Pre-Covid, at this point in the year I would look at the 25-30 dance shows I had seen during the year and pick out my top ten favourites. Sometimes I would need to add a 'best of the rest' list because I'd seen so much I rated and enjoyed.
This year I have seen twelve shows. Twelve.
There are reasons for this. The pandemic delivered a blow to the live entertainment industry across the board from which it has yet to fully recover. Some areas have recovered faster and stronger than others but dance and theatre are still less active and performing to smaller audiences generally. Especially dance.
Recent ACE funding decisions have delivered fresh blows the impact of which are not yet known - but many companies face real-terms cuts to funding or the loss of their NPO status entirely.
Personally, I am less willing to travel to see dance so I have missed things in previous years I would likely have seen, in Chester, Liverpool and Huddersfield (mostly). I still went to London a couple of times. Like many people I feel differently to before in enclosed and organised spaces leading to off-putting anxiety (and sometimes full-blown panic attacks, although these have lessened over time). Some of the ways I have tackled anxiety are by avoiding shows that are long (+90 mins) or without an interval, changing where I sit in theatres - front and centre now tends to be more middle and end of row (especially an empty row) - and not booking shows that look like they might be less interesting to me personally or companies I don't especially feel the need to see again. I know this is unhelpful to those companies who need audiences so badly right now but there it is.
The Days | Theo Clinkard | The Lowry [Studio] | April
A conceptually simple but unexpectedly-moving duet that unfussily created a powerful emotional narrative, punched home with some clever musical choices and tenderly-measured performances from Maria Nurmela and Ville Oinonen and two locally-recruited older performers.
Le Pain | Jean-Daniel Broussé | The Lowry [Studio] | April
The cirque content in this show from JD of Nikki and JD fame is relatively low so it is more of a mixed media physical theatre piece with lots of humour, film, dance, some acro - and bread-making. It is a beautifully-constructed piece, full of warmth and humour and charisma from a performer who literally embodies all those qualities - plus some really good bread.
Dance | Rambert | The Lowry [Lyric Theatre] | May
This was a triple bill featuring the marvellous Eye Candy by Imre van Opstal and Marne van Opstal - shown as part of the summer livestream but much more impactful and (good) strange on stage - a new Ben Duke commission (Cerberus) - which was terrific - and a piece by Alonzo King created in 2000 for Alvin Ailey (Following the Subtle Current Upstream). The third piece was less to my taste but I had been so blown away by Eye Candy and Cerberus that it still seemed like a very strong programme.
Double Murder (Clowns/The Fix) | Hofesh Shechter Company | HOME | June
I have seen Clowns so many times (twice on stage and more times than I can count online) that I was not especially excited to see it again (especially with so many recent personnel changes in the company). But I was wrong. Clowns is terrific: poetic, exciting, shocking, funny, sexy and thought-provoking. New piece The Fix was unexpectedly simple and different: "a response to global pandemic, loneliness and isolation that settles on hope and hugs as the answer" [the Guardian]. I found it deeply moving and at the end as I stood in the front row while dancer Frédéric Despierre hugged me it felt everything I needed at that moment.
Dark in the House | L-E-V Dance Company | Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar | Bold Tendencies, Peckham Rye, London | July
Apparently Sharon Eyal had planned to restage 2011's House - which has never been seen in the UK - for this new three-day residency. Instead she reworked elements of House, OCD Love and Wet (2022) - which was created as part of their This Is Not A Love Show - A Series of Dance Performances at Kraftwerk Berlin in January into a site-specific new work.
The result - soundtracked by Ori Lichtik for the first part and DJ Koreless for the second - was a hypnotic exploration of Eyal's strange/beautiful, precise, extreme, spiky, languid, not-quite-robotic choreography performed in near-darkness (Part 1) or floods of red, green and pink (Part 2). Having been slightly underwhelmed by Love Chapter 3's oddly light-hearted tone at Sadler's Wells in May, this dark, alien beauty - which I saw twice on consecutive nights - made me fall in love with Eyal's work all over again.
Bold Tendencies is such a fantastic venue - the top two floors of a no-longer-in-use multi-storey carpark - and the smaller audience these performances are designed for - they also promoted her 2021 residency in Selfridge's loading bay - gives these shows a very special atmosphere and sense of excitement.
Kin | Gecko | HOME | September
Gecko are a physical theatre company with strong dance unpinning their work and their new show Kin - which is on the highly-topical subject of migration - is particularly strong on dance content. Anyone who likes Hofesh Shechter would enjoy this as it shares much of the same DNA. Dark, comic, intelligent and impactful: visually dynamic and wonderfully creative. A really fantastic show that they will continue to tour (and refine) in 2023.