Transformation Fest: Rinse and Blackmilk Review – Sexy Dance Double Shot | Dance

TAmy Litman, director of the Ranform Festival, told her opening night audience that this is the most challenging financial environment in which she has worked. However, there are plenty of exciting indie festivals this fall: Take Me Somewhere in Glasgow, Nottingham Not Dance, the Southbank Centre’s Konsty Series, and Transformation Itself, a week of world-class dance and performance that on its first night had small venues packed with raucous audiences.

These two solo shows set the tone for artists who have something to say and interesting ways of saying it; The two pieces differ starkly in style, concerned with questions of identity and cultural expectations.

Amrita Hebe, a dancer and choreographer from Bundjalung (Australia) and Ngapuhi (Aotearoa/New Zealand), is clearly a very intelligent woman. In Rinse (co-produced with Mish Grigor), she speaks directly to the audience throughout the 40-minute clip, dancing as she goes, as if the movement were part of her thought process. You might say it’s stream of consciousness except that the dancing and lyrics are carefully thought out and thought out.

She’s great but good company: sarcastic, conversational, with flashes of wit and obvious politics. There’s a clever section about Hippie’s move to New York as a student, tracing the history of dance through famous choreographers—Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey—while emulating the style of each one.

Rinse claims to be about beginnings, from the origins of the Earth to how the Hepi created this piece (the witty line, “Adam, Eve, Steve, Apple,” seems to sum up several millennia). But it is richer when it addresses possession, property, and heritage in dance. Who owns the movement and who can do it, whether it’s Beyoncé borrowing from Bob Fosse, or white American Beth Dean performing indigenous dances. There’s the friend who suggests that Hepi focus on Maori dance and not New York postmodern artists, and Hepi’s changing feelings about haka dancing. But it doesn’t preach, it just provides space for thought.

In contrast to Hepi’s brightly lit and visually communicative stage, South Africa and Switzerland-based Terran Willemse keeps us in the pitch black in Blackmilk. He comes running down the stairs, muttering into the microphone. It takes a while to realize that these are the lyrics to Moon River, this dreamy song transformed into something depressing and disturbing. Dressed in black, wearing a hood, Willemse begins to twitch in repetitive tunes, swinging his arms. Blackmilk is the first in a trilogy called Trompoppies, the Afrikaans word for drummers, whose precise movements seem inspiring, but the pedestrian movement and repetition could easily follow a thread through Trisha Brown and Anne-Teresa De Keersmaeker, who only wear 21st-century alienation.

But then the horror melts into something else, his hands fly, his head swings; It is unclear whether this is a freedom or a collapse, but it is certainly a departure from narrow ideas of black masculinity, which is Willems’ point. There is something wonderful about it. Leftfield, sure, but it’s interesting, which has a lot to do with the atmospheric soundtrack, and Willemse’s commitment to the sinister intensity of the whole story. What he reveals is not easy to categorize, but like Hebe and the other artists at this festival, his refusal to be categorized is exactly what keeps you watching.