Tramway, Glasgow, 13 June 2009

Say It's Not True (Photo - Walter Bickman)

NORMAN DOUGLAS is from Govan. Govan is the place with all these Gaelic street names. Huge numbers of Highlanders and Islanders, over centuries, have made new lives in that part of one city. Many have gone out again from it, back to their home regions or out to see a bit of the world.

The Fablevision company, based in Govan and dealing mainly with community-based film projects, developed an exciting proposal to explore this theme, along with Highlands and Islands collaborators. That’s how I came to know of Norman Douglas’s work.

He’s a choreographer and still sometimes a dancer. He was keen to bring his skills back to his home community in Lewis to explore this theme, for a production scheduled to happen in an old shipbuilding shed in November of last year.

I was commissioned to make a link between the stories of the Scottish Islands and the stories of the Govan shipyards. But there were funding issues and it was not possible to realise the project fully, though a reduced scale performance did happen with Douglas’s involvement.

I found it difficult to see how what seemed to be a minimalist tendency in his choreography would fit with what was in danger of developing into a full blown romance on the history of the seafaring and shipbuilding Gaels and their place in an urban community (with choral speaking of the Director’s vision by the Glasgow Govan choir).

I couldn’t see that November performance. So I was definitely going to grab the chance to see the only Scottish performance of three new works by Douglas and his company. This took a series of chess moves with the UK transport system which is much too complex to summarise, but the short, intense experience in Tramway 1 was worth every step.

A simple projection was the set for Say it’s not true, a journey into the body of Camille Claudel, mistress of Rodin but a sculptor in her own right. She was incarcerated in mental institutions for many years. I have before me a plate showing her 1902 work, ‘Perseus and the Gorgon’. The marble is still writhing. This is a clue as to Douglas’s interest – which is expressing the tensions within our lives, which are on the scale of the huge myths if they are given voice.

The voice is movement. Every part of the unobtrusive staging serves it. The bronzes on the brickwork wall were like a studio backcloth rather than a powerful presentation. The lighting, so quietly perfect, so that the single dancer’s body wears a slip that seems like bronze. And the result was that you could focus on the abstract movements which conveyed a fearsome energy in a slight human body.

Of course you got a sense of turmoil and imprisonment but also of an undiminished will to struggle for breath. Now I know nothing of the technical challenges of such dance to the dancer, but I would imagine that any body could only move with that disciplined force for a short time.

And it requires a serious concentration from the audience. In a way I’d like to look back now and see a filmed version. In another way I feel this is the challenge and strength of the medium – and you got the sense that the choreography is by someone who fully understands it – an unobtrusive master at work.

It looked like a prop was going to be too dominant in the second dance, Touching Tongues, executed by Douglas this time. A teddy bear was suspended over the stage, with blindfold and arms/paws held by gaffer-tape. When it swung it was gut-wrenching in its allusions. The dancer was in thrall to it but fighting. But the result was indeed dance.

The body seemed heavy, not a natural vehicle for the complex moves. But the style was completely different – jerks and fast movements this time. I think the piece got beyond any need to pin down the storytelling to a literal narrative. Saturday’s Guardian carried a striking image of Helen Mirren on stage as the mythic Phèdre – a woman in thrall to a forbidden and impossible sexual obsession. And there was something of that sense of conflict here.

So we were ready for the interval less than half an hour in. The final piece, Chora, brought two dancers on stage. The opening was huge drama. The rattle of chains and the image of two women, limited in their own trajectories, counterbalancing each other in the air. It was good that the chains were dropped after that sustained metaphor because the interplay of the two dancers needed no props at all – beyond the meticulous lighting.

I’ve had limited opportunities to see dance, but when the leaner and the more muscular body locked into a single shape, I remembered stumbling into an Edinburgh Festival show when I was a student. It was the Merce Cunningham group and I remember being at first confused by the dynamism happening everywhere.

Then I forgot to look for the details of narrative and instead let the more abstract visual music work. I’ve still some of the imagery in my head and this piece evoked it. Not at the time, but afterwards, by comparison.

The interplay alternated between kinetic and balanced. Acceptance and struggle with an inevitable relationship. It could be mother and daughter but again, I think it’s not that kind of storytelling. After the beautiful but still bristling interlockings you’d see one finger tenderly tap down another spine and the detail itself was enough of the story.

The music is well amplified but not visible on stage. No distractions are possible. I came out wondering as to how dance as complete within its own terms as this could be included in other types of performance – large scale music-theatre or alternating with storytelling or poetry. My feeling is that it can’t, in terms of combining. But I’d love to see some of the great simple timeless island stories told this way.

© Ian Stephen, 2009

Links

• Tramway

• Norman Douglas