Coastal Currents 2019 - 'Dance Movies' at the Kino - Review

I like cinema. I like dance. I like music. So the three for the price of one ‘Dance Movies' at the Kino-Teatr as part of this year's Coastal Currents, was an absolute must. It not only motivated me to leave the house, but it also made me want to write a review.

The event was split into two halves. The first half contained three, very different short films in which performance was either the main, or integral, part of a wider visual and narrative composition.

The first film I Am Weather (Rebecca Marshall/Nichola Bruce/Clare Whistler) was a triptych projection filmed at the Library of Water in Stykkishulmur, Iceland. 

The triple screens alternated between close-ups of fast moving water or spray, and dancer Clare Whistler viewed through a lighthouse lens. It appeared as if it had been filmed in an empty room in a tall glass building with a distant view of an urban skyline. The remarkable effect was to capture the dancer in a way that distorted her body, elongated her limbs and finally made her physically disappear altogether as if melting into the floor. The water sequences, that seemed different each time, provided an intense soundscape. It was a wonderful combination of the free flowing and the confined in a meditative union of shades of grey and elemental hydro-sonics.

The second film Klipperty Klopp 2 (Andrew Kotting/Yumino Seki) was also a split-screen and shades of grey affair. Funnily enough the last thing I reviewed was Kotting’s ‘Lek and the Dogs’ so it was very interesting to see this much earlier and now reinvented work.

On the left screen was Kotting’s original 1984 film of a man energetically running round a field in Gloucestershire pretending to be a horse. On the right this had been re-created with dancer Yumino Seki, more of whom later. The two films mirrored each other although the original was filmed almost completely in the rural environment, whereas Yumino Seki’s re-enactment also brought in some urban grit. This included segments in which she was quite brilliantly placed in front of a wall with the legible graffiti reading 'Take your poo…'. Given the slapstick speed of the characters and the original narration about the funny/crazy man and his horse, there was definitely humour. However, the tension between the absurdly humorous and the reality of two people running in marked, repetitive and seemingly futile patterns while negotiating relationships with their accumulated detritus, was also quite uncomfortable at times. The whole thing ended close to home with Yumino Seki on Hastings beach, barely able to hang on to her wildly flapping metaphor in the fierce wind. I so wanted her to just let it go.

Film three was Experiments with a Danse Macabre (Nichola Bruce/Patricia Langa/Daniel Hay-Gordon). Another film that dealt with confinement, Patricia Langa danced out the tension of being within ever decreasing walls, amidst a world of projected images. From a painterly perspective this film was lovely to watch. The layering of images, colour, texture, dark and light and movement made the film an ever changing and beautiful visual spectacle. The subject of death, or the ability of the dancer protagonist to inflict it at great personal cost, was told in the manner of a fairy tale. I accepted the artistic license in the telling of the tale and the beautiful package it came in, right until the last clichéd line: “we are all equal in death”, at which I sighed, possibly audibly. I'm afraid we are as equal in death as we are in life and that is not very equal at all.

The second half was just brilliant. Exspira Machina/Kwaidan AI was a combination of live music, dance and film. Afrit Nebula provided the music, Yumino Seki the dance and Mark French the visuals. The description of the pieces as ‘a ghost in the machine trapped by a scanner, unable to escape her own memory’ doesn’t come even remotely close to communicating the astounding amount of stuff that was going on here.

Musically it was a multi-layered fusion of jazz, rock, world, sacred, experimental - in fact there are all sorts of genres you could try and define this trio with but really, really good is probably best. There was a lot to it, both instrumentally and vocally, and it was very tight.

The visuals in this part of the evening ranged from a kind of ambient, spectrum loop to a mesmerising film of industrial machinery. A Victorian pumping station (I think) working a continuous and massive, rhythmic sequence of power and painted ironwork. Hard to believe this was normal less than a century ago.

From the left Yumino Seki appeared slowly and silently and the combination of music, visuals and live dance completely took over. The interplay between the three was superb. At first it was hard to know what to focus on but after a while there was a kind of emotional and sensual absorption into the whole. It was a wonderful experience.

On a personal note, I spent most of the 80s living in Japan and it was magic to see a butoh trained dancer for the first time in about 30 years. In Hastings! 

The Artists

  

Film Makers  

Nichola Bruce - https://www.nicholabruce.com/projects-in-development/

Rebecca Marshall - http://rebeccaemarshall.com/filmmaker/

Andrew Kotting - http://www.andrewkotting.com/

Mark French - http://shootonsite.org/index.php/mark-french

Dancers & Choreography  

Yumino Seki  - https://yuminoseki.webs.com/

Clare Whistler - http://www.clarewhistler.co.uk/

Daniel Hay Gordon - https://www.danielhay-gordon.com/

Patricia Langa 

Musicians

Afrit Nebula - http://www.afritnebula.com/

Venue and Host

Kino Teatr  - kino-teatr.co.uk

Coastal Currents - http://coastalcurrents.org.uk/

Images
Images for 'I am Weather' and 'Klipperty Klopp' found in public domain. (Was unable to find an image for 'Experiments towards a Danse Macabre' (or a website link for Patricia Langa). 
Images of Afrit Nebula and Yumino Seki courtesy of Neil Partrick.

Review - Lek and the Dogs, Electric Palace Hastings

I saw Lek and the Dogs at the Electric Palace Cinema in Hastings on Friday evening. It is based on the true story of Ivan Mishukov, who left his abusive home at four and lived with street dogs for two years before being picked up and put into children's homes. His transition into adulthood seemed to work for a while but he was unable to sustain it. 

