Stunts, gimmicks, tricks, hot air: snapshots from the edge of modern dance

This month I’ve been venturing into the further reaches of modern dance – obscure territory where I don’t feel particularly comfortable. In its hinterland is the Judson Church in New York: it was here, during the early 1960s, that young Turks such as Trisha Brown and Steve Paxton began investigating the idea that dance need not involve formalised gestures or what primary school teachers call ‘movement to music’, but could grow instead out of quotidian activities such as running, jumping and walking. From that point of departure, the journey has become ever more extreme and contorted, traversing the realms of performance art and installation, often politicised and sometimes pornographic.

The Korean Howool Baek doesn’t want us to see her face. At The Place, she sat cross-legged on the ground with her back to the audience and allowed parts of her body to do the talking and thinking. Her shoulder blades jostled for attention, her fingers strummed a nervous tune, her splayed limbs seemed to take on a will and character of their own, almost as though they were in rebellion against the trunk that attempted to control them. It was a weirdly compelling spectacle, followed by a short film in which three dancers, multiplied by the magic of CGI and bent double so that only mops of hair are visible, became a plague of marauding aliens stomping through Berlin landmarks such as the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. I thought this madly funny, but everyone else in the audience remained po-faced.

At Sadler’s Wells, the GoteborgsOperans Danskompani presented Damien Jalet’s Skid – a big international hit since its première in 2017. The stage is filled with a square white platform (covered with plastic, presumably greased in some way) slanted at an angle of 34° – the limit at which humans can stand upright.