Sometimes you see a dance work you don’t know much about, yet recognise – the moment it begins – that you are going to follow that choreographer to the ends of the earth from now on.
I felt that way about Maggie the Cat, by Trajal Harrell, an experimental American dance-maker, who has been creating ripples for some time. He’s 46, so I really should have caught up with him by now, but I missed his show at the Barbican in 2017, though I had only heard entirely positive things about his breakthrough piece Twenty Looks Or Paris Is Burning at the Judson Church, which effected an unlikely collision between Harlem voguing and the experimental dance movement of the early 1960s.
His own style combines voguing and pop culture, with the theoretical ways of postmodern contemporary dance. That makes it sound awful, but it is utterly transfixing and entirely original. In Maggie the Cat he takes Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – specifically the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor as Maggie – and shifts the focus on to the black servants of the house, who are always marginal to the action.
Resplendent in a floaty housecoat, Harrell introduces himself as Big Mama, and he and Big Daddy (Perle Palombe in a shirt and shorts) stay at the front of the stage throughout, rapping and dancing, turning the name of Maggie into a kind of incantation over the top of a richly mixed score containing everything from Alberto Iglesias to Bruce Springsteen. Behind them, initially, are tables loaded with red cushions, bed sheets, duvets, towels, aprons and various bright garments.
“This is our help,” he says, as the dancers first clear the jumble sale of goods away and then, magically, begin to reappear, using the household items to clothe themselves in brilliant, seductive, eye-catching ways. A cushion as a handbag. A towel as a hat. They strut and preen as if on a catwalk, their feet arched in a beautiful simulacrum of high heels, appearing over and over again in different forms and moods – flirtatious, defiant, wild.
The performers are all superb and they couldn’t be more diverse, in appearance and in the ways they actually move, whether it’s the feline slink of Stephanie Amurao, the cool grace of Nasheeka Nedsreal, the fierce flounce of Christopher Matthews, or the slow curves of Songhay Tolden, in lime green trousers, raising his arms above his head as if in a trance. At first, the constant parade seems repetitive, but then you notice how each section develops in different, subtle ways responding to aspects of the character of Maggie, the insider outsider in a rich man’s house, determined to hang on.
There’s wit here – as when some dancers strap on cushions and become furniture for the others – but the passion of the dispossessed too. The movements sometimes, in their details, seem to recall the tropes of the black characters serving the leads in the old Hollywood movies. At others, they are like a courtly dance. The moment when the dancers dip their feet in a tray of brown paint, so they leave faint marks as they move, tracing their importance and their path across the white floor, is strangely resonant. At the close, each dancer walks forward to take a bow in the same little black dress, asserting their individuality. Applause doesn’t seem quite enough; it’s a thrilling work, both free and beautifully structured, profound and exhilarating. It’s part of a trilogy that will come back to Manchester in 2021 and I can’t wait to see the rest.
What I particularly loved about Maggie the Cat is its sense of being itself alone. There’s a lot of other good dance on display at Manchester, but quite often it has been used as an ingredient in a collaboration between different disciplines, and so flattened into the service of a multi-authored aim, decorative but not dominant. In both Tree (with wonderful African-inflected choreography by Gregory Maqoma) and Invisible Cities (where Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui turns dancers from Rambert into the physical embodiments of the strange magic of the story) the dance is both the strong animating force of the action and yet somehow kept in its place.
That tendency was at its worst in MIF’s Alphabus, at the Great Northern Warehouse, when the best efforts of some FlexN dancers and members of the Youth Identity programme at Contact theatre were foiled by a pudding of a show about a myth of rebellion and language. The performers were all charismatic, highly skilled and incredibly well intentioned but the show fell flat except in moments of individual virtuosity. It felt as if too many cooks had been involved. Sometimes less is more.
Star ratings (out of five)
Maggie the Cat ★★★★★
Alphabus ★★★
