ECHO BEACH
27/10/2015 - 28/10/2015
Production Details
Hannah has a dance collection. It is a collection she has been gathering for a while and she calls it ‘dancing like everyone I know’.
And Hannah has discovered that it’s all in the detail, that’s what makes your dance so specific.
Echo Beach is dance theatre that revels in the casual social dancing that is unique to everyone. It uncovers the delicacies of family life, unveils memory through music and movement, and touches upon the fragility of what is seen and what is felt.
‘The piece was a complete highlight … touching and poignant, funny and nostalgic. The fragments of memory spoken through movement and voice, saying just enough, not too much. It was a beautiful balance of fragments and narrative, humour and depth, an openness cultivated with the audience’ – Laura Burns Mayfest Diaries
Find out more at www.hannahsullivan.co.uk/
X-Space, Baycourt
Tuesday 27th – Wednesday 28th October, 07:30pm
TICKETS $25
DURATION 70 mins (no interval)
Dramturgy by Alice Tatton-Brown
Sound Design by Yas Clarke
Design by Annelies Henny
Movement Advice from Dan Canham
Photography by Paul Samuel White
Film by Dan Narayanan, Synertree Media
Theatre , Dance-theatre ,
Innovative, creative and highly enjoyable
Review by Gin Mabey 28th Oct 2015
Solo performer Hannah Sullivan is on stage at Baycourt Theatre’s X-Space, moving slowly to music. Once we are all seated a 70s funk song begins and she dances a sequence of various and joyful ‘moves’ … which aren’t really moves at all; they’re ways of dancing that we can see our friends, family, ourselves doing. Hannah uses her face in a brilliantly comic way. The audience is laughing before she even speaks. From the start, she is so extremely focused.
When she speaks, she has a light and gentle voice and a humility to her that I don’t expect from such a brave solo performer. She tells us she has a collection of dance moves, she has collected them over the years. She thinks about the details: how people move; are their eyes open or closed? The mere idea of this is brilliant to me, as so many memories throughout my own life involve dancing and they are very special.
Hannah talks to us intermittently between her movements, telling us a story of her parents dancing on New Years’ Eve in 1999 as she and her little brother watch and laugh. She doesn’t say directly but there is a pain behind this memory which she shows us by physical description.
Hannah is an interesting performer. She’s extremely charismatic, strong, sassy, funny and bold when she dances, and very gentle, quiet and feather-light in her movements when she is ‘herself’, speaking to her audience. In both modes, she is a fascinating performer to watch.
She uses repetition, written headings to punctuate the stages of her performance, and simple storytelling.
This show could be challenging for some audience members who perhaps have not been exposed to much theatre. There’s a guy in front of me who shuffles uncomfortably and looks at his partner for assurance when Hannah takes long moments of silence as she closes her eyes and suspends her body mid-move and lets the moment linger. I think these moments are fantastic as I feel as though I am privy to a private moment, as though she is under water or in her home alone, dancing and processing life.
Hannah ends the show, dancing as herself, to a glorious Radiohead (or Thom Yorke solo) song and it’s a sight to behold. Brave and beautiful.
Echo Beach is a very innovative, creative and highly enjoyable show.
Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer
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