Samba and Tears and Bridging the Void is an experimental double bill interested in fusing movement and dance with multimedia.

Directed and choreographed by Sivan Rubinstein, Samba and Tears is a piece exploring the way we interact with the news and social media. Armed with only a laptop, performers Esther Manon Siddiquie, Eva Chauvet and Rosa Firbank dance their way through the piece unrelentingly with unstoppable commitment; the pair are audibly panting towards the end. The concept behind the 35 minute long performance is very intriguing. It is presented in a refreshingly stripped back manner with only a couple of effective light changes and soundscapes to illustrate the meaning of the dancers’ moves. However, this simplicity also seems to be the piece’s weakness. Too often I felt that I needed a little bit more guidance to understand how the abstract movements relate to the news. Perhaps this was my own fault and maybe I shouldn’t have looked so hard to find the meaning of it all as Samba and Tears works really well simply as a series of unattached snapshots inspired by the media. Yet still I was struggling to understand its overarching theme. Nevertheless, the determination of the performers is truly impressive, Eva Chauvet being the stand-out dancer to me.

Working with Experiential, Rachel Johnson choreographs Bridging the Void, a dance piece incorporating music and a video projection of the London skyline. Dancers Eleanor Palmer, Gabi Serani and Clélia Vuille move around with the audience in almost complete darkness, our feet touching the scattered leaves on the floor. They slowly start to crawl on the floor, not afraid to touch audience members, as the lights slowly start to fade in. As the piece develops, we start to see their shapes, their faces, and their movements, which begin to become more and more articulate, while the projection shows the video of the sunrise. It is quite a poetic image, accompanied by Josh Tomalin’s careful lighting design and James Welland’s highly intense score. It is almost too distracting how beautiful it is, so much so that the movements of the dancers are often upstaged by the atmosphere of the piece. Although the dancers do a great job at stretching the boundaries of their performance area, the choreography, sadly, is quite repetitive and lacks the substance to match the impressively rich world that is created around it. Despite this, there is a sense of meditative togetherness in the room, and the piece is at its strongest when it allows the spectator to tune out and just be present.

 

Samba and Tears/Bridging The Void played at the RichMix on 3 April. For more information and tickets, see the RichMix website.

Photo: Josh Tomalin