Overview

The Blake Diptych Preview, Dance Chora – Fleur Darkin Company,

Pavilion Dance, 25 & 26 November 2011

Written by Stephen Batty

“Sweet justice”: the phrase was used by Fleur Darkin during the short interview following the first of the two performances of Experience at Pavilion Dance. Maybe none of those involved in staging this remarkable invocation of the poet and painter William Blake would have realized just how “sweet” the justice was. Over a century ago, a short distance from the studio where Experience was performed, a child named Mary Butts sailed a model schooner yacht in the stream that ran (and still runs) through  Bournemouth’s Lower Gardens.

As she recalled in her memoir The Crystal Cabinet, this was play that she invested with an imagination at odds with the niceties of a late Victorian upbringing . Mary strung small dolls on the yardarms of the model schooner; and as it sailed in the confines of the Bourne stream, Mary Butts sang the chorus from the well-known song in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island: “Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho- and a bottle of rum..” Yet her imaginative world had been generated not by Stevenson but by William Blake. Mary’s paternal great- grandfather was Thomas Butts, patron of Blake’s works, a large collection of which hung on the walls of the Butts family home in Poole. Mary claimed that she absorbed Blake’s way of seeing through being surrounded by the watercolours, engravings and portraits by the great visionary artist. This was an aesthetic entitlement Mary Butts was to lose. In 1906, when she was sixteen, the Blake pictures were put up for sale to help pay death duties after her father passed away. The quest that was to consume her for the rest of her life can be seen as an attempt at re-gaining the freshness of this early encounter with Blake’s visionary intensities. Mary Butts became a novelist, a modernist writer whose stories were marked by the violent instabilities of the 20th century.

At this stage in its development, Dance Chora’s Experience holds both poetic tenderness and extreme rage in a way that keeps alive that Blakean inheritance lost to Mary Butts last century. At one extreme (tenderness) the dancers uttered phrases concerning the presence of angels that recalled Peter Handke’s screenplay for Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire:

“I see them in my lover’s freckles.” “I don’t see them when I’m too tired to say ‘yes’..” “I see them in my father’s non-judgmental eyes..” At the other end of the emotional spectrum was the rage thrown by the company at the mesh barricade at the rear of the stage. Accompanied by Paul Bradley’s screeching guitar work, the ‘branches’ of the Tree of Life which filled the stage at the opening of Experience were hurled at the mesh with a velocity that immediately sparked a recollection that Blake’s beloved Peckham saw fierce rioting this summer.

In the wake of the more strenuous moves, the silences that allowed the audience to hear Blake’s breathing felt so expressive of what the poet called ‘the price of experience’ which is bought with ‘ all that a man hath.’

One of many astonishing sequences in Part Two of this Diptych had Blake (Ezekiel Oliviera) being ‘courted’ by angels (Annakanako Mohri and Kirsty Arnold). As the latter advanced along the table at which Blake sat ( Annakanako crawling on top and Arnold moving beneath) their feet mirrored each other with faultless timing, creating a field of depth around this ordinary prop. Oliviera’s handstand on the same tabletop, his palms meeting the prints where the angel had moved, offered a resonant image of divine inspiration: Blake the artisan/artist/printmaker/ poet, printing his hands on a surface which had just been traced by an angel.

As the lights dimmed on the closing scene, Ezekiel Oliviera and Audrey Rogero (Blake’s wife) were seen embracing in the square of the upturned table, while in the other corner of the stage the fragmented ‘branches’ of the Tree of Life had been arranged in a shape resembling rays of light or fanning water, radiating from the impenetrable mesh barrier, suggesting some sort of effulgence coming out to meet the couple as they slept. If filmed, this scene would demand an eye akin to that of Andrei Tarkovsky to lend it justice.

So what is this “sweet justice” which emerges from Experience? It has something to do with the very opposite of those words given to Blake’s father ( Morgan Symes) whose curt statement “imagine less” cuts across his son’s burgeoning imagination.

Darkin, with Dance Chora, has shown us how we might “imagine more.”