Place Resolution 2025 - works by Congfang Xiao, Brooke Sorensen and Eve Walker
My first review at Resolution 2025 and, as ever, it proved a night of wide-reaching and adventurous dance.
The Place’s generic picture for this show. Photo © The Place.
Place Resolution festival
Congfang Xiao (Spring): Hey STOP!!!
Brooke Sorensen: Cathedrals
Eve Walker: For Steve
★★★✰✰
16 Jan 2025
London, The Place
theplace.org.uk
Resolution is The Place’s annual festival of new choreography and performance works by emerging artists. This review was originally commissioned by The Place as part of Resolution Review, where established dance writers are paired with new writers (interested in writing about dance) to cover each night of the festival. The original review on this page (and its companion review) can be found at: https://theplace.org.uk/blogs-stories/thu-16-jan
My first night at the 2025 Resolution Festival — or, as The Place’s artistic director, Eddie Nixon, warmly noted, “Creative experiments to be approached with an open mind”. Open mind at the ready, I jumped into what proved a night of wide-reaching and adventurous dance.
Social anxiety and phobia were the subjects of Congfang Xiao’s Hey STOP!!!, and her five dancers, led by Ya Shu as the shyly retiring square peg in a round hole, certainly showed that at times. Much was made of white fabric (‘installation art’), which was at its best in ropes restraining Shu’s attempts to escape the mad world of reality. However, what I liked most in Xiao’s composition seemed least related to the subject and everything to do with interesting dynamic shapes, as four dancers chained and mirrored their arms at the back of the stage, creating a stunning tangle of writhing limbs at one point. Xiao shows arresting promise and clearly thought about the beginning and end of Hey STOP!!!, swiftly grabbing attention and neatly resolving things at the conclusion. Great lighting too, from Mengyun Liu.
Brooke Sorensen’s Cathedrals featured a particularly strong cast of young dance-actors. A provocation about the male-dominated world of cathedrals and their architecture, this piece started wonderfully and subversively with six Sunday School teachers gaily skipping for the Lord before diving into the snarly meat of the work, where the snarling and railing never really seemed to let up thereafter. Occasionally, the group would run and move at pace, filling the stage with welcome brio, but the snarling would return. And a little snarling, even done with slo-mo brilliance, can go a long way.
Steve Paxton (RIP), the Contact Improvisation supremo, was the inspiration for For Steve, which was arrestingly danced by its creator, Eve Walker, and Maria Giacchetto. Paxton’s dance-questioning pedigree meant this was the most experimental work of the night, built around what seemed to be a hangover from Covid, exploring contact without the contact and improvised movement/interactions with two musicians playing live on stage. In truth, the pure impro section didn’t really take off, but the beginning and end of For Steve featured the dancers close together, gently stroking and echoing each other’s moves, with low side lighting creating a mesmerising, otherworldly look. Accomplished dancing and shades of James Cousins’ early work - more of that, please.