uneven one-hour show created by four women artists of colour living in Scotland; and like Mette Ingvartsen’s work, it uses a combination of movement, poetic text, music and sound – with some added songs – to explore ideas around black women, and the fantasies projected on to them in a white-dominated world.
The idea of the Seance refers back to the way in which women denied a voice found a new kind of power, in the 19th and early 20th century, through spiritualism, and the claim to speak for the dead or the ancestors.
And while some sequences reflect that idea more vividly than others, and some sound as if they have swallowed a library-full of intersectional theory on women and colonialism, the whole gorgeous show – by performer-creators Patricia Panther, Letitia Pleiades, Ashanti Harris and Mele Broomes, with BSL artist Bea Webster, and luscious visual design by Sabrina Henry, Zephyr Liddell and Hana Allan – succeeds both in celebrating aspects of black heritage and modernity, and in mocking western expectations of the exotic, in a show full of energy, anger and promise.
JOYCE MCMILLAN
Brexit Means Brexit and 21 Pornographies, runs completed. Sonic Seance has a final performance at the Tramway this evening, and the Take Me Somewhere festival continues until 2 June.