Can it be a bit of a curse for an artist to knock it out of the park right at the start of their career? Choreographer Oona Doherty’s astonishing early works, Hope Hunt and Hard to be Soft, marked her as an unique (urgent, unfiltered) voice moving in uncharted territory. Her output since has been more variable, although she’s always utterly her own woman.
Doherty’s last major piece, Specky Clark, was high concept. This new world premiere, Leather Jacket, feels the opposite, not quite enough concept. (I know, you can’t win.) The leather jackets of the title are being worn by eight dancers. Under bright fluorescent lights in the concrete space of Bold Tendencies – the Peckham multi-storey car park turned theatre – the dancers all slap one foot to the ground in a heavy thud, and again, and again, keeping a determined rhythm. It’s a thrill to be up close as foot slaps turn to thigh slaps, then bounces, then into Doherty’s own skewed kind of Irish step dance, matching the shift from electronic score to Cormac Begley’s experimental Irish folk music. (The dancers have shed the jackets by now; they’re just in their underwear.)
Here is the collective pleasure of sharing a rhythm and a common dance. The unison is exacting, but always with a sense of being flesh-and-blood people, not a regiment. There’s something very honest about it, the dancers exhaust themselves, and between sections they pant, sweat, swig water, laugh with each other (in a way that says: “Can you believe we got through that!”). Their presence is real. And this is really what Doherty wants to show us: the pushing, the perspiring, the getting on with it. The dance is a means to an end, and the jackets only make it harder, sweatier work.
The movement itself is not hugely interesting. There’s the odd wry theatrical flourish – one dancer, stripped to his pants, dons sunglasses and smokes a cigarette, a comical uniform of cool. There’s a slight sinister undercurrent when the dancers slap the heavy jackets on the floor, echoing the rhythm of the opening with thudding violence. You wonder if the mood is suddenly going to turn, open up another world. But at a tight 45-minutes, this isn’t that piece. It’s another unpredictable step in Doherty’s singular journey.
