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In today’s artistic environment focused on developing collaboration and depleting boundaries, it’s refreshing to see a choreographer questioning the validity and success of the fusion between dance styles and artistic mediums. When the lines between classical ballet and contemporary dance blur, movement vocabularies cross, linger, dive, and permeate one another, but to what degree of success?

This compelling notion was the concept behind Fusional Fragments, a work choreographed by Marc Brew in collaboration with percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, and commissioned by the Southbank Centre as part of Unlimited: London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad, celebrating the extraordinary talents of deaf and disabled artists.

Five technically strong and diverse dancers graced the stage, interacting with and separating from percussionist Glennie as she wove, sang, and moved throughout the space, an influential and mesmerising force behind the movement. Both beginning and ending the work, Glennie exaggerated and morphed the soundscape, composed by Phillip Sheppard, and created her own element of interaction: a fused fragment beyond the constraint of a movement vocabulary, but still able to hold its own within the work.

Strong movement vocabularies were witnessed throughout the piece: the use of distinct lines, ballet positions and boundaries was evident, punctuated by contemporary dance’s use of levels, fragmented lines, and the breakdown of traditional partnerships. A dominating use of lighting splintered the stage, allowing the dancers to use these sharp angles to play with and interact with the space, shaping and visually distorting their own lines.

With a movement vocabulary that focuses on isolation and ‘broken’ lines, a lighting score that visually breaks down the dancer’s bodies (an interesting moment occurring when a strong light streamed across the space, highlighting only the dancer’s knees), this work mainly centers around fragmentation rather than fusion. By clearly breaking down and dividing the technical parameters of both movement styles, the idea of fusion became a little lost in the work. The work embraced both styles, but didn’t challenge them, and clearly defining the influences of the movement could ultimately lead to its confusion.

Yet there was something very compelling about this work. The atmosphere created in this piece through the movement and the collaborative elements are to be applauded, and though conceptually I felt a little let down in this work, visually this piece was something to behold.