Oxford dance - what is le pointe?
The Oxford dancer’s disappointment is near-tangible. Flexibility diminishes, muscles waste away, ballet shoes mould in a hidden corner. In a university where debating and drama reach unchallenged levels of excellence, where is Oxford dance? Having spent two and a half terms scouring high and low, depressingly little emerges. But every so often, a gem appears, that resolidifies my belief in students’ appreciation of aesthetics. Last term, Music In Motion did the honours.
This term, the passion and energy of the Freefall Contemporary Dance Company jetés in with a satisfying breath of fresh air: talent, originality and freshness at long last converge with relieving pleasure. But why is there frustratingly little raw student dance? To compare Oxford with other universities, namely Cambridge, UCL and Bristol, would be a frankly embarrassing exercise.
Cambridge’s dance society is maintained to an enviably high standard partly through the resident dancers instilled and supported by Queen’s college. Our own dance society, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Its limited, over-crowded classes discourage even the most determined dancers and I pity the students new to dancing who are unlikely to discover the satisfaction of ballet and modern from Oxford’s Dancesoc.
The enormous popularity of Dancesport has been both a help and a hindrance, encouraging more people to get involved but shadowing the subtle beauty of dance-as-art with the vulgarities of competition. And dance in performance seems even more inaccessible. Miranda Laurence, creator of Freefall, hails the company as the first Oxford contemporary dance group.
Graham Alexander, dancing in Freefall’s impressive company resents the difficultly of getting into the dance scene, “mainly because you have to find it — normally via the thespy crew,” he says. Perhaps it is because of the lack of a readily available dance scene that makes Freefall so fantastic: the truly motivated dancers are forced to flock together to merge their art. For art is what was offered in Freefall’s performance at the Magdalen Auditorium last Thursday.
Opening with a purely improvised dance, performers spontaneously respond to the experiments of four musicians on stage. Dancers littered the stage in contorted positions, unfortunately sometimes threatening to verge on what I call ego-dancing (basically, who can get their leg the highest). Early numbers lacked the energy that is so crucial in contemporary dance. The company works best, however, in the beautiful original choreography of the later numbers.
They display a stunning cohesiveness and poignant visual exploration of music and theme. Jessica Bland’s eclectic and frantic isolations are a feast for the eye, neatly balanced by Stephanie Yezek’s enormously impressive comic routines. The company is risk-taking in nature. They take physical risks in their challenging choreography. They risk empty audiences in performing original dance over drama.
Alexander’s exploration of the postmodern movement has the potential to verge on the ridiculous, but his highly controlled strength and style manages to launch the number into the innovatively pioneering. In fact, near on every risk pays off, and upon Laurence’s year abroad next year, it would be a crying shame if the company should leave Oxford with her. High quality Oxford dance is hard to come by • let’s not let it freefall from its dizzying heights.
1st Jun 2006