Watching a dance is about both what you perceive and what you read into it. That ever-blurry line is especially evident when watching older people dancing: they may lack the blithe suppleness and stamina common among younger dancers, yet their presence comes freighted with the past, their lived history.
Sadler’s Wells Elixir festival is all about perceptions of dance and age, and its opening work, common ground[s] by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo, relies on that sense of lives more felt than seen. The women, dance veterans in their late 70s, appear seated in silhouette, holding a long staff between them like a mast. The dance unfolds mostly through steady pacing and gesturing, in sync or in contrast, sometimes intimate, sometimes indifferent. The drama comes more from the sound around them, ranging from plangent melody to turbulent thunder. Only at the end, the women seated again but each now with her own staff as if their lifelines had separated, do we intuit that the low-key accumulations of this undemonstrative work are, like life, appreciated more in retrospect than in the moment.
