Leigh Warren & Dancers - BREATHE

Leigh Warren & Dancers
BREATHE
Womadelaide, March, Adelaide

Getting a gig at Womadelaide opens up many opportunities, allowing performers to access a wide audience and perhaps get onto the international festival circuit. The performance environment, however, presents certain difficulties for a dance company. There are the technical problems of poor sight lines and limited stage and wing space, making entrances and exits difficult.

Furthermore, the audience is not compelled to sit still or sit quietly, and the open air setting, with several other stages simultaneously offering competing (and rather noisy) entertainment, means that holding an audience’s attention can be problematic. But Francis Rings’s Breathe managed to do more than that: it kept an enormous and largely dance-naive audience spellbound.

Composer William Barton’s performance on vocals, didgeridoo and guitar was pivotal to building the atmosphere and creating the audience’s absorption. Working with a pre-recorded backing tape, Barton shifted easily from voice to instruments. His circular breathing on the didgeridoo provided the rhythmic propulsion and charge to much of the piece, aided by amplification that meant he could heard at the farthest reaches of the audience. The muted colours of designer India Flint’s costumes, in contrast, did not work so well in such a large viewing space, being largely washed out by the lights if you happened to be sitting at any distance to the stage, as I was.

The work is in six sections that explore the essential act of breathing. It opens with four men and a woman advancing from the back of the stage, hands linked, alternately rising and falling, advancing and retreating like the rhythms of the breath itself. Their bodies curl and twist into each other, and the pace accelerates until the woman is born aloft. The next section is composed of another woman dancing solo, making much use of floor work and falls. The middle section, to my mind the most choreographically arresting, comprises percussive arm and torso movements by five men moving initially in line followed by a series of very varied duets, which culminate in a staccato group formation. Next is a duet for two women, clearly representing lungs in long white conjoined dresses. It’s an interesting idea but loses its way: why are they suddenly lifted up at the end? The male-female duets that follow are much more cleverly structured. A complex ensemble section ends the piece, culminating in a circle dance that echoes the circular breathing of the didgeridoo.

Breathe was beautifully danced, but who the individual dancers were, I cannot report; another downside of a festival performance is that there are no programs. But this didn’t matter a bit to the audience, which clapped enthusiastically after every section as if they were watching a band performing its greatest hits, and a hit Breathe was, undoubtedly, under the trees at Botanic Park.

– MAGGIE TONKIN