Dance at Durham Fringe-2024
It’s after 10 p.m. The last day of Durham Fringe comes to an end. The festival co-organiser, Daryl Folkard, runs up and down the stairs of Dunelm House, the Durham University Students Union building, for the hundred-and-seventieth time. There are three long flights of stairs leading to the Fonteyn Ballroom. Prima ballerina assoluta, Dame Margot, was once the chancellor of Durham University, and the auditorium is named after her. Yet, the Ballroom was used for exams and dreaded by both students and teachers. Its wooden parquet floor, perfect for dancing, was covered over by more practical laminate. Only in July 2024, the ballroom is open for dance again, at the fourth Durham Fringe. Dance City in Newcastle kindly supplied a proper dance floor. A specially constructed stage held dozens of shows over five days of the festival. This year the festival’s focus is on dance.
I should explain my involvement in Durham Fringe. I am an amateur 55+ dancer. This is not to say that amateurs do not treat dance seriously. Over the last twenty-five years I have spent hours and hours a week learning technique (mainly early modern and contemporary dance), practising and rehearsing. ‘Amateur’ signals the fact that one does not earn anything from performance; on the contrary, one contributes one’s time and money towards it. ‘Amateur’ does not imply that the performance is not up to professional standards. Boundless, the 55+ company of Dance City, Newcastle, where I go to train and rehearse once a week, works with established choreographers, benefits from professional tech support and performs at professionally organised festivals, including Edinburgh Fringe, Inspire festival in Dance City and Durham Fringe.
Durham Fringe programme makers wisely paired Boundless with the Acroflex Dance Academy, a group of young girls excelling in acrobatics and spectacular to watch, in one performance, ‘Dance Showcase I’. Acroflex brought mums and dads and Boundless brought partners, children and friends, attracting community and putting the audience numbers up. As a result, ‘Dance Showcase I’ was lavishly attended by an emotional and supportive public. Boundless showed two works, ‘Café Boundless’, by Beth Veitch, and ‘One Million’, by Alyssa Lisle, both choreographed for the company. ‘Café Boundless’ is a quirky piece inspired by the visual aesthetics of Wes Andersen’s films. It requires perfect synch, which Boundless struggle to achieve, but it is dynamic, rhythmical and fun. ‘One Million’ suits the company perfectly. Boundless members, all of different shape and highly individual, are allowed to be more of themselves. Their differences contribute to the idea of diversity, the main theme of ‘One Million’.
Another amateur company, the North East Dance Project, showed ‘Branches’, a thoughtfully composed and well-performed piece. The company is run by the ballet dancer and teacher Amy Beck, and the entire project is about making dance, not least classical ballet, accessible and enjoyable for both performers and audiences. It relies a lot on famous ballets like ‘Swan Lake’ and ‘Giselle’, fragments of which were performed, as well as theatrical and well-known ballet music. Looking at the dancers of various ages and shapes is refreshing, liberating, emotionally moving. To be able to dance, one does not have to have the standard ballet figure. The company’s love of ballet is genuine, and, importantly, they treat what they do with a smile.
Based in Durham, I could see nearly all dance performances at Durham Fringe. Though of different genres, each of them was exiting and wonderful to watch. There were two more dance showcases, including ‘Talk’, a trio of a tech man and two gracious female dancers creating music with electronic bracelets fixed to the wrists. It reminded me of the Theremin, an electronic musical instrument which one plays without touching, just by sending air waves. In ‘Dance Showcase III’, the US group ‘Movement Factory’ showed ‘It's Never Enough’, Carolina Quirós’s choreography combining contemporary dance and circus style and tackling the issue of consumerism. In a separate showcase, the North-East choreographer Lizzie Klotz demonstrated her work-in-progress, ‘Abundance’, a 40-minute piece of physical theatre about kindness, care, female solidarity. The cast included two young professional dancers, a 15-year-old girl and eight Boundless dancers. ‘Abundance’ was accompanied by electronic music, half-improvised, live on stage. The props included duvets, soft and cozy, contributing to the theme of gentleness and care.
Then there were regular companies. The Unearthed Dance Company from Edinburgh showed ‘All, Here and Now’, a dynamic and powerful piece of contemporary dance about overcoming social barriers and connecting over divides. The company’s technique involves spectacular sliding, gliding and slipping movements. One of the pioneers of modern dance, Doris Humphrey, made going out of balance and recovering it her main artistic medium. The Unearthed seems to have got the message. A young vivacious gang, they courageously throw their bodies around, free of any constraint. Dancers spread on the floor wet sand out of a bucket, and the slippery surface enhanced their formidable sliding dynamic. Some moments of dance struck me as having intense beauty.
I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Past & Future’, the double bill of Eliot Smith Dance, the resident company of Dance City. In contrast with freedom and vivacity of the Unearthed dance, the ESD performance is highly controlled, beautifully measured, and this contributes to their aura of super-professionals. As to the ‘Past’, the company revived Paul Taylor’s ‘Duet’ (1964), to Haydn’s music, sixty years after it was first staged. Some time ago the company went to New York, to ask the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation for permission, and it came back with a pair of beautiful, original costumes designed by George Tacet, on special loan. The ‘Future’ was represented by Eliot Smith’s latest work, ‘Human’. The Newcastle-based composer Adam Johnson wrote the music especially for the piece. His score reminded me of ‘concrete’ music, of ‘La Symphonie pour un homme seul’ (Symphony for One Man Alone’) by Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, which Maurice Béjart used for his avant-garde ballet of the same title in 1955. Like Béjart’s piece, ‘Human’ is an existential comment expressed in the language of dance. Yamit Salazar is a brilliant dancer and actor, and his performance of the solo was perfection itself. His Human evolves from cave to rave and back; watching him, fellow humans are looking into a mirror.
Busy at the festival, there were some dance performances I was not able to see. The Dora Frankel Ensemble showed ‘Fragments of Poe’, described as ‘a macabre & quirky night of intrigue … inspired by some of Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known tales of gothic romance/horror and framed by the visual aesthetic of queer artist Aubrey Beardsley’. It also claimed to be interactive. I regret missing it at Durham Fringe and hope to see it elsewhere.
My only problem with dance at Durham Fringe is the low attendance of the shows. With the exception of local groups (Boundless, the North-East Dance Project, ‘Abundance’), contemporary dance sadly did not bring large audiences. One way to solve the problem would be to pair dance performances with other more popular genres, and why not with magic or circus? Durham Fringe did it brilliantly by joining Boundless 55+ with the young acrobats from Acroflex. Another way to fix ticket sales would be targeting relevant audiences, for instance, posting on university networks used by students and stuff, or on interest groups. Diverse, theatrical and lively, dance performances can be enjoyed by everyone.