Mariner Warner  blog Feb 2019

Kneebone always envisaged a dance piece in response to the sculpture, and wanted to work with local women. Once a prosperous mill town, as its grand municipal buildings show, Rochdale now suffers from all the problems of today’s Britain and the growing poverty of so many, especially women and children. The choreographer T.C. Howard recruited a group of women living in the town; they included every kind of refugee, from wars overseas and from violence and disasters at home.

The first performance (which I saw only on Vimeo) was held in the Town Hall, a triumph of Victorian Gothic, encrusted with stained glass, mullions and panelling, and richly painted with historical legends, all built in the heyday of Rochdale money. For all the distance of the shots and the fuzzy sound, from the first instant the dancers’ involvement was compelling in its intensity and grace. Among the large cast were three or four professional dancers, but none of the others had ever danced before. They made a corps de ballet of all shapes and sizes, ages and origins, and over a sequence of enigmatic tableaux, they forged a profound alliance between themselves. The music by Colin Elliot – some of it played live on the cello – heightened the sense of contained, explosive emotion.

The second performance took place in the galleries on the closing day of the show. This time I could go. Howard and the dancers adapted it to fit the different spaces, and again, from the moment the women appeared, a mood was commandingly established. The group was smaller, one was pregnant, another was with her baby daughter, and they made a potent chorus, dressed in white with lace trimmings and embroidered mottoes: one said ‘Keeping the Black Dog at Bay’, another ‘New Chapter’. They had also pinned on mementoes: a nappy pin, photos of their children. Their reciprocal 

gestures and ritualistic sequences of moves evoked the sculptures: the dancers sprinkled white powder on the ground and printed it with their bare feet, they came together and moved apart, they caught their breath, they interlinked with one another in duets and trios and circles, they stroked and held and balanced one another, they wrung their hair, one of them recited a poem, with the line ‘I’m sure I could walk on water like this’; at the close they all walked away leaving one woman standing heroically alone.

They conveyed a sense of discoveries about themselves and others, and of finding strength in the process, and they drew the audience in, made us part of what they were communicating, which was a kind of grief and a kind of defiance, a secular version of ‘heaven in ordinary … something understood’ between them and with us.

The Rochdale Dance Project showed what an artist can inspire and what arts can do. An earlier sculpture of Kneebone’s is called Emerging out of an inconceivable void into the play of beings (from Bataille), and this is what she and Howard and the women of Rochdale achieved – intimations of meaningfulness, a sculpture in motion, bodies in action against negation. It mattered that the bodies were ‘ordinary’: realism in the midst of otherworldly hopes and dreams.