Dance
Unlimited Festival
111
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
****
EVER since their first meeting in 2015 - when American Joel Brown and Eve Mutso both performed in Exalt, an integrated dance piece by Marc Brew - the possibility of a collaboration had been gathering momentum.
However, wheel-chair user Brown had work commitments with Candoco and Estonian-born Mutso - formerly a principal dancer with Scottish Ballet - was energetically exploring her own new directions in choreography and performance. Shared time was proving elusive. Perseverance has now paid off: their duet, 111, was the opening event in Tramway’s platform for disabled artists, Unlimited.
Brown comes on-stage first, slipping out of his wheel-chair and establishing his degrees of mobility: spinal chord injury left him unable to use his legs but he has powerful, and eloquent, upper body strength.
When Mutso arrives, the rapport between them - burnished with points of playful humour but finessed by unstinting trust - goes beyond mutual supportiveness in motion, and opts to push towards setting up risky manoeuvres. A three-sided scaffolding tower offers plenty of opportunities to test not just bodies, but artistic aesthetics.
Both dancers scale heights on several levels, using the cross-bars to get off the ground but then - in an amalgum of acrobatics and dance - they conjure up a kind of mid-air calligraphy, where limbs and torsos assume visually striking forms.
This foray into flesh-and-blood sculpture continues when Brown resumes his chair and Mutso - sometimes poised behind, sometimes stretched across his lap - ‘merges’ into him, their arms combining in a hybrid semaphoring of graceful resourcefulness.
Everything about this piece speaks of matching talents acknowledging physical differences but celebrating the need to create work that strikes out, beyond the individual’s comfort zone. As for that title - Brown humorously imagines the elegantly lissome Mutso has 100 flexible vertebrae, while he has only 11, hence the combined dynamic of 111. A duet that is far more than a sum of those parts.
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