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A Wound with Teeth<\/a><\/em>, the first half of the choreographer Holly Blakey\u2019s recent double bill at the Southbank Centre, reminded me of some of Paula Rego<\/a>\u2019s busiest paintings. It seems to come from the same dreamscape: deconstructed fairy tale costumes, densely arrayed symbolism, a certain shagginess of expression, animal heads, predatory gender relations (going both ways), triumphant victims, grotesque sexuality, maximalism, a powerful sense of mischief, an elaborate, multi-perspectival choreography of confrontations, subplots and cursed couplings.<\/p>\n The resemblance doesn\u2019t extend to Rego\u2019s depictions of dance itself. She painted ballerinas \u2013 most notably in the Dancing Ostriches <\/em>pictures of 1995, inspired by Disney\u2019s Fantasia<\/em> \u2013 and designed costumes for a ballet performed three years later. The quietly mournful circularity of The Dance<\/em> (1988) feels worlds away from the confrontational choreography of A Wound with Teeth<\/em>, a relentless blast of high-speed transitions and simultaneous tableaux melting in and out of one another, their creative abundance and chaotic energy quickly overwhelming the occasional footholds of narrative coherence, but revealing an underlying structure in their wake. The Rego-ish way that Blakey and the Southbank Centre chose to describe the piece bridges the gap, however: <\/p>\n How can loss of memory be a site of potential? \u2026 Blakey uses her own experience of forgetting to create a work that questions our ability to remember, and also to imagine and invent, at the border of the rational and the irrational. In a world that is sometimes terrifying and perverse, fighting for our own survival also means creating stories, and our own monsters and beasts.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The \u2018experience of forgetting\u2019 that inspired A Wound with Teeth<\/em> is more specific than this suggests: Blakey was sectioned as a child and spent a year at a mental health facility in Manchester, an experience she blocked from her memory. After making herself ill by starting to uncover this period of her life many years later, she decided instead to embrace the idea that \u2018my body had let me forget\u2019, and started work on a new full-length piece driven by that impulse, Lo<\/em>, which will be performed next year. A Wound with Teeth <\/em>is a preview of one section of it.<\/p>\n (In a way, Rego\u2019s experience was the exact opposite, the more familiar tale of psychoanalysis unblocking her unconscious and allowing the real work to begin. It\u2019s never that simple, though: she hid the Depression<\/em> series of large-scale pastels, which were born out of an especially debilitating depressive episode in 2007, for a decade, because she was ashamed of them.) <\/p>\n The second half of the double bill, Phantom<\/em>, For important periods, the focus of Rego\u2019s paintings narrowed too: the dog woman pictures and the abortion series both created in the 1990s, for example. Phantom <\/em>brought to mind both series, and the discomfort I felt in front of them, the feeling of not knowing how I was supposed to look at them. At the risk of stating the obvious, a miscarriage is not the same as a backstreet abortion \u2013 though there are also visceral commonalities, of course \u2013 but people didn\u2019t know how to look at the film version of Phantom<\/em> either. As Kate Lloyd\u2019s profile<\/a> of Blakey puts it: <\/p>\n When a clip of the performance first debuted online in 2021, Blakey was shocked that something that felt cathartic to create caused a \u2018real stink\u2019 with the commenters. She received \u2018so much hate, infinite appalling, appalled messages\u2019. What does she think triggered it? \u2018Honestly, I think the moments that leave audiences asking: \u201cIs this woman in orgasm, or is this woman in some form of pain?\u201d\u2019 She pauses. \u2018I\u2019m not trying to shock anyone. I didn\u2019t think it was shocking in any way.\u2019 What she was trying to capture, she says, is the multiplicity of being a woman.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n I\u2019ve recently experienced a miscarriage. Is that right? My partner lost a pregnancy, our pregnancy; I was there. But also not there. Not there<\/em>. While the gender dynamics of A Wound with Teeth<\/em> are pretty balanced, the churn of patterns swiftly disrupting or inverting the preceding arrangements, in Phantom<\/em>, the male-presenting dancers play more supplementary roles, standing back, banked in a secondary line, the screaming mostly coming from women, the convulsing soloists always women. <\/p>\n The score, though, of shredded guitar and handclaps, was created by Gwilym Gold. Gold is Blakey\u2019s partner; the miscarriage also happened to him. \u2018There\u2019s something about Gwil being my partner and writing the music for this thing, the music of this miscarriage, that felt really important to me for this work,\u2019 Blakey said when the film version was released. They joined the dancers onstage together, for the final bow. The music sounded just like the pressure in my head, as I sat, both completely invested and somewhat removed, looking on \u2013 at the stage, or in a hospital room. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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