Linbury theatre, London
Yolande Yorke-Edgell and company join the dots between the founder-mother of American modern dance Martha Graham and the late Robert Cohan
Programmes by Yorke Dance Project often refer to past works and traditions. Their current evening traces a lineage to founder-mother of American modern dance Martha Graham through the figure of Robert Cohan, a Graham dancer who was central to the establishment of contemporary dance in the UK, and whose extraordinary late flowering of creativity the Yorke company facilitated, right up until his death earlier this year.
It opens with Yolande Yorke-Edgell performing Graham’s iconic early solo Lamentation (1930). The movement itself is minimal and mostly concealed: Yorke-Edgell is sheathed in a cloth tube that shows only the surface effects of the torque and tension within her body. This is expressionism given physical form: it’s all about what happens on the inside.
Ballet choreographer Kenneth MacMillan is by no means a direct descendent of Graham’s, yet his Sea of Troubles (1988) resounds with her influence. Danced barefoot, it is full of twists, flexes and floorwork, and its storytelling, based on symbol and psychodrama, recalls Graham’s heightened, declamatory style. Six dancers play characters from Hamlet – Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius, the Ghost, Ophelia and Polonius – but switch roles between scenes, each change signalled by a simple prop or costume such as cloak, crown or shroud. There’s no storyline, but rather a sequence of cameos expressing the dramatic turbulence between characters. Fascinating as a choreographic study, it’s hard going as a dance: highly strung yet curiously detached, and pretty confusing even if you know your Hamlet.
Afternoon Conversations with Dancers comprises eight solos (five shown during any single performance) that Cohan began before Covid, then continued to create over Zoom. Its rewards are rich: Pierre Tappon’s startled leaps and plunges, Freya Jeffs spiralling floorwards as if towards some buried enigma, Romany Pajdak in pointe shoes, her torso stretched between poise and strain; best of all, the underlying conviction that the shape and phrasing of the human body is all that a dance needs. For all that, it feels like an unfinished work.
Yorke-Edgells’ So It Is is a homage to Cohan for eight dancers, built on the sculptural Graham technique of tension and release, tilts and spirals that Cohan learned, taught and developed – a stately, somewhat polite mix of tribute and reverence, leavened by outbursts of lyricism.
Yorke Dance Project presents a special evening dedicated to Robert Cohan at the Linbury theatre, London, on Monday 15 November.