Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos' 'A Light Conversation'

CA

There's no such thing as abstract dance. This is the thought A Light Conversation left rolling around my head as I caught the tube home. Performed to a Radio 4 discussion on existentialism, the duo immediately dared us to interpret their seemingly randomly arranged limbs and scattering spatial patterns. Amid swathes of movement and text co-existing like reluctant flatmates, moments of revelation would occur, the text suddenly attaching itself to the movement; or the other way round. I realised that while the meaning doesn’t exist in the dance, it exists in us. Suddenly, as we hear the mention of love in the sound-score, on stage, the two dancers are clinging to each other. I wonder stupidly, ‘do they realise they‘re doing that?’ It is accidental and yet totally contrived. They provoke meaning and simultaneously they defy it. Watching these two dancers living out this ambiguous soap-opera of words and movement was hard at times- there was something slightly lecture-demonstration about it- but I was certainly with them, wherever we were, all the way.

JJS

The Robin Howard Dance Theatre has been rearranged, the change is refreshing as the audience sit around three sides of the performance space. This is good as the place is usually so familiar it must dull my critical eye. The performers enter. He wears a blue t-shirt and nondescript colour trousers, she wears a pink t-shirt with longer sleeves and a skirt, also a colour that somehow is always evading me, isn't a colour. The sound-score is of a British radio show. They are debating Kirkegaard, why he was drawn to Socrates, why he didn't like Hegel, how it matters not whether we get married and have babies or shoo away any human entanglement because we will always ultimately end up in despair...in the way of academics there are so many words that need to be said in order to be articulate that no word has time to resonate and the Big Things they are discussing are snatched away in the next breath.

Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos indulge in a small dance against the backdrop of these discussions. I am unsure about the placing of dance against so much text, words often consume or distract with their everyday logic but the juxtaposition is at points rather witty. They move easily and logically as the voices articulate and I feel the way I do when I am eating, satisfied and comfortable absorbed in sensation, marking time by what's left on the plate but vaguely haunted by the images of what else I could be eating. She has my attention more of the time though I feel like she keeps something back, except in moments.

They create an atmosphere that is theatrical but not necessarily compelling, comfortable but not necessarily casual. The lighting didn't always add to the event for me but I trust somehow their consideration and where they have chosen to place attention even if it may not be my favourite cup of tea. It was nice. Time well spent (or peaceably at least).

'A Light Conversation' by Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos Wednesday 14th October, 2009 The Place