{"id":824,"date":"2014-04-03T19:09:13","date_gmt":"2014-04-03T18:09:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=824"},"modified":"2014-04-04T00:03:58","modified_gmt":"2014-04-03T23:03:58","slug":"what-did-you-do-in-the-war-mummy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2014\/04\/what-did-you-do-in-the-war-mummy.html","title":{"rendered":"What did you do in the war, mummy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"enb_lestweforget_gallery_dust_1_jpg__740x448_q85_crop_upscale\"<\/a><\/p>\n

How do you stage warfare? In a year commemorating the\u00a0centenary of the First World War,\u00a0the conflict\u00a0resists direct dramatisation. Naturalism struggles to capture the scale, and bathos might demean the dead. Dance embodied yet abstract vocabulary, a wordless form offers an opportunity to articulate the unspeakable. The choreographers in Lest We Forget<\/em><\/a>, English National Ballet\u2019s profoundly wrought programme at London\u2019s Barbican, have thought seriously about what and how to represent the\u00a0war \u2013 and in particular how to use the women who dominate a classical company. These are works of innocence eroded by experience. A male military company is an uneasy fit for the female corps de ballet. The record so much reflects male experience: in the trenches, but also in government. 37 Days<\/em>, the nuanced BBC drama charting the path to war, was wall-to-wall moustache. Peter Gill\u2019s play Versailles<\/em><\/a>, now ending its run at the Donmar Warehouse, inhabits the war\u2019s immediate aftermath, where women passionately debate loss and reparation while the conference rooms are male enclaves of decision-making.<\/p>\n

\"Gloria<\/a>

Gloria (Royal Ballet) Photo: Bill Cooper<\/p><\/div>\n

What can women be in this story? Kenneth MacMillan\u2019s ballet Gloria<\/em><\/a> (1980, revived at Covent Garden in February) was inspired by Vera Brittain\u2019s memoir Testament of Youth<\/em>, which described the blinkered patriotism that drove young men to war. She herself worked as a nurse during the conflict, and MacMillan’s silvered women suggest angels of grace around the battlefield, or shades of carefree days receding into memory.<\/p>\n

\"Akram<\/a>

Akram Khan’s Dust (English National Ballet) Photo: Ash<\/p><\/div>\n

Other accounts suggest woman as beacon, nurse and worker – and also as scourge of those reluctant to enlist, urging and shaming them. This complex mesh of associations pervades Akram Khan<\/a>‘s Dust<\/em>, an astounding work which closes the ENB programme. The women’s scything arms, stabbing like as blades, are directed both inwards and outwards \u2013 an astringent image of fervour, complicity and bereavement.<\/p>\n

Jocelyn Pook\u2019s score includes a crackle-bound wartime recording of a trench song (\u2018We\u2019re here because we\u2019re here because\u2019), with its awful circularity and gruesome jocular resolve. Khan himself appears as a faltering casualty, in a theatre of war framed with heat and dust rather than the familiar muddy chill. No other conflict has produced such searing accounts of physical death and injury, and Khan offers a powerfully embodied image, as he is upended, revolving on his own shaven scalp. Such a particular section of the body \u2013 skin chafing against bone \u2013 registers in the spectator\u2019s mind, evoked later in the piece as Khan and Tamara Rojo rub scalps, skull to skull. Khan repeatedly makes the body seem strange \u2013 having the women join hands to create a serpentine cable, pulsing outwards from Khan at their centre. In their duet, Rojo hurls herself at him, wrapping her legs round his waist so tight they disappear from view, while she leans back, apparently unsupported. He clamps a hand over her mouth \u2013 this is contact as compulsion and repulsion.<\/p>\n

In Second Breath<\/em>, Russell Maliphant <\/a>doesn\u2019t distinguish the sexes. His nine couples dress alike: they\u2019re all cannon fodder, falling and falling again in the murky churn of Michael Hulls\u2019 lighting. Despite a climactic duet for Alina Cojocaru and Junior Souza, individual losses register most tellingly in Andy Cowan\u2019s soundscore: Maliphant uses bodies for sculptural effect.<\/p>\n

\"No<\/a>

No Man’s Land by Liam Scarlett (English National Ballet) Photo: Ash<\/p><\/div>\n

Liam Scarlett <\/a>offers a more histrionic vocabulary in his co-production with Queensland Ballet, with silent howls of anguish and a clamorous score from Liszt\u2019s Harmonies po\u00e9tiques et religieuses. As its title suggests, No Man\u2019s Land<\/em> dramatises a distance \u2013 though not that between opposing forces but between troops and the women they leave behind. Scarlett proposes an unsettling psychodrama, both in duets of flurried, rapid lifts and in an early sequence when women clutch their men from behind, sliding arms in sickly-yellow gloves up their torsos like the straps of a knapsack. The departing soldiers are both embraced and burdened. When the women are shown packing explosives in a munitions factory, the yellowed hands are revealed as a chemical stain (they were known as \u2018canaries\u2019), and there\u2019s a toxic ambiguity in the way they send not loveletters but bullets to the front.<\/p>\n

There is dance to be made about the painful drama of waiting, especially in such terrible circumstances. Christopher Marney\u2019s War Letters<\/em> for Ballet Black last year, set in World War Two, tapped notes of painful confusion as couples lost sight of each other in absence and in reunion (although the work was diluted by reassuring swingtime dances). Rojo\u2019s brave suite of commissions \u2013 the most focused and inspired of any British ballet company for a long time \u2013 treat their subject matter with impassioned imagination and profound respect, and suggest that the ambiguities of female experience involve far more than merely keeping the home fires burning.<\/p>\n

Follow David on Twitter: @mrdavidjays<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How do you stage warfare? In a year commemorating the\u00a0centenary of the First World War,\u00a0the conflict\u00a0resists direct dramatisation. Naturalism struggles to capture the scale, and bathos might demean the dead. Dance embodied yet abstract vocabulary, a wordless form offers an opportunity to articulate the unspeakable. The choreographers in Lest We Forget, English National Ballet\u2019s profoundly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":826,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,53,54],"class_list":{"0":"post-824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-ballet","9":"tag-liam-scarlett","10":"tag-tamara-rojo","11":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}