Watching a dance is about both what you perceive and what you read into it. That ever-blurry line is especially evident when watching older people dancing: they may lack the blithe suppleness and stamina common among younger dancers, yet their presence comes freighted with the past, their lived history.
Sadler’s Wells Elixir festival is all about perceptions of dance and age, and its opening work, common ground[s] by Germaine Acogny and Malou Airaudo, relies on that sense of lives more felt than seen. The women, dance veterans in their late 70s, appear seated in silhouette, holding a long staff between them like a mast. The dance unfolds mostly through steady pacing and gesturing, in sync or in contrast, sometimes intimate, sometimes indifferent. The drama comes more from the sound around them, ranging from plangent melody to turbulent thunder. Only at the end, the women seated again but each now with her own staff as if their lifelines had separated, do we intuit that the low-key accumulations of this undemonstrative work are, like life, appreciated more in retrospect than in the moment.
Louise Lecavalier was a dynamite dancer in the 1980s and 90s, fearlessly throwing herself into heart-stopping spins and dives. Now in her mid-60s, she is recognisably the same person. In Minutes Through the Afternoon she sports a hooded black coat, tracksuit pants and a shock of tangled hair, equal parts sorceress, athlete and punk. The tumbles and freefalls are gone, but the death-defying spirit is still there, electrifying her arms into crackling shapes and causing her hands to fibrillate like hoverfly wings, her feet to skitter in a nervy dressage. The force is strong with this one.
Ben Duke’s White Hare reverts to the life-in-retrospect theme: Chris Akrill and Valentina Formenti (youngsters at 54 and 51) act out scenes from a couple’s life in reverse chronology. Big dramas – a suicide averted, civilisational collapse – are glimpsed through the banalities of garage visits and requests for pasta. Bathos is Duke’s stock in trade but doesn’t always hit the spot here, and the doom-loop structure feels surprisingly loose. Still, if in previous works Duke had figured death as a kind of mythic exeunt, here he dares to represent it directly – as a plain old tortoise, chomping on life’s strawberry. Seems about right.