Sol Pico and Stories Left to Tell
New Territories has retained its power to surprise and enchant: the final two shows, both at Tramway, showcased the festival’s continued enthusiasm for blurring boundaries, re-imagining the past through a vital and bracing post-modern intelligence and wit, fusing dance, video, spoken word, dated rock, flamenco, story-telling, humour, ballet and compassion.
If Stories Left To Tell had something of the tribute act about it – it related episodes from the diary of Spalding Gray, sometime member of America’s legendary performance art troupe The Wooster Group and raconteur – the division of Gray’s memories between a cast of five was moving and hilarious, gradually seasoning towards melancholy as Gray’s illness and depression defeated his lust for life and love of family. Rarely hagiographic – Gray’s moods are exposed in their ugliness and splendour – the cast cover the phases of his life in candid monologues.
Haunted by his mother’s suicide, Gray’s decline is miserable: whether the injuries he received were serious enough to merit his own suicide is never explored. But a single video sequence, of Gray in top live performance mode, emphasises that this is a celebration. Always humanistic, caustic and bawdy as the story dictates, Gray’s gentle but rigorous self-examinations collide in a kaleidoscope of anecdotes and punch lines. While the focus is always on Gray himself, the collection becomes a reflection of an everyman’s journey, from childhood, through uncomfortable adolescence, to a challenging manhood that concludes in loving fatherhood. The pieces have perhaps been selected to stress how Gray reconciled himself to various traumas: the energy of the performances comes from his attention to language and the respect of every performer on stage.
Sol Pico is deservedly known as the queen of Spanish contemporary dance: El Lilac de les Mosques takes on old age, disappointment and fairy tales. Structured like a rock gig – the band let loose alongside Pico and her two male dancers – it streams flamenco display, melancholic reflections, fragments of folk tales and a stomping solo en pointe to celebrate the onset of maturity. Pico has plenty of Spanish fire, deliberately evoking the bravura of flamenco and parading her skills: life-affirming and hilarious, El Lilac is loud, rough and enchanting. Pico’s character slowly looses her mythological defences – the Rapunzel like hair, the magic red shoes – to accept the changes forced on her by time.
When the National Review of Live Art was retired last year, there was some concern that it would undermine the New Territories brand. Yet across the programme, that unique mixture of accessible and radically experimental works has maintained both the image and the quality of the New Moves Team.