Through the Eyes of a Dancer: Selected Writings

Stan Won’t Dance

232 | Stan Won’t Dance Performance Space 122, New York City March 15–19, 2006 Web review, dancemagazine.com Like the movie Brokeback Mountain, the British group Stan Won’t Dance brings the danger of gay love to center stage. The place is a smoky gay pub in London, and the movement idiom is rough-edged Contact Improvisation with sinister overtones.Choreographed by Rob Tannion and Liam Steel (both are former dancers with DV8 Physical Theatre who got together and co-founded Stan Won’t Dance in 2003), the dance-theater duet Sinner traces a nervous flirtation between two men. Ben Payne’s script is a fantasy of what happened in the hours before the real-life David Copeland planted a bomb in a gay bar in 1999, killing three people and wounding many others. This is a powerful performance, filled with a sly kind of precision: the men’s limbs and heads seem to just miss each other, fitting into a revved-up kinetic puzzle. What makes it engaging is not just the nifty lifts and throws but also the physical wit, sweaty humor, and the uncertainty of how far to trust someone you’ve just met. The dancers, Steel and Ben Wright, didn’t seem to be acting; they had an almost alarming curiosity and intensity. “Robert” (Steel) is small, insecure, ambivalent. “Martin” (Wright), tall and oozing self-confidence, moves with a kind of offhand gusto and sharpness. The story leads down a psychological path from frightened to frightful, suggesting that hate crimes are, deep down, fueled by fear. The refrain of a cell-phone ring precedes an ominous, one-sided conversation: “Who is this? Leave me alone.” It culminates in an aria of self-hate from Robert: “You’re my brother. . . . You’re my disease. . . . Whoever you are, that’s what I am.” The two men seem to switch identities, becoming two sides to one coin: confidence/fear, aggressiveness/insecurity, bigotry/empathy. The religious overtones sink in bit by bit: first the title; then T-shirts emblazoned with kitschy images of Christ; and then . . . the crucifixion. Small, sweet Robert takes a hammer and nails Martin’s jacket—with Martin inside it—to the table, then knocks the whole pile over and tosses chairs on top of the mess. His sudden violence was all because of the fear and confusion and wanting to “be somebody.” Possibly not too far off from the real David Copeland ’s psyche and others like him. ...