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This triple bill of Spring Loaded offered three diverse works, all of which delivered. It was an evening dominated by women, a topical occurrence considering the recent and ongoing discussions about the relative lack of high-profile female choreographers, and reflections on the experience of being a woman in the profession. The first two pieces - Amy Bell and Valentina Golfieri’s I Just Close My Eyes: Here Are The Devils and Aoife McAtamney’s softer swells - were choreographed and performed by women, while the third, Cameo Cookie, was choreographed by Gary Clarke but performed (almost) single-handedly by the impressive Eleanor Perry.

Although four male performers join Perry in the closing vignette, Cameo Cookie is essentially a one-woman show. It is structured around the figure of Anita Bryant, a woman who campaigned against the gay rights movement in America during the 1970s. Structured as a series of vignettes, Cameo Cookie employs a heavy dose of theatricality, numerous props, and an eclectic mash up of music and sound recordings to reflect upon this crusading, influential woman and the movement she so aggressively targetted. The vignette setup saves the work from becoming too subservient to a narrative; rather than being walked through a history of the gay rights movement or hit over the head with a message, each snippet of this hyper-theatrical, in-your-face performance lands with a punch and then disappears almost before the audience has time to digest it. The vignettes range from ridiculous to sickening, humorous to disturbing, and, with a touch of pathos thrown in, the work definitely has impact.


Its success is due in large part to the strength of Perry’s performance, but also to the frankness of its nature; Cameo Cookie knows what it is, and goes for it with gusto. It invites reflection on the position of the gay rights movement today, especially with gay marriage being so topical and politically relevant, but also invites larger reflections on gender and sexuality. What does it mean for a male choreographer to create a work where a female performer portrays both an anti-gay rights activist (a female whose target was primarily male homosexuality) and a sexually-liberated woman surrounded by scantily-clad, rather camp, back-up male dancers? It celebrates sexuality differences, but what about gender differences? Through the kaleidoscopic rollercoaster of its vignettes, Cameo Cookie raises some interesting questions.


Cameo Cookie followed Aoife McAtamney’s more subdued solo offering, softer swells. In a drastically different, much subtler way, this work also invites reflections on gender and sexuality as McAtamney takes the audience through a personal journey using both movement and voice. She starts slowly, quietly, but full of presence. Gradually adding fragments of sung text and more full body movement, references to Irish culture appear, and the work takes on an increasingly personal quality. That this is one woman’s journey is impossible to ignore; the amusing and somewhat raunchy lyrics of one section, together with McAtamney’s choice of a wife-beater (sans bra) and powerful, unapologetic use of her body keep the female-ness of this wanderer in the foreground of her journey.


The pacing is effective, and the faster, intense physicality that occurs later in the work explodes wildly and satisfyingly from the more restrained sections. However, as the work ends I do not have a strong sense of where this journey has taken McAtamney; the work is described as non-linear, but non-linearity does not have to equate to lack of, or ambiguous progression. Nevertheless, when it ends I feel that I have experienced something worthwhile, even if I can’t quite say what.


Bell and Golfieri’s I Just Close My Eyes: Here Are The Devils opened the night. The two choreographer/performers are a double act, and an entertaining one at that. Sporting brightly-coloured dresses and conspicuous peroxide blonde beehives, they inhabit a bizarre world of sharp, precise head gestures and dysfunctional relationships. Alternatively partners and adversaries, they work both with and against each other. At other times they completely ignore each other, wrapped up in playing out their own peculiar dramas.


The beehives steal the show, and every head gesture (there are many) increases in amplitude as it is funnelled through the magnifying lens of the towering blonde curls. The beehives otherwhelm the performers’ bodies, making the familiar less familiar and the real more surreal. When Golfieri dons a second beehive this effect is taken to the extreme, with very entertaining results. The success of the beehives (and the work as a whole) is, I think, due to Bell and Golfieri’s decision to keep the movement vocabulary within clear, simple parameters, and to fully capitalise on the vocabulary by using repetition and phasing to great effect.


A microphone, which appears from Bell’s underwear early on in the work, adds dramatic tension to the relationship between the two performers. They hold it as if waiting to speak, or offer it to each other, as if inviting the other to respond. But whatever is hanging in the air is left unsaid, and the portentous microphone seems to hold sway over these voiceless, beehived females, up until, and perhaps beyond, the very last, tantalising moment of this work.