Beethoven, Boots and Cats

Bookending my first day at the Edinburgh Festival are two very different but beautiful performances at the wonderful Dance Base venue in the Grassmarket, Matthew Hawkins’s “Ready” and Christine Thynne and Robbie Synge’s “These Mechanisms.” Now helmed by the wonderful choreographer and dancer Tony Mills, Dance Base is genuinely inclusive, providing workshops, classes and performances for all ages and abilities.

Performance

Matthew Hawkins’s “Ready” / Christine Thynne and Robbie Synge’s “These Mechanisms.”

Place

Dance Base, Edinburgh, Scotland, August 2, 2024

Words

Lorna Irvine

“These Mechanisms” by Christine Thynne & Robbie Synge. Photograph by Amy Sinead Photography

The first performance is by the incredible, internationally acclaimed Matthew Hawkins, who trained with the Royal Ballet School, and has worked with the Michael Clark Company, Merce Cunningham and Rambert, among many luminaries. This piece was inspired by both his late father, who played Beethoven CDs towards the end of his life, and his own long illustrious career.

Hawkins moves instinctively, a constant shapeshifter, utilising every part of his statuesque form, and much of the studio space. But it's also a promenade piece, responding to the outdoor space. He tentatively strokes the sighing leaves of trees, making nature itself a collaborator. His capricious choreography sees him perform languorous extensions, only to smack his hands together. It's as though he's determined to interrupt the flow, to disrupt any existing preconceptions of ballet's five basic positions. Limitations are ripe for exploration at every corner. His hands are rarely still and his expressive face lets the captivated audience into some of his thought processes. Elsewhere, he's as inscrutable as a prowling tiger.

Elegiac or playful; prone, flexing or swaying, he's a bewitching dancer. Such presence is innate. The heavenly piano sonatas bleed with the sounds from around the venue: all is control; all is chaos. As he slinks off into the breezy afternoon air, he instructs, “Watch me up close, or from a distance.” I do both, and it's a rare privilege to see the tension in his thigh muscles working as he goes from lying sideways, straight into splits. Matthew Hawkins is a genius, forever dissolving form and interrogating experimentation.

Matthew Hawkins's “Ready.” Photograph by Nick Burge

At the opposite end of the dance spectrum lies Christine Thynne's collaboration with choreographer Robbie Synge. Almost a one woman show, Thynne, who took up dancing at eighty years old, explores muscles, memory and muscle memory. Thought processes are recorded and looped by Thynne's sound designer and composer Calum Paterson. These encompass everything from the Latin Thynne learned at school, to poetry, to remembering to go and pick up her family. The beatboxer's chant of “boots and cats” is also cheekily deployed.

It's pitched somewhere between joyfully anarchic experimentation and performance art. Paterson is gently chided by Thynne for turning up the volume, or not recoding her voice. When Thynne eventually dances her solos, I thought of none other than Laurie Anderson, gracefully grooving to “Language is a Virus.” At another point, she's a funky club kid, lost in the beats of Peterson's bass heavy ambient music and throwing shapes. Yet another solo is evocative of the ebb and flow of the sea, alluding to Thynne's interest in kayaking. It's beyond inspirational, it's enough to make you want to invade the stage and join her.

“These Mechanisms” by Christine Thynne & Robbie Synge. Photograph by Amy Sinead Photography

Such mischief extends beyond her dancing. As her fragments of poetry and thought loops coalesce, she creates a makeshift seesaw using a wooden board and several large bottles of water. It's risky, to say the least. “Health and safety,” she chuckles, putting on safety gloves.

There's no linear storytelling here, no narrative arc. If there's any overarching theme to be gleaned, it's that of retaining a childlike sense of wonder or intellectual curiosity, of never dimming the lights or worrying about how others may perceive us. Age is just a number, dance always means more than bodies moving in space, and for Thynne, it's all about the process and not the result. And that's more than enough.

Lorna Irvine

Based in Glasgow, Lorna was delightfully corrupted by the work of Michael Clark in her early teens, and has never looked back. Passionate about dance, music, and theatre she writes regularly for the List, Across the Arts and Exeunt. She also wrote on dance, drama and whatever particular obsession she had that week for the Shimmy, the Skinny and TLG and has contributed to Mslexia, TYCI and the Vile Blog.