The Observer
Act One: Test Run & Look At Me Now, Mummy

Robin Howard Dance Theatre, The Place, London
By Luke Jennings

Sunday 9 March, 2008

Take Your Partners? No Thanks
The joy of the solo, for performer and audience, is underlined in three different ways

Sheffield-based Charlotte Vincent is one of the most challengingly theatrical of the UK's choreographer-directors. She tends to use the same performers and in her double bill at the Place, she allots solo pieces to two stalwarts, Janusz Orlik and Aurora Lubos. Test Run sees Orlik dryly explaining the absence of the rest of the Vincent Dance Theatre ensemble - 'Two with broken legs ... one in rehab' - and rejoicing in the chance to dance 'without the usual things getting in the way. Other dancers, for example'.

As two violinists play, he launches into an extended sequence of scooping turns and torso ripples intercut with snatches of classical dance. But he soon finds himself competing for space with the attention-hungry musicians and forced into ever-more exhibitionistic poses to hold the audience's attention.

Look at Me Now, Mummy presents a fragged-looking Lubos surrounded by the detritus of motherhood: burst balloons, soiled clothes and saucepans, rubbish all over the place. Everything, that is, except a baby. So during a series of mundane domestic tasks presented as bravura performances, and interspersed with jags of quiet weeping, Lubos makes one out of wrapping-paper and slips it in the microwave. Out it comes when she's made a cake, but the birthday candles set it on fire, so she douses it, now messily disintegrating, in the dirty casserole.

Vincent has long felt that female directors are second-class citizens in the dance world - left to mother their companies, never fast-tracked - but this feminist subtext never overpowers Lubos's exquisitely pitched performance or compromises the choreography's harrowingly sustained focus. Small but beautiful.

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