Susan Jeff, classical ballet teacher and freelance writer
In a culture that is overtly promoting social inclusion and raising the visibility of the hitherto socially invisible, Anjali signposts the possibilities. In the 1960s, there was a call for a new way of looking at dance ? in 2001; the programmers at the South Bank answered a development of that call. New eyes? New aesthetic experiences? Time will tell.
Claire Russ, artistic director Claire Russ Ensemble and associate choreographer with Anjali Dance Company
Somewhere in the ether, there is a notion that people who have learning disabilities, and in particular those who have the genetic condition Down's Syndrome have a high level of espressivity and a distinctive sensibility in movement.
If we put political correctness aside, do we honestly still see disability as a defect? Does some part of you not want to touch it because it is painful or confrontational? Or is that the edge which makes viewing it exciting? Or perhaps we see ourselves?
The question is are these qualities a desirable part of the general public's dance palette? We are now conversant with an aesthetic of diversity but can an aesthetic encompass states of being, such as emotionality and furthermore vulnerability? What makes the dancers seem vulnerable is that in both creation and performance they are struggling with cognitive mind processes - to remember the forms and structures, which are the vehicle for their expressivity. And to remember the bank of imagery that informs the movement quality.
Anjali is a company of adult dancers who choose dance as a career they have developed the stamina to perform a full evening's programme with accuracy, which could not have happened even a year ago. So, as with any repertory dance company the next challenge is to achieve a different artistic intention for each piece. This is about imagery and remembering the impetus for the movement. I always involve the dancers cognitively in the creative process. I like to take time gathering contributions to the thematic base of the work. Given time, the dancers will often come up with some fascinating tangential conceptual ideas.
The dancers' training is integral to the work being created and technical goals are incorporated into classes. For example, I noticed that in some instances there were blocks in the torso giving rise to a lack of sequential movement. This meant that the brain was sending singular messages rather than a continuum. Therefore, we incorporated exercises, which traced the journey of a point or sphere travelling through the body into the training.
In Talking Point, this sequential use of the body is what drives the choreography, as if a corporeal tongue is finding its way around a new physical language. The idea of continuum and connection extends to the whole space into which movements are thrown by one dancer and caught by another. Some have greater force requiring the recipient to absorb a great deal of energy like the exchange of words in an argument. This idea provoked fast falling, rolling and throwing sequences which have extended the dancers capacity to take their movement to the edge of what is possible.
I think it is important for the dancers to have an awareness of a context of difference and furthermore that they implicitly advocate for others whenever they are in the public eye. I think that this awareness is important for the sophistication and maturity of the work and the performer.
Finally, and true to the pluralist society we are living in, we have a choice about how we view something that seems alien. We have a choice to see a hugely different human landscape or align ourselves with it as members of the human race.
Shan Maclennan, head of education, Royal Festival Hall
I don't like the term disabled dance. I don't like it because it either seems to demand, at best, special pleading, at worst, sympathy or to risk serious marginalisation.
The dance I have been watching over the last 25 years which is performed, informed and more rarely choreographed, by learning disabled people, has often been the dance which I have found most rewarding as an audience member. Over that time, I have spent countless hours watching contemporary dance which can be very self-absorbed and exclusive at times. I've never felt that watching a learning disabled dancer. The movement I've watched under the education/special needs/learning disabled banner has been as startling, as arresting as any theatrical event I have attended.
Is it because the variety, of body shapes, hairstyles, physical 'turns of phrase? is so much closer to the mass of people I see as I go about my daily life? Is it because of the total lack of inhibition with which the performers address me, at once their closest confidant and a total stranger? Is it the vulnerability of performers who know or suspect that they are not conforming to the norm? Is it the sheer power of watching people inhabit and express themselves in a space which has traditionally been denied to them (except in a few rather desperate ghettoised contexts)?
One thing is certain: this work must be seen in performing arts venues around the country. It is experimental - it has to be. Learning disabled dancers and choreographers are excluded from the vast majority of vocational and academic courses available to other potential dancers. It is radical - is has little or no reference to tradition and by its nature, it subverts these accepted realities. It is new - having a hidden place in history, history has to start today. It looks different - the dancers look different from the stereotypical dancer, more like the mixed bag of relations dancing at a wedding or on someone's 21st birthday. This all makes for fascinating performance the kind of thing a marketing copywriter would die for. The kind of thing an audience will pay for.
It would be foolish to pretend that there aren't huge barriers still to be overcome. The marketing copywriter I mention has to understand that he or she has the enormous task of telling not just people interested in dance but society at large that something new and inclusive has happened in the theatre that many thought they knew and rejected on that basis. The paying audience - those who aren't used to dance and perhaps even more so those who are - need to prepare themselves for something similar enough to things they know to be recognisable but different enough to take their breath away.
There are the formidable issues about training for learning disabled performers I have already mentioned. There are the possibly even more daunting issues about proper rates of pay and proper acknowledgement for people who are often caught in the 'benefit trap' for reasons nothing to do with their work as dancers (learning disabled performers are often not allowed to earn a fee for their work without losing their benefit but the fee isn't big enough to make it worth it).
But beyond these issues, there awaits the possibility of the most astonishing kind of dance. It's not the kind of dance which makes its gasp as technique, as turnout or line. It can be the kind of dance, which makes us examine who we are, shows us our world afresh. It is certainly not disabled but empowering and freeing for dancers and audience in the way that only a performance given with integrity and generosity can be.
Julia Curruthers, head of dance and performance, Royal Festival Hall
Why did I programme Anjali? For the same kind of reasons that I programme other events: the company has a special quality that appeals to me personally; the dancers have a remarkable stage presence and a wonderfully direct and unselfconscious way of delivering the choreography. Also because my instincts (which I have increasing confidence in as the years go by) told me to plunge in and go with it.
There were several contributing factors. In summer 2000, Anjali took part in our Royal Festival Hall Ballroom Floor Programme - and I fell for the Matthew Hawkins' piece, Prosperous Beach, in quite a big way. I was curious to see how it would look in a formal theatre space. And, getting into excitable promoter mode, I wanted more and different people to see this work that could make such a direct connection with its audience. In a presentation about working with Anjali on her piece Talking Point, Claire Russ made fascinating observations about what happened to her and the dancers in the studio. Her talk involved words like unapologetic, unguarded and openness. Some weeks later Jonathan Borrows told me about, by chance, doing contact improvisation with Anjali dancers in a Gaby Agis workshop at the Jerwood Space. He clearly had experienced something quite new and different that he had enjoyed enormously. All this interesting information confirmed what the hairs on the back of my neck had been doing during the time I sat watching Anjali perform.
I could see that artistic director Nicole Thomson has a selfless ability to make no assumptions about what is possible and what is not. She has ignored the clichés and ambitiously gone for style and content. She has been able to involve interesting, high-level professional dance heads in what the company is doing.
I like the way Anjali seem to get out of the potentially fusty, anachronistic, boxed category that might be called 'disabled dance'. Artists and companies whose daring ideas and sheer quality lift them above the worthy dreariness of right on, over-funded cultural diversity are doing all of us a huge favour! Fortunately there are increasing numbers of them making waves out there, successfully putting down fresh tarmac and making it easier for others to follow on more speedily! And I have to live in hope of more?
Donald Hutera, dance, theatre and arts journalist for The Times of London, Time Out, Dance Europe, Dance Now and Dance Magazine
Writing is a revealing kind of thing. It's about our baggage, and prejudices and biases. As a dance writer, it could be perceived that you have a certain amount of power. I think it is much more about having responsibility to the artists and to the public. Writing is a bridging position and I try to be fair. But again, because I am who I am, I bring my baggage, my prejudices, biases, likes and dislikes. You have to work with that and maintain a certain degree of integrity in looking at work. Objectivity is a myth and it's actually totally subjective responses that we are always having. Even a piece that you feel somewhat detached from, or that you feel is somewhat clinical, is being perceived subjectively. It isn't the critic's job to judge, but to experience. I love this idea: it's a bit like having to get drunk on what you see and then to talk about having been drunk rationally and lucidly. If I have to ask myself, 'What is at stake? What matters here?' then something is wrong. The other thing is, if I'm sitting there thinking: 'What is this piece telling me about being alive?' then there is a real problem.
