Extra Ordinary Folk is a collaborative programme of Fidget Collective, named a social choreography in the attendant programme notes, with deconstructed dance and light and sound performers in an event of just over one hour fifteen minutes. In that time, the work devolves as transgressive collaborators and audience actions across these forms. 

Corbans Arts Centre is a vast cavern of a place; the waiting audience members each given a lanyard and instructions to stay within the orange cones. Once they venture through a doorway broken down by a dance performer, we are given a sense of an intimately linked procession. Intimately linked to the collaborators’ intention, I mean. And in that entrance and distance, the elements of the event – near and far – are given weight. The audience waits and then, the audience watches.

Positionality, on the other hand, is released into the mix through another realm. Light squares, in the early solo and combined movement-based sections of the work are deftly timed by a consummate lighting designer. Sean Curham captures the organics of Extra Ordinary Folk by bathing their soft antics in nuanced or dramatic lighting flow. A tiny flashing rainbow in the roof and two rolling frames provide spatial texture, more entrances and even a psychedelic hue or two. In the dim side light, offstage, we become aware of others sitting and standing sometimes blocking a view and, in that way, demonstrating perspective in the Brunelleschi mode. The blocking body creates an interesting shadowy linearity to the a-narrative structural tone.

Of all elements in this evening’s work, the soundscape holds the visceral yarn. The sounds and music, a controlled deconstruction by artists Kristian Larsen and fellow Jazmine Rose Phillips, tells a tale of plaintive uncertainty, with lovely beats and a megaphone that matches the ethereal ambience of the evenings’ sharing. The child beside me snores lightly, a seated audience requests a standing man to move. I wonder if I can join a sensuous duet with fleeting moments of unison. While it still feels awkward to contemplate actually venturing onto the stage uninvited and, once and for all, dissipating the unspoken boundary of ‘audience’ place in any performance setting, these audience sounds are moments of a parallel musical sensibility, and arguably part of the collaborative turn.

Sometimes I feel lost in the brume of stylistic invention, thwarted by the non-narrative agenda of dance expressing Bourdieu’s socialised bodies and fatigued by working it all out in performance immediacy. However, in a stream of consciousness manner, the dancers piece together fragments of relationship or communication. They occasionally break into gestural or verbal means to do so. They draw on virtuosic dance to bring the audience back into focus. And, I would always make an effort to watch the sublime subtleties of dancers, Claire O’Neil and Tallulah Holly-Massey. They have danced for years and any abstract sequence of movement they make catches the infinities of memory and maybes though the kinaesthetic lens. That is, as extraordinary folk, they embroider the light and sound with dance. A particularly pretty scene is Holly-Massey bathed in reddish light simply noticing herself in an imaginary mirror – although the frame is there. This patch of gentle natural dance is, more evocative of a tightly choreographed night than the switches between characters, from unresolvable tussles and in and out of t-shirt costumes in some of the other patchier scenes.

Each member of the Fidget Dance speaks to the holism of the work. They, rather than the intention, cut across the ordinary and, in the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary dance, become new members participating in sustainable performance art. I just wish audiences did not have to wait to be invited or shown how to dance once they climb on stage

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer