An Lanntair, Stornoway, 16 October 2008

The Blank Album

A BITING breeze over the bins and takeaways and other urban ornaments in the city of Stornoway. Darkness has returned to evenings so it was time to patronise An Lanntair again. The mainly local audience was united in not really knowing what to expect.

The Blank Album is billed as dance, music, comedy. The producer Natasha Gilmore is a choreographer but her work ranges through site-specific installations to music video. I realised I’d seen her work for theatre in Cumbernauld’s recent intense and driven staging of The Wasp Factory.

So there was me, who usually likes contemporary dance but hits the arts wall at conventional music theatre. With my mate who can handle classical opera but doesn’t get what dance is about. United in our faint understanding of popular music today. What they call punk now sounds pretty melodic to me and I don’t know what Indie means.

Think I’ve a clue ’bout drum and bass which maybe takes us a shade along the track to the quirky eclectic delight of Shooglenifty. The bass player Quee MacArthur is a collaborator in composing for that band but he also uses a wide range of electric and acoustic music with sampled sound to create work for many performers including Boilerhouse and The X Factor Dance Company.

His billing as the composer definitely held sway in these latitudes. We were met with a line up of instruments. You wondered if they would just get up and start moving by themselves. Cello and fiddle looked pretty authentic but at least one of the instruments looked made to bend in mid air. In the days when I had hair I had a conceptual one very like it. A lot of guitars. And the images on flyers and posters strengthens that expectation of up-front tongue-in-cheek rock group mayhem.

The performance includes all that in a witty satirical way but much more. The form of the work is the compilation of an album. The music styles are varied but there are catchy possible singles spaced between the more free pieces. The band members are spiky dressers and the sexual tensions, rivalries and shades of interaction are dramatised in both music and movement.

You’ve got the mad ego of the up-front guy who is allowed to run with that but only as long as it’s an asset to the band. You have the shift from the cello as a sombre background tone to a dancing solo instrument. The bow is a gentle wand repairing rifts but then it’s a whip cracking out in desperation.

It’s difficult to describe how the music and movement work together. You get a clue from their website (see below). Music videos here are more restrained than the performance but the integration of visual elements to the rhythms of the footage is tight.

I think many of us went away a bit puzzled as to what it was we’d experienced. My friend who doesn’t get dance found it witty but also moving in places. At times there were laughs out loud and there were games to warm up the audience. But unlike some of the excesses of rock and roll in my younger days, we always came back to a close and humane study of the way people play with each other. On or off the stage.

I’ll leave you with a memory of one part of the show. A dancer is performing a headstand. But one of the hands supporting her is on the chest of one of the other band members. The tension is present but in balance. She then sings, minimal but quite moving lines.

But she is also slowly pedalling her legs, perhaps for balance. Which transmits of course through her body tension to the chest of the guy on the floor. And the reflection of these leg movements is another part of the dance, caught by the simple lighting.

There is a virtuoso element but it serves a purpose. I can’t say why I found that moving but I wasn’t the only one who did. There are chances to catch this show again next year. If you’re within traveling distance don’t miss it.

The Blank Album can be seen at the Garrison Theatre, Shetland, on 11 February 2009; the Sunart Centre, Strontian, on 26 February 2009; and the MacRobert Arts Centre, Stirling, on 17 April 2009.

© Ian Stephen, 2008

Links

• The Blank Album
• An Lanntair
• Ian Stephen