There’s something irresistible about Resolution, the annual festival of new work at the Place, which gives dance-makers a chance to show what they are up to. The audience is always appreciative, the choreography often thought-provoking, the dancers skilled and eager. There’s a kind of pot-luck quality about it. You pitch up and see what happens.
Normally, the event takes place in January (hence its title – it’s a new year resolution). But this year’s festival is unfolding now until 16 June. The three works on 27 May, the night I attended, were all engaging and full of promise.
The evening opened with Grown Men Keep Breaking My Heart, a solo by Kennedy Junior Muntanga, devised with Joey Barton, in which Muntanga cajoles members of the audience into playing figures in his family as he explores an incident in his childhood. Muntanga has enough charm to bring it off, yet when he moves – in great sweeping circles of submission and release, soft backflips and tight spins on his heels – you wish he had trusted the choreography more than the words.
Ed Mitchell’s Life Goes On manages to convey a lot through a duet that is tinged with mime and with subtle humour. Dancers Grace Ford and Edan Carter, in matching striped tops, react in supple synchronicity to a tear in their relationship that means they have to put a brave face on things. The choreography is varied and clever, the lighting evocative and the overall effect as they move from loving to murderous in the flash of an eye both controlled and impactful.
So is Petronella Wiehahn’s Gathering Clouds, which inventively uses six dancers to explore different moods and react to imagined climatic conditions. After a contemplative opening, with couples moving in languorous response to one another, the movement becomes propulsive, the women moving in tight, fast groups, shoulders heavy, feet light. Impressive.
Resolution continues at the Place, London, until 16 June