The film was quite an experience. A friend of mine, who had seen it in London, asked me on Facebook what my review of the film was. My immediate reply was:

“Great apart from a tad too much not entirely convincing crying from Lek, and the tiresome, smugly dogmatic (no pun intended) philosophising. The film would have been much more effective by cutting out that guy entirely.... that's my review! :)

As a pithy and amusing comment it works but the film bugged me and kept bugging me. So I looked at the published reviews to see if any of them reflected what my own reaction had been.

I found a lot of reviews. All of them stuck to pretty much the same format but not always in the same order: a plot synopsis, varying degrees of sycophancy and a focus on cinematic form and reference, literary and philosophical influences and assessing where the body of work fits in director Andrew Kötting’s oeuvre. There was a fair range of opinion on these things and not everybody enjoyed the experience. The BBC’s film critic Mark Kermode obviously did. This film is right up his street. He was  going to find several avenues of pleasure in this movie and he did. So far, so predictable.  To be fair, however, he did also say (as did others) that what people took from this film would be entirely personal. That is absolutely the case but then again is that not the case with any film or work of art?  

There seemed to be very little about the actual content - the emotional content I mean - and surely it is the story and the trauma and how those emotions are conveyed that is the point here.  Introducing the film at the Electric Palace, Andrew Kötting said that he wanted people to feel these things. That is commendable enough but it makes an assumption that the audience are strangers to such feelings and the director is therefore providing a service to allow them to understand trauma at a safe distance.  Often it seemed as if the director was ‘bludgeoning’ his audience (a word used in more than one review) to emote, and to feel pain. In that respect the film is very much of its time. Public displays of trauma: parents of murdered children, victims of violence, abuse, terror - trauma as spectacle seems to be a news requirement these days.

Mainstream film reviewers are obviously not keeping up although a couple of the reviews mentioned the word ‘emotional’. The problem was that none of them really communicated any and what I wanted to know was how the film made them feel and what they thought of the subject. 

Perhaps it is in the nature of ‘educated’ reviewers to not go there. They retain that vague sense of contempt for public expression of emotion but it’s fine if it’s either fiction, or cinematised ‘truth’ that can be glossed over in an analysis of the form in which it is presented. The reality of the story effectively becomes secondary to the package in which it comes. 

I could not access the pay to read reviews but the available quotes suggested they were much the same content-wise, if more critical of the film overall. The most succinct and effective review was probably Eye for Film’s, Amber Wilkinson who avoided the verbiage and managed to tell you everything you needed to know without actually losing sight of Lek - the film’s subject.

What I found most strange and disturbing is what appears to be the complete disconnect between telling and reviewing a tale of childhood trauma, without understanding just how triggering that can be for audience members who have suffered childhood trauma. The director joked that walkouts had previously occurred perhaps because people thought they were coming to see Show Dogs or Isle of Dogs. The muted ripple of laughter in the room was muted I suspect because half of this audience didn’t have a clue what either of these films were.

I am sure that some of the walkouts have been because the rawness of it has been too overwhelming for those who don’t have the luxury of understanding trauma at a distance. In fact I am not sure it is possible to understand trauma at a distance.

The audio-visual noise may be another reason people walk out. It was phenomenally loud, intense and often distorted. For people who do not find peace at the centre listening to industrial noisecore, I can see why the soundtrack could present not only emotional challenges, but physical, aural discomfort as well.  

The difficult thing for me to take in this film, however, was the philosophising drone that effectively concluded you’re fucked. Your trauma will inform your actions in endless repetitive cycles and there’s no escape. Such a message is potentially devastating. People who have been traumatised are painfully aware that it is still informing their actions.  They have been forced to understand it and forced to find ways to alleviate that cycle in order to survive both emotionally and physically. The glibness of this single, simplistic, philosophical overdub, threatened to reduce a complex and quite remarkable piece of cinema to a smug, undergraduate observation. Because of this I couldn’t help feeling that Lek/Ivan had actually been a bit dissed by having his story and his trauma used to conveniently park a philosophy that does neither Lek, nor actually the film, justice. However, I am seeing this film as a standalone piece. In the context of the trilogy perhaps there is a wider angle. At least the humour kicked in as the (cruelly) paraphrased drone continued …  yer’ all gonna die, the planet’s gonna die. No shit Sherlock!  

We live in an age of anxiety, dystopia and fear masked by increasingly absurd levels of pretence that we are all unique and heroic individuals who can make a difference. We are simultaneously more empathetic and quicker to shut down. We are all one of Lek’s crowd on the street desperate for recognition. With no certainty about what we are supposed to be recognised for, or who is supposed to be doing the recognising, we are constantly recalibrating our identities just to feel comfortable. Going underground is not an option we have.

It is an exhausting time in which to live. The film communicates this, at times in a profoundly beautiful way but it is the beauty of Lek himself that you should be taking home with you. 

Links:

BFI Interview with Andrew Kotting

Hattie Naylor
First dramatisation of Ivan Mishukov's story, which formed the foundation of this film, was Hattie Naylor's play 'Ivan and the Dogs'. 

Xavier Tchili 

Actor - Lek (hard to find info and this is out of date but has some biographical content).

Lek and the Dogs twitter feed

'Rotten Tomatoes' review list