11.07.1996

Follow that car

Car, a touring production from the Cholmondeleys. Performed outdoors at sites around the UK until August 25

The Cholmondeleys (pronounced chumlees) are an all-female modern dance company based in London. They are currently touring the country with their production Car. I saw then perform it last week at the Hackney Festival.

The performance consists of three 15-minute pieces - all utilising a brand new car as means of arrival and departure and most interestingly as the main site of the dance. The strength of the work came from this struggle between a stationary car, invaded, surrounded and explored by the six dancers, relishing the chance of controlling this all powerful machine. There is an incantatory feeling about the way they whirl in and out of the car - as if they had mastered the car’s function and were in the process of evolving it into something else. But although the vehicle is still, it never seems tamed - almost by dint of all the dancers’ movement the car gains a strength - a state of impenetrability, resistant to change and ready to pounce. It is the car’s icon status, its mix of myth and ubiquity that fascinated J.G Ballard in ‘Crash’ and ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’. Like him the Cholmondeleys use the car as a stage of history, suggesting future dystopia, political assassinations, media image and sexual object - and also like him they are unable to get the car out of their system: they are obsessed by it. It delivers them and removes them from their space - they perform when and where it stops.

The piece is disturbingly public, having whispers of agit-prop, but more resembling an actors’ troupe appearing at festival time on a wagon. But today the means of transport is not converted into a stage set by the performers. It insists on being itself - make of it what you will. The absence of human transformative power has trapped the characters in time, reducing interaction to gesture and keeping humans like cars - copies of each other.

The Cholmondeleys are on to something provocative and malign. It is the decision to reconvene their space in public and struggle openly against all our alienation that gives this piece its power and beauty.

Paul Hart