Interplay cascades between the playful and the profound, creating a work as tightly-bound as it is exploratory.
In ‘Next of Kin’ (choreographed by Marcus Jarrell Willis) there is a subversion of the typical closed embrace; here, the two dancers dance side by side, with one often darting into the dark before the other, waiting for the spotlight and the other to follow. The movements are fun and cheeky but also touch on a deeper tension; there is embrace and then the back arches away. Moving through life with another is never perfect; never easy.
‘Why are people clapping?!’ (choreographed by Ed Myhill, restaged by Camille Giraudeau) acts as the most experimental of the four dances, successfully creating an intimacy between audience and dancer, both through its organic feel of improvisation (though there is no doubt it is carefully crafted) -and the simplicity of the rule holding the piece together: clapping can be the only sound. Thus unfolds the depiction that sound has more force than initially realised; it can unify, can act as a tool of power, as a source of individuality, as an energy the body is powerless against – all parts of the body, from leg to arm to tongue to eye.
‘Small Talk’ (choreographed by Pett Clausen-Knight) comes as the most effective and bittersweet piece of the night. Against the swell of orchestral music, there is a painful dramaticity of two dancers in grey pulling together and pushing apart amongst the domesticity of a rug, a lamp and a chair. The talk may only be ‘small’ – conversations lived and breathed in a simple living room – but the length of performance (25 minutes) gives the impression we are watching two entire lifetimes, an entire marriage, unfold in this ‘small’, sorrowful way. The three props are used masterfully, preventing any sense of stagnation in a piece whose focus, in many ways, is on the familiarity and estrangement that comes from repetition.
‘Suite Release’ (choreographed by Marcus Jarrell Willis and Yusha-Marie Sorzano) comes as something of a grand finale. Music is used here not so much as a backdrop to the dancing but as the anthem to it, from ‘How Great Thou Art’ by Labrinth to ‘United in Grief’ by Kendrick Lamar. Freedom and escape and the release of agony are found through the striking nature of collective movement. While the dancers mouthing to the lyrics sometimes feels clumsy, it is the organic vocality of the dancers on stage (increasingly cheering and celebrating one another) that aids the work, breaking down the wall between performance and pure enjoyment, between audience and performer. One feels they have not merely spectated dancing but been in the midst of it.
The success of ‘Interplay’ is not in each piece alone but in the power of their ordering. In many ways ‘Small Talk’ mirrors ‘Next of Kin’ in its exploration of what happens when two people attempt life together. In much the same way, ‘Why are people clapping?!’ and ‘Suite Release’ take sound, and the way the body both yields and is awakened by it, as their focal point. This cohesion allows for an emotional build, from a playful start to a cathartic release to a powerful ending. One can’t help but leave feeling that life, in all its complexity, in the way we interplay with it, has been dignified and therefore celebrated.
TICKETS: leedsplayhouse.org.uk/event/interplay
Main image: Suite Release.
