Choreographer
Jasmin Vardimon
Performers
Leon Baugh
Luke Burrough
Malfalda Deville
Kath Duggan
Jasmin Vardimon
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Lullaby
Jasmin Vardimon
Dance Company at
Richmond Theatre
21 February 2005
Joanna Vardimom's Dance Company was founded in 1997. Through a variety of dance styles and techniques she has focused on issues of health and sickness. Lullaby is no exception. It is set in a hospital ward and uses the privacy curtains and a very strong hospital bed for some of the scenes and acts.
Lullaby uses five dancers that included Vardimon herself as well as Leon Brough, Luke Burrough, Mafalda Deville and Kath Duggan. The best part of the evening was the superlative movement of the dancers. Vardimom in her choreography requires very precise athletic movement; much of the time dancers seems to bent or bending double, and in their duos to be twisting each other round in what in other circumstances would be considered violent. Yet the dancers are athletes, and while they don't make the moves seem effortless they are never less than graceful and perfectly controlled.
Some of the symbolism of the dances was hard to interpret, and maybe in a rather modernistic way movement (the medium), dominated the content (message). That's fine for an aesthetic experience, but not for something that purports to be about something different or deeper.
It's inevitable in dance you consider the body, and through the body the health of the body and its desires. In both boy/girl and boy/boy scenes there was a good deal of suggested sexuality, both in the second scene in the hospital waiting room between two young opposite gender lovers and in the excellent scene where one dancer uses the microphone for some outstanding body-rhythm. While dancing he also makes the music by tapping the long-lead microphone on his body, on his partner's body and on other physical objects. The dexterity of the rhythm-making and the rich range of imaginative uses of the microphone made this scene a good example of Vardimon at her best using minimal resources to maximum effect. Though it would be hard to single out any particular dancer as all five work as a team and the contribution of each is well matched. However, though the two male dancers with the amount of lifting and twisting seemed slightly to steal the show in the sheer exuberance, polish and conviction of their movements.
Musically Lullaby is mostly barren, which is a pity as the one or two scenes where some more substantial music was used the significance of the dance moved from just athleticism to purposeful acting. Suggestive music with its own associations would have added greatly to Lullaby, though this did not mean there was not plenty to admire, and on many occasions enjoy. One good aspect of Lullaby was that at seventy-five minutes it did not outstay its welcom.
Roderick Swanston
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