Brighton Fringe 2022
Because I Can
Eva Recacha, Choreographer, Lauren Potter, Dancer, Alberto Ruiz Soler, Soundscapes
Genre: Dance, Experimental, One Person Show
Venue: The Dance Space
Festival: Brighton Fringe
Low Down
Robust dance solo by Eva Recacha explores the idea that women become invisible after a certain age and challenges us to think about power, memory and growing old. The audience witnesses the performer revisit various memories, contextualised by the sounds and noises of the outside world. Her presence becomes an ode to resilience and acceptance of life’s twists and turns.
Review
At the start of the performance the performer Lauren Potter traverses the stage with small shuffling, mincing movements: there’s an atmosphere of faded gentility and aging, but intricately expressed.
As she expands her movement, as the soundscape grows, so she confronts the audience with her shout, “Because I can”. At this stage it’s a brave but slightly unconvincing rather shrill show of strength.
The rest of this fifty minute solo dance performance fills out and empowers the statement until it returns but this time as a voice amongst the many others of the soundscape, an embodied statement of triumph rather than a cry of intent.
So that filling out? A celebration and a recognition of both weakness, power and desire and the minutiae of a full life. The soundscape is full of voices, sometimes a younger woman speaking to an older woman, sometimes her speaking: “Will you come and see me?” There are distinct passages of sound, a jarring industrial soundscape in which the dance both seems caught in the unbending rhythms of the outside world, or caught in the constrictions of dress and convention. Then there are other more lyrical moments – an almost amniotic sequence where the dancer sits and glides around the stage, or the careful rolling around a centre point in a precise circle.
There is the occasional narrative as well as the more abstract dance, that grounds the portrayal in the real, it’s a tale of someone who took children to school, who has swum in warm tropical seas, who has had personal power and influence over their life – and still has it. And it’s a tale of someone who has crossed a boundary into a region of age where recognition has to be fought for and made explicit, where expectations are different, but where, paradoxically, the whole person is even more present.
Lauren Potter is immensely skilled and precise while still giving Eva Recacha’s choreography a warmth and feeling quality that grows in impact with the development of the central theme, supported by Alberto Ruiz Soler’s occasionally immersive, sometimes melodious soundscapes.
The piece worked as a whole, you could see the strands of a life being danced and gathered together – another great solo piece from the newly if not yet officially opened Dance Space.
