Lea Anderson's Double Take - Review

With her remarkable penchant for wit and observational gesture, it is unsurprising that Lea Anderson, founder and choreographer of the all-female Cholmondeleys and the all-male Featherstonehaughs, celebrated her 20th anniversary with a twist. Seminal pieces from both company’s repertoires were revived as the double-bill Double Take, seemingly predictable, however the Anderson’s first evening length work Flesh and Blood (1989) was performed by the now all-male Cholmondeleys, and a variety of cabaret pieces from The Show, Big Feature and The Featherstonehaughs Go Las Vegas were performed by the now all-female Featherstonehaughs.

The double-bill celebration opens with the Cholmondeleys performing Flesh and Blood. After Steve Blake and the Victims of Death have made their presence known to us with their incredibly loud performance of punk rock music, there is one thing alone that is noticed; of course, the men are wearing Sandy Powell’s liquid jersey dresses. But this isn’t gender-bending or cross dressing, the costumes are inextricably linked to the piece. Anderson has cited Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1927 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc as a point of inspiration for the piece, which, along with religious iconography, brings the theme of obsession into the foreground. Anderson is known for her obsessive use of repetition and unison, but it is the intense focus of the male dancers that really grips the audience (an intensity mirrored in the volume of the music). The performers have to be good when there are sections in the work which are just choreographed eye movements. Incidentally, these sections brought beauty into a piece that is otherwise metaphorically and literally dark. The rest of the piece comprises of the Cholmondeleys crawling around the floor, torsos held up and twisting side to side, with arms bent by the head; like images of lizards and insects in depictions of hell by artists Bosch and Escher. Although a serious, gothic work Anderson does not miss injecting her characteristic wit into the piece. Apart from the absurd appearance of dancers crawling around the floor as insects and tracing each others ‘auras’, Anderson parodies social and ballroom dancing.

Those who have seen her work cannot deny Anderson’s unique ability to bring out the absurdity of everyday gestures. Her choreographic works for the Featherstonehaughs focuses heavily on observations of male social behaviour, the acuteness of which is not lost when the works are performed by women. The second act of this show comprises of eight short pieces, all with their own ingenuity. The atmosphere is much more relaxed than the intense first half of the double-bill; the dancers come on stage to set up a table, chairs and square of pink tape (which becomes the performance area) in the interval, and remain themselves throughout the cabaret style second half (in which Steve Blake is accompanied by the Bog Standards). All of these works deserve praise, but three stand out as particularly ingenious. The opening dance Strangers sees the dancers passing a microphone between each other, singing Strangers in the Night whilst dancing and managing not to get tangled up in the microphone wire – at attempt that is incredibly funny and no mean feat. Greetings closely follows, a parody of the physical ways in which we say hello to each other, moving between a simple handshake to the kissing of a knee or foot which shows off Anderson’s flair for gesture. The audience pleaser is Elvis Legs, which comprises of Elvis dance moves taken apart and put back together again, but in the wrong order. Priceless.

It is important to note that the gender swap is not intended as a social or political comment, but Anderson has stated that she learnt a very important lesson in working Flesh and Blood on male dancers – men and women’s knees are different. Nothing escapes Anderson’s wit, not even the awareness that her choreography is not always heralded as technically difficult (to traditionalists at least). The show closes with Iced Toe, in which all the dancers jump about the stage kicking their legs to their faces, an amusing affirmation of the dancers’ technical ability. Funny and clever with an injection of punk – Lea Anderson still at her best twenty years on.