Title: Dance Work
Work: Of Oil and Water
Summary
Made for eight dancers with music by Orlando Gough, this is Davies' second full-length work. Fast energy, shifting territories and a travellator on stage provides new ways to test the perception of speed and space. The title suggests a play with layers that may or may not mix. Gough's music begins with the voice of a 112 year-old woman living in the Transvaal, and ends with part of an Estonian runo-song. In between is a Malaysian woman speaking, a Zulu man making playful noises, a Berber woman yelling, combined with the voice of Melanie Pappenheim and saxophones of Rob Townsend.
Analysis
‘Put oil and water together and they separate out into layers, held together by surface tension but kept apart by their own differences of density and viscosity.
This hour-long work is built on that image of layers that mix but do not merge. The dancers mark out the extent of their own bodies, pushing against the resisting floor, and moving as if sheathed in space. In duets the connections between them are lagged and dissonant, skin deflecting as much as providing the contact between them. And in groups they draw together like currents of movement that never blend into a single flow.
With the music and design adding their own dragging counterpull to the movement, the slippage and friction between these contrasting planes of action produce a tense, restless and driven image of human interaction, the dancers separated by the very surfaces that connect them’ (Sanjoy Roy, programme note, 2000).
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