The first night of Undisciplined is a comforting meander into tactility and everything sensuous. Two hours before the performance of Becky Namgaud’s The Heat, Charlotte Spencer’s interactive We are all memory bodies turns the upper floor of The Dance Space into a warm sphere filled with conversations between strangers and friends. People are invited to respond to various activities centred around touch, and as the evening progresses ideas come and go, others emerge and cling.
I can’t help but notice that the idea of imprints makes a continual return. In Our Hands, a gentle sketch-and-talk organised by Vicky Mallin, a group of us sit round a table with Mallin and colouring pencils. Mallin times us with an hourglass (a refreshing departure from being bombarded with digital alarms) and carefully grasps the bundle of pencils in one hand. We join her in moving the pencils around a large sketchpad as Mallin slowly drags the colours across diagonals and linear directions. Each of us has a finger or a hand on the pencils, forming connection without physical contact. By the second half of Our Hands, we doodle on the page reflections of ongoing conversations. Mallin explains that her decision to focus on hands, more than any other part of the body, stems from her fascination with how much we use them and what our hands go through. She has consulted neurologists throughout her research, uncovering a plethora of complex networks in how our hands feel and experience touch. As we sketch, I’m drawn to how the paper feels, the tiny differences between how one pencil nib feels on the page compared to another, the sharp and smooth angles in the pencil itself. We talk about grooves someone has noticed in their hands, the shape of our fingertips – are yours round or square? – how touching hands is sometimes awkward in everyday life but has a time and place where it can be sweetly significant. By the time we finish, the page is scattered with imprints of chatter, softly imbued in an array of colours. A warm hug on paper.
Beyond Mallin’s table, we can read a poem, Our Hands by Petra Soor and respond in writing. People have left behind thoughts on their hands’ sensory experiences in daily moments taken for granted, on saying goodbye for the last time. Hands and the passing of generations, leaving their own imprint, springs to mind. Becky Edmunds’ Do Not Wash, greets you with a small woven cloth stretched over a wooden frame. Sitting behind it is Edmunds, who describes the intense connection she felt holding one of her grandmother’s embroidery pieces, despite never having met her. Intrigued by the thought of her grandmother leaving physical traces behind in craftwork, Edmunds asks sewers to impress their DNA on the thread, whether it is rubbing it into your hands or running it through your lips. So, Edmund’s cloth holds the DNA of people who have stopped to stitch it with her, passing the needle back and forth through the fabric in tactile conversation as they sit opposite Edmunds. As always with sewing, the feel of the needle piercing textile followed by the rough pull of soft thread is therapeutic to me. Every encounter leaves a different form. Our improvised stitching moulds into abstract shapes, first a saucepan in my eyes, and then a woman reclining, in a surprising foreshadow of The Heat.
The Heat, an expression of the darker female psyche in a domestic space, is deliciously wild and daring. Dark lighting coats a living room draped in a giant plastic sheet. As the darkness softens, we see a naked form half concealed on the sofa beneath the plastic. The dancer, Caroline Reece, slinks onto the floor, feet and hands padding the floor. Head down, her pelvis floats above her in an animalistic inversion. The plastic breathes around her, and after going through many tactile explorations beforehand, my skin easily imagines the warm stick of polymer rustling against the body. As Reece gradually comes to standing, she turns, the plastic spiralling and wrapping closer around her flesh. When she walks off behind the curtain covering the back of the stage, her hands carry the bundled sheet above her head – in the dim light, it almost looks like a bridal silhouette.
Indeed, the dancers are married to this domestic space as they play out wild urges and sink into low and slow emotions. With the curtains almost never open in the little living room, there is a sense of entrapment and even servitude. We see snapshots of the stereotypical housewife; Reece reclines on a sofa with a wired telephone, Becky Namgauds reluctantly dusts off the floor with a pan and brush, Masumi Saito squats at a low table cutting and eating oranges. As the scene progresses, Namgauds sweeping evolves into dragging floorwork, ankles sickling, chest pulling along the floor: a silent, physical groan against the mundanity of chores. Saito’s orange-eating swells to murderous proportions. She stabs her knife into oranges, jumps and screams on the table. Holding a whole satsuma in her mouth, tension builds as her eyes widen at the knife she points directly at herself. In one decisive motion, she drives the knife into the fruit, juice squirting down her torso.
It's not all darkness, however. Bea C. Bidault brings a nuttiness to the piece, the curtains suddenly opening to reveal a body clad in a tight pink dress with Bidault’s head off-kilter on one shoulder. “Look at yourself!” She shouts. “You look amazing. A-maz-ing!” She chatters on about how her therapist says she is like a butterfly in the forest, again and again and again. And, “Where is my head?”. Well, Bidault’s head drops to her detached body’s hand, which pushes it back onto the shoulder. Bidault rattles on in false brightness, completely oblivious. Eventually, her poor discombobulated body tires of her and abandons her on the back of the sofa. The humour hits just right and captures an exhausting need for validation.
Primal instinct in a “civilised” space seeps in, eventually invading The Heat in a shaking, roaring climax of unashamed pleasure. Yet, the primal is exposed differently in Bonni Bogya’s haunting solo. Like Reece in The Heat’s beginning, her pelvis hangs in the air creating an A-shape with the body. Bogya’s legs sometimes snap up, twisting. Hip joints writhe, an unpredictable jaggedness possessing her body. It’s enrapturing, seeing someone move through an eerie corner sequestered away in the human physique. It’s what The Heat manages successfully, a delicate balance between the recognisable surface and hidden rebellion. Violent, funny and curiously sad, The Heat is a work that will linger in the mind long after is has ended.
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You can catch more events at Brighton's Undisciplined Festival until 20th March. Find further information on South East Dance: https://southeastdance.org.uk/whats_on/undisciplined-2025/