Sola: A Suite of Solos About Absence
Sola is a collage of contemporary dance solos about the presence of absence. Running at the Corpus Playroom from Wednesday to Saturday at 9:30pm, each performance features four different student dancers (of six total), performing one after the other in an atmosphere that shifts between solemn, contemplative, energetic, and hopeful. Sola is the antidote to a severe absence of dance in the city of Cambridge.
Lauren Sayers rehearses a solo. Photo: Katiann Barros-Rocha, with permission from Sola.
The final image of Lucy Sims’ solo – two pale hands silhouetted in the dark doorway, rubbing carefully up and down her forearms, before vanishing – leaves the audience breathless. She dances in silence, expression troubled. A pulling in-and-out of the arms, a fluttering salute of the fingers – her movements seem to tug to-and-fro with something inside her: we wonder what it is she is struggling to keep inside. The programme tells us that this solo, ‘Lucia’, is about the loss of a person who was ‘the whole of Italy’ and in Lucy’s expansive movements, the solo seems to open out onto the void of ‘Lucia’s absence. As Lucy turns and tumbles, we hear only the intimate sound of her fabric swishing against the floor. The movement becomes gradually more urgent, breath growing heavier, until she finally dissolves into the darkness.
Lucy directed Sola, with Lauren Sayers assistant directing (and dancing on Friday and Saturday). This is not her first work in Cambridge or with these dancers: with Anise Hartley and Lauren, Lucy danced for Kick! Letter to the World in Clare Chapel this December. This time, each dance was self-choreographed by the soloists and emerged from earlier improvisations with live musicians, three of whom return for Sola: pianist Mischa, drummer Frankie Steel, and violinist Jem. The result is dance electrified by live music or hushed by silence.
Izzy Megilley opens her solo about burnout to the pulse of loud drums, her arms carving broad circles through the air as if desperately making space for herself. Moving in counterclockwise loops around the stage, she is especially compelling when crouched – feet flexed, legs ready to propel herself across the floor. Anise Harley, too, with a flick of an arched toe, looks ready to leap in her solo ‘People or Stars’. Focusing on the way spending time with yourself can become isolating, her dance explores those actions we repeat that become familiar. The double-edged bittersweet bind of isolation in familiarity trickles into her dance. She moves with an aqueous fluidity to the aquatic sounds of múm’s The Land Between Solar Systems: her limbs undulate like sand cascading, each motion rippling from shoulder right down to fingertips. In contrast, Isobel Dyson’s music is better known, the ominous beat of Clubbed to Death from the Matrix. Her arms lengthen and smooth the air, but at times are caught mid-spiral in a juddering hesitation. Mind and body seem at war here, each warped by some unseen fury. As her limbs reverse unpredictably, she is alternately bathed in the visceral glow of blood-red lights and a wash of white.
Eoin McCaul rehearses a solo. Photo: Isobel Dyers, with permission from Sola.
The lighting is key to Sola’s artistry. At times, sudden flashes from light to dark make the dancers disappear and reappear mid-motion. In Eoin McCaul’s dance, a shadow doubles his figure, turning a solo into an unconscious duet. Eoin carries himself with the poise of a tightrope walker. His solo is meticulously structured, exploring a cycle of motions, of which arms are the focal point… He flicks a shoulder and it ripples; he trails a hand around his neck; his head tilts to accommodate the space in the crook of his arm. He seems to vibrate on his feet, bouncing imperceptibly, and when he moves it’s a gliding shuffle. The climax sees him spinning, his control fixed even as he whirls, and the audience’s eyes fixed on him.
Despite the diversity of each solo, Sola finds cohesion in its motifs – the circling of arms, the juddering changes of direction, the play of light and its absence. Not to mention that the whole suite of solos are about “the presence of absence”, as director Lucy tells the audience each night with quotation marks in the air and a laugh. It is not easy to point to or “look at” absence, in real life or in these solos. So, instead, the performance becomes an invitation to feel for absence: how absence moulds the empty space we move through or how it moulds us from the inside out.
“Sola finds cohesion in its motifs – the circling of arms, the juddering changes of direction, the play of light and its absence.”
A rare offering, Sola proves that Cambridge’s dance scene can deliver exploratory and captivating work. And Lucy and Lauren are only in their second year. One wonders the power of what they might direct in the future.