No hope, no reason
To write about the temporal is difficult. To speak of dance, the soul thinking the body, is to use a language often ill-fitted to it. One encounters perhaps, some of the same problems of choreography as the performers themselves. To seek an understanding of No Hope, No Reason, Jude Walton's recent performance is, Walton herself reminds us, to do so with love. For love is curiosity, the want to know. And to understand, one has to look with love.
This work is not solely a dance piece: Jude Walton's work, here as always, is a blending of many practices but a blending which always has the sense that "all ideas rise like music from the physical". (Guy Davenport, Ecologues).
Dance/movement, complex slide projections (here in collaboration with lan de Gruchy) and music/text (the texts of John Barbour being set to music by Hartley Newnham) are spun together. This formal compilation, this structural layering, correlates directly to the ideas offered up by Walton. It is a work of the contradictious contrariness of love, of its necessary but incongruous presence in the bleak, cold world in which we live. This is the story of love within the story of the city; the one creating the other infinitely ... ceaselessly creating variations on the themes.
It is in the opening solo from Shona lnnes that this most basic dichotomy between reason and sentiment emerges: feelings blunt our reason, reason blunts our feelings. Love is what melds these paradoxical impulses ... and tears them apart again. It is the ultimate paradox (giving and taking; revealing-concealing; seeking-denying): the equivocal expression of love.
Here, Innes' body dis-locates itself-'splitting' along its central axis, an arm and upper