A Celebration of Bob Lockyer, The Place - review

Bob Lockyer was producing and directing new dance on the BBC before the parents of today’s performers were born. For his 70th birthday he asked five friends, Richard Alston, Mark Baldwin, Siobhan Davies, Monica Mason and Wayne McGregor, to make or commission works for a fundraising gala. Proceeds will go towards creating more new dance.

The gifts range from fake antiques to mini-treasures to the choreographic equivalent of socks. Papillon, commissioned from Sebastian Goffin by Mason, is a 19th-century cameo pastiche which sees Skyler Martin trying to coax a kiss from Mayara Magri to Dvorak’s Silent Woods. Lake Maligne, made by Royal Ballet choreographic apprentice Robert Binet on Random Dance member Daniela Neugebauer, might almost have been by Wayne McGregor, who commissioned it. Neugebauer emanates a kind of serene physical Tourettes, watching unperturbed as parts of her body drift enigmatically off on their own devices.

Siobhan Davies also chose to commission. The Way It Works is This..., by Charlie Morrissey, is a re-animation of physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey’s early bids to photograph human motion. The deadpan soundscape by Orlando Gough, stroboscopic projection of Marey’s enlarged images, and mime-artist performance by Morrissey himself are all equally alienating.

Alston’s dance to Jo Kondo’s Isthmus, with its bamboo-sounding percussion background, is like watching the play of human windchimes. In Prayer, Baldwin goes for a more epic effect with four Ephesian women swapping gestures that seem taken from hunting, bathing or sacrifice, before they petrify into an anguished frieze.