Two Theories

Karole Armitage

Two theories

 

I had only one theory. The assumption I had when I walked in to the Queen Elizabeth Hall was that punk is dead. Or at least that it is outdated. Punk has become a cultural artefact, so how could the revival of a piece that was so radical 30 years ago still have an impact today?

Armitage was going to have to try much harder to be sensational with two revised pieces. The attitude of the original work was still apparent: punk dance has a laziness to it that ballet does not have. It’s in the posture: in the way they hang their heads low and stoop their shoulders. Ballet begins each movement from the wrist, draws the limbs next so that it is all elegance and grace. But punk drives you from your hips and your shoulders, and from there you throw your arms and legs around you. It is movement driven from the very base of your body.

Where ballet seeks your appreciation and approval, punk doesn’t want it. It is a much younger discipline, with no desire to prove itself; its nonchalance is almost arrogant. The clash of the two art forms was well articulated on the stage by the tireless performers (their bodies glistened with the effort), but the true rebellious impetus has less relevance now than it might have had in the 80s. They danced like destructive teenagers, but the dated aesthetic made them seem almost like embarrassing parents.

Armitage herself introduced Two Theories, and admitted that it made her feel nostalgic to be back in London with these dances. Inspired by a scientific book on theoretical physics, Armitage’s choreography is itself a creative reaction; ‘it begins’, she said ‘with the unleashing of wildness into empty space’ and she surrendered the stage to her troupe. Barely clothed dancers appeared to disharmonious music, their physical variation as captivating as their movement. They were from all racial backgrounds, were tiny or tall or more muscle-bound than is usual for a dancer. They were (like the atoms they represented) unpredictable little things and not just because you couldn’t guess their movements, but also because they had an independent spirit that might have made them ignore their direction anyway.

As I watched I felt as though if I were to lift one of them and put them on the palm of my hand they would continue to dance, unaware of whether my palm faced up or tipped upside down. Like a windup toy that continued to move if you knocked it onto its side.

The second of the two theories, String, sought show how chaos and order could exist together. The classical Indian music ‘Dark Waves’ that accompanied it sounded like the breaking of dawn and the 10 dancers, now in white leotards, moved with the more graceful, swanlike gestures of traditional ballet, connected in chains across the stage.

After the interval the stage was set up for Drastic-Classicism, and as the guitar sounded its first electric yawn the musicians seemed like a teenage band practising in a garage. The dancers lounged against the back wall of the stage like images from an old vinyl cover, their costumes ripped and draped over them like cobwebs.

Drastic-Classicism lacks the restraint of rigid choreography, allowing the personality of each individual dancer to shine through.  There were moments where the company looked like ballerinas and held their bodies in statuesque positions, but mostly they maintained their hooligan mood. Drastic-Classicism is about finding synthesis in antithesis: in marrying contradictions and I saw beauty in its riotousness.

Perhaps it is because I missed the era of punk that I watched Armitage Gone! with the freshness of a child and was amazed by its ferocious attempt at recapturing the spirit of rebellion that I assume gave punk its energy back in the 80s. There was a certain wildness unleashed upon the stage but, remarkable though their dancing really was to me, perhaps it had become more of a pantomime of punk than a provocative challenge to conventional dance.