I know it's really tacky but.... helll why the fuck not. It's there so we might as well flog it...
REVIEW OF THE PREMIERE OF LET'S TALK ABOUT LOVE PROJECT. 01 FEB AT THE PLACE IN LONDON. WAS A GREAT NIGHT. ANY IDEAS ABOUT FUTURE SHOWS THEN CONTACT JESSYKA. jessyka_wg@yahoo.co.uk
Vandella Dance, Linda Gieres, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith
Vandella Dance meets Skank Agenda My right hand clutches this grenade
Linda Gieres White Moment
Jessyka Watson-Galbraith Let's Talk About Love
Working Process is an on-going exploration of Maday Kinga’s human limitations. She perches on a white cube under a spotlight for a meditation on physicality – hers and ours; her nudity magnified the minimalist movement that’s often lost behind clothing. The layering of stillness and bodily positions tested audience concentration a little, but this searching solo was deeply felt and performed with integrity. The nudity was no gimmick, but addressed the timeless necessity of live performance and the body.
Linda Gieres and Alicia Weihl ticked the boxes for embodied, mature technique, satisfying those who delight in precision and clarity of line, even if the classical appreciation of beauty and harmony meant this work broke no new boundaries. Their movements may have lacked heart, clogging up their rib cage, neck and head, but the dynamics and spatial relations emitted more interesting interpretations. The Arvo Pärt soundtrack was all too familiar; White Moment was expertly danced, but the choreography and concept felt as cold and academic as a museum.
Even if she didn’t lay down the usual markers of contemporary dance in form and style, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith was true to its spirit: push the audience and question expectations. Deep and meaningless, she led her twelve dancers in a gushing lip-sync and jazz extravaganza to three sick-making Céline Dion songs. Let’s Talk about Love made the audience a mirror to live and filmed personal dancing, the kind you do in private – part catharsis, part piss-take. Inwardly cringing, we laughed out loud to a wilderness of emotional hair-thrashing and diabolical choreography. The evening was made by this joy of warped reality in a dance-world near stagnation.
Alexandra Baybutt
Just when you think Resolution! has no surprises left up its sleeve, along comes a project devoted to Celine Dion. Yes, Ms. Titanic herself. Jessyka Watson-Galbraith’s Let’s Talk About Love was clearly one chanteuse short of the full power ballad, and one of the funniest dance experiences to grace The Place stage in many a month.
Emoting and gyrating like the cast of High School Musical giddy on a cask of rum, Watson-Galbraith and her eleven fools for love ‘interpreted’ a trio of Dion belters with an open-hearted élan that so ingenuously blended sincerity and satire it was impossible not to fall under its spell. The ragged, under-rehearsed feel of its semi-showbiz musical moves actually worked in its favour, catching the feel of dancing round your bedroom with a hairbrush in your hand. Weird. But kinda wonderful.
By contrast White Moment, a duo by Linda Gieres, was too calculated and controlled for its own good. Performed by Gieres and Alicia Weihl, it elegantly sketched out an echoing relationship between two women, who may – or may not – have been two halves of the same personality. But the combination of Arvo Pärt’s studiedly melancholic score and Gieres’ musical yet over-literal choreography robbed the dance of any sense of spontaneity, rendering the end result academic more than emotional.
Among the responses to a dance piece, ‘nice arse’ is probably not the most appropriate. But how else was Timea Maday Kinga expecting us to respond to her naked solo Working Process, in which she exhibited her slowly moving body like a statue in an art gallery? The programme offered some buff guff about ‘communication between yourself and your physical state’ but, with its tasteful lighting and focus on self control, Kinga’s Butoh-influenced piece was artless in its artifice, ultimately concealing more about its creator than it actually revealed.
Keith Watson
Vandella Dance, Linda Gieres, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith
Vandella Dance meets Skank Agenda My right hand clutches this grenade
Linda Gieres White Moment
Jessyka Watson-Galbraith Let's Talk About Love
Working Process is an on-going exploration of Maday Kinga’s human limitations. She perches on a white cube under a spotlight for a meditation on physicality – hers and ours; her nudity magnified the minimalist movement that’s often lost behind clothing. The layering of stillness and bodily positions tested audience concentration a little, but this searching solo was deeply felt and performed with integrity. The nudity was no gimmick, but addressed the timeless necessity of live performance and the body.
Linda Gieres and Alicia Weihl ticked the boxes for embodied, mature technique, satisfying those who delight in precision and clarity of line, even if the classical appreciation of beauty and harmony meant this work broke no new boundaries. Their movements may have lacked heart, clogging up their rib cage, neck and head, but the dynamics and spatial relations emitted more interesting interpretations. The Arvo Pärt soundtrack was all too familiar; White Moment was expertly danced, but the choreography and concept felt as cold and academic as a museum.
Even if she didn’t lay down the usual markers of contemporary dance in form and style, Jessyka Watson-Galbraith was true to its spirit: push the audience and question expectations. Deep and meaningless, she led her twelve dancers in a gushing lip-sync and jazz extravaganza to three sick-making Céline Dion songs. Let’s Talk about Love made the audience a mirror to live and filmed personal dancing, the kind you do in private – part catharsis, part piss-take. Inwardly cringing, we laughed out loud to a wilderness of emotional hair-thrashing and diabolical choreography. The evening was made by this joy of warped reality in a dance-world near stagnation.
Alexandra Baybutt
Just when you think Resolution! has no surprises left up its sleeve, along comes a project devoted to Celine Dion. Yes, Ms. Titanic herself. Jessyka Watson-Galbraith’s Let’s Talk About Love was clearly one chanteuse short of the full power ballad, and one of the funniest dance experiences to grace The Place stage in many a month.
Emoting and gyrating like the cast of High School Musical giddy on a cask of rum, Watson-Galbraith and her eleven fools for love ‘interpreted’ a trio of Dion belters with an open-hearted élan that so ingenuously blended sincerity and satire it was impossible not to fall under its spell. The ragged, under-rehearsed feel of its semi-showbiz musical moves actually worked in its favour, catching the feel of dancing round your bedroom with a hairbrush in your hand. Weird. But kinda wonderful.
By contrast White Moment, a duo by Linda Gieres, was too calculated and controlled for its own good. Performed by Gieres and Alicia Weihl, it elegantly sketched out an echoing relationship between two women, who may – or may not – have been two halves of the same personality. But the combination of Arvo Pärt’s studiedly melancholic score and Gieres’ musical yet over-literal choreography robbed the dance of any sense of spontaneity, rendering the end result academic more than emotional.
Among the responses to a dance piece, ‘nice arse’ is probably not the most appropriate. But how else was Timea Maday Kinga expecting us to respond to her naked solo Working Process, in which she exhibited her slowly moving body like a statue in an art gallery? The programme offered some buff guff about ‘communication between yourself and your physical state’ but, with its tasteful lighting and focus on self control, Kinga’s Butoh-influenced piece was artless in its artifice, ultimately concealing more about its creator than it actually revealed.
Keith Watson
posted by Jessyka Watson-Galbraith at 2:05 PM
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