During a brief visit to Aberdeen, I attended the DanceLive Festival as a guest of the Fenton Arts Trust, which was supporting a collaboration between that five-day event and the Soundfestival that immediately followed it. You may never have heard of those festivals or that trust, yet they both represent decades of backing for the arts.
Funded by the Aberdeen City Council and Creative Scotland, Aberdeen’s Citymoves Dance Agency has worked for 35 years to develop local talent, build a dance audience and encourage participation in dance through classes for all ages and abilities. Since 2005, it has produced an annual array of performances in its home town; DanceLive was established by Ian Spink, a gifted choreographer in his own right and the agency’s director at the time.
This year’s DanceLive ran to 17 events in seven locations around the city. Widely varied in structure and content, the three I saw seemed a compilation of the popular themes that now dominate artistic activity everywhere. The first program opened with Clare and Lesley Disabled Dance in a short piece by Leeanne Dobbie titled It’s a Must. Without any discernible disability, the young performers, Clare Adam and Lesley Howard, played at being strong, slipping in and out of oversize men’s jackets and tumbling over each other like puppies. Their evident enthusiasm gave the duet its character and let us share their sigh of satisfaction at the end.
Joseph Toonga’s Born to Exist constitutes the third part of his Hip Hop Dance trilogy and addresses “a sense of overcoming stigmas society holds towards ethnic minorities.” Aisha Webber started it alone in a long sequence of shuddering undulations that flowed across her bare back. Amanda de Souza and Paris Crossley joined her, stomping fiercely, beating their chests, punching, flailing and falling in a relentless storm of anger and pride. Confronting us aggressively with their demands for recognition, Webber shouted “Can you see us? We’re right here,” and de Souza, who is Brazilian, harangued us in Portuguese, repeating the word preto, black, like a desperate echo, knowing full well we couldn’t understand her.
Born in Cameroon, Toonga focuses on politics and black experience, using the hip hop vocabulary to portray violence and determination. Without changing tone for 50 minutes, this work thundered with the convulsive street dance called krumping, which draws its name from the acronym for Kingdom Radically Uplifted Mighty Praise. The style suits Toonga’s furious protest down to the ground and drills its vehement realization into your eyes and mind.
Several nights later, Scottish Dance Theatre’s Ray, by the Israeli choreographer Meytal Blanaru, offered the flip side of political activism in a cheerful celebration of interdependence. Dressed in street clothes, three men and four women kicked it off with a relaxed rave, bopping to the same beat separately, in facing pairs and eventually in an amiable cluster.
Seated on four sides of the dance floor, welcomed by a sign reading, “It’s good to see you and you and you,” we soon became part of the action. As a man crossed the space with his eyes closed, one viewer after another spoke his name softly; each voice guided his progress, outstretched hands guaranteed his safe arrival.
Though Blanaru didn’t bother with transitions between segments, a reassuring sense of trust wove the piece together. Two kneeling women met face to face, with one bearing the other’s weight as they crawled away. A slapping duet for two men shifted from friendly teasing to sudden hostility before settling into gentleness. Surrounded by the others, a woman rose from a crouch, urged on by their attention, then lifted by their helping hands, then carried over their heads and across the floor. Ray lasted for nearly an hour, and the audience left the room smiling and chattering, clearly eager to see more.
Known as the granite city, Aberdeen sustains itself by building and servicing offshore energy installations. Yet contemporary dance has taken root there, and with constant tending, it blossoms steadily amid the dark stones and hulking ships.
Born to Exist tours until March 2023. justusdancetheatre.com
Scottish Dance Theatre performs at home in Dundee in November 2022. scottishdancetheatre.com