I am aware that today's newspaper could be lying in somebody's cat litter tray tomorrow, and that's a nice humbler. On the other hand, its also very useful to realise that dance companies, artists and venues will use your quotes to promote dance, which might make more people come. Again that's where the responsibility comes. Funding bodies will also be influenced by that; there are all the economic and marketing factors involved. A good critic doesn't tell you what to think about a particular work, but rather gives you clues as to how to think about it. That again is part of the notion of personal stance - who you are, where you are coming from. Why do I do what I do? What do I want? I want my world to be rocked. I want to be transformed, changed, challenged. I don't want my preconceptions to be petted and stroked. I want a new perspective. And it happens. This whole idea of dance as therapy, well, you can look at just about anything in life as being therapeutic or valuable or helpful. I think in terms of any sort of work, there are two important things. The big picture is that dance isn't just about super refined, super technical bodies. That seems a very elitist attitude to me. I also think that foibles are what are fascinating about art and about living, about everything. We like difference. We like the odd, the unusual, the unique, the convention-breaking, the mould-breaking. The really wonderful thing about theatre and live performance is that you are allowed to stare at people. That is what it is all about; it's about looking and not having to shield or disguise. It is about looking at who people are in as much totality as possible. I am going to judge it on what it is and what it is giving me and ask if it works according to its own terms.
Catherine Hale, freelance writer
Anjali 's mixed bill for the Purcell Room was a landmark for diversity in contemporary dance. The company of four dancers, each with a learning disability, met the challenge of working with such eminent choreographers as Matthew Hawkins. His Prosperous Beach stood out in its ingenuity.
Hawkins fused the enchanted quality of these dancers with his own bizarre imagination to evoke a surreal world of bygone magic. Dressed eccentrically in black by Pearl, they resembled a heroic troupe of seaweed-gatherers in a tableau by Goya. Defying interpretation centre stage was a silky snake-like thing. With stately gestures of mysterious intent, they draped this coiling fetish on each other. Quizzical gazes at the audience and the plaintive strings of Mendelssohn and Strauss lent a comic absurdity to the performance, while the genuineness of it was heart-warming. It was with glee that I realised the snake-thing was an ungainly arrangement of pointe shoes?
Claire Russ' Talking Point showed the dancers consummately articulate with their bodies as they bump and grind to the visceral heat of Leftfield. Sexy and imposing, they played with spaces within and between them. The funky standalone costume props they climbed into cleverly extended ideas of three-dimensionality. The success of this piece came, as with any group of dancers, from the long hours of work developing kinetic awareness and the refusal of a glass ceiling of preconceived limitations to their achievement.
Cindy Gower, freelance dance writer and projects co-ordinator, South East Dance
Anjali ask us to watch 'differently', with new eyes and new expectations, without the burden of convention and stereotype.
Anjali do not want sympathy. Seeking an open-minded response, the dancers challenge preconceptions of the abilities and sensibilities of learning-disabled people and explode notions of contemporary dancing bodies. For audience members the reward is a varied programme delivered by committed performers. Choreographers including Mathews Hawkins, Claire Russ, and the company themselves, ensure a range of qualities and dynamics. Supported by high production values, the performers co-exist with projected digital imagery, props, sculpture, light and sound, giving rise to humour, serenity and exuberance in equal measure.
On stage, the company display an enthralling combination of calmness and energy with inspiring transience. The honesty of their performance provides an injection of reality - the audience watch real people, not ethereal images of perfection.
So, is there a need for 'new eyes'? Anjali's performance is not tokenistic, but calling Through New Eyes a professional contemporary dance programme establishes expectation. While many performances presented on the London stage are deemed professional, for me using this label here is unhelpful. To accept it is to bow to the sympathetic response the company strive to leave behind. New eyes, and new ideas, may be required to make sense of such non-conformist work.
The company pioneer discussion and debate. They embrace and confront the predictably political perspective their work attracts - establishing recognition for themselves (and others) without fitting the convention. In today's neatly packaged and branded society, however, Anjali prove a challenge; even the sophisticated marketing department at the South Bank Centre did not manage to attract a substantial audience. And if the dance community cannot brand the work, selling it to audiences will continue to remain difficult.
Regardless of this, Anjali's opportunity to perform for a paying audience on the South Bank is an undoubted landmark, paving the way for other marginalized groups to perform at respected venues, developing audiences, and critical language, as they go.
These extracts are taken from A New Aesthetic? A weekend of seeing and writing about disability dance with Royal Festival Hall Education. Contact Karen Hall on +44 (0)20 7921 0701 or email khall@rfh.org.uk