A case for ecstatic (Jazz) dance ~ Black Saint & the Sinner Lady
Credit: Graeme Miall.
Social prescribers should take note of Clod Ensemble and Nu Civilisation Orchestra’s interactive dance extravaganza, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, hosted, dinner-theatre style at The Barbican.
Initially, the invitation is a little oblique, to ‘join the award-winning musicians and dancers onstage,’ but this may encourage the demurer to unwittingly participate!
Using innovative 20th Century composer Charlie Mingus’ manic trills of dark and light jazz rhythms to bring people of all shapes and abilities to the dancefloor might not be such a tenuous proposition. He famously communicated his compositions by singing rather than notation, trusting in his orchestra’s complicit feel for impro.’ It is appropriate then that it forms the soundtrack to an evening of risk taking.
The band strikes its first cacophonous riff and those who remember listening to jazz with trance-like transfixion submit to its chaotic crescendos. The uninitiated would find it hard to resist the considered cacophonies in this blend of Duke Ellington and gospel inspired dance music. It is a genre that winds you up and brings you gently down – just what we need for arts engagement.
But the rules of this world in cabaret-style round are made crystal clear by our hosts – the professional dancers, decked deliciously in vibrant silks and flounces, ask us to dance, and the game is what we make of it – mirroring the practiced exclamations of their limbs or letting the music move us from within.
The ensemble of dancers, which includes familiar faces from London’s recent immersive dance shows, win at being likeable and manage to put many of the layman scattered across raked platforms and tables at ease with pre-show chat. I turn the chat back on my host, asking questions about him – trust a journalist to make the performers awkward.
However, by the second set, myself, along with an awe-inspiring demographic of eighteen to seventy-year-olds have shaken our bits and bones in wild abandon, with some derivative references to ‘Soul Train’ to boot! Watching the pit full of fully grown bodies, many, I suspect, framed by desks during the day, is quite the unusual spectacle – this isn’t organised social dance after all, this is free-style, jazz-infused, ecstatic dance as fuelled by the odd glass of Sauvignon or can of craft-beer.
There is something transcendently graceful about watching the lumbering bodies of two men, well into their sixties, unselfconsciously carried away by music and social immersion, rather than sport and alcohol. One couple are a mother and teenage daughter; and it is rather lovely watching them venture into the polite scrum together before separating to explore.
Having only partially done my homework, I have come with the expectation of story. Dance interludes, choreographed by Suzy Wilson, invisibly break into the more amateur physical ‘praise-be’s’ of the audience, and we are presented with dynamic duets, rather than a narrative or threads of story. However, there is plenty to watch in this feast of human behaviour.
By nine-thirty PM, I’m aching, and I’m not that unfit…the desire to watch the clock creeps in before closing time. A heavier offering of constructed performance may have held us more closely to the experience at this late stage of the evening. Yet, the achievement of the piece remains evident…
Here is a packed hall of over one hundred people, of all ages, spontaneously expressing themselves to the sound of a big band, without free-flowing alcohol or the social parameters of a night-club or wedding party. Significantly, this evening, seamlessly produced by Nu Civilisation and Clod Ensemble, may have gone some way to making the tentative or isolated in the room feel both joyous and safe.
For this reason, those wrapping their heads around a new era of collaboration, between the arts, charities and local government, would do well to pay attention.
