Manchester international festival: Sea Change; Breathless Puppets – review

Deansgate, Manchester; available online
Boris Charmatz gets Manchester’s communal toes tapping, while Akram Khan partners with hand-drawn animation to stylish effect

The French choreographer Boris Charmatz opened this year’s Manchester international festival with Sea Change, a live event performed along the cobbled stretch of Deansgate, on a muted grey Thursday evening. Despite a small crowd and a certain lack of atmosphere, it proved to be a delicate, moving enterprise: a line of professional and amateur dancers, each performing their own different “bit”, united by theme. Some clutched their heads, lamented and ululated; others flowed from pose to pose as if doing tai chi in the park; others went through warm-up exercises like joggers, or slipped about as if mired in the mud at Glastonbury; some yelled “Save our rainforests, save our oceans!”, raggedly cheered on an imaginary sports team, or reached for the sky in euphoric, ravey bliss.

All had one thing in common: from a fun run to a funeral, a protest march, a boozy barbecue or the advance of the zombie hordes, they referenced collective events. Charmatz gave us back our lost moments of togetherness. There was even a section about running to catch a plane; you know things are bad when being late for something takes on a nostalgic quality. The dancers’ costumes of sweaty white T-shirts, jeans and trainers, smeared with brightly coloured school chalk, emphasised the benign, refreshingly casual tone.

With its single line of performers and simple idea, Sea Change was not the 10-minute-long pageant-promenade it had been billed as: it had more in common with amateur street theatre and the Edinburgh festival fringe – but this was all to the good. Its ad hoc, contingent air and humour gave it a lighthearted fellow-feeling that has been sorely lacking. Charmatz reminds us that we humans are communal creatures, we’re meant to be around each other, and something doesn’t need to take place in a temple – or a theatre – to have a ritual function and a bonding warmth.

MIF has also commissioned some dance films this year. Breathless Puppets is a 17-minute animation co-created by choreographer Akram Khan and animator, writer and director Naaman Azhari. It utilises rotoscope technology, in which live action is sketched over to give a constantly moving, line-drawn aesthetic. Breathless Puppets tells the story of a young man called Nicholas who wants to be a dancer, despite his family urging him to go into medicine. Nicholas’s loneliness and ambition are contrasted with scenes in which Khan himself performs to a full house of cheering fans.

The delicate monochrome rotoscoping works nicely: white lines on solid black for Khan’s storyline and thin, dark lines on white and grey for Nicholas’s suburban yearning, with tree branches and fences carefully picked out. The style also works well to showcase the twisting, loping sinuousness of Khan’s choreography: in a tactile, two-man duet he enacts all the support, reliability and nurturance that Nicholas has lacked from his own father.

The plot also takes in forbidden romance, illness and death, but these are unnecessary lunges towards melodrama. Overall, this short film is a stylish reminder of Khan’s gifts and the lure of dance for young wannabes.

Watch a trailer for Breathless Puppets

Star ratings (out of five)
Sea Change
★★★
Breathless Puppets ★★

Contributor

Bidisha

The GuardianTramp

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