Claire Henderson Davis

Review: Take Refuge Under My Shade at Storyhouse, Chester

Posted on June 20, 2018 by Angela Ferguson in Culture, Inspiration, Live review, Storyhouse, The arts, Theatre

I must admit to not having seen many pieces of contemporary dance and so I was a little apprehensive when I visited Storyhouse for a preview of a specially commissioned piece which is being staged as part of events in Chester to mark Refugee Week.

Staged in the intimate space of the Garret studio theatre, Take Refuge Under My Shade is the work of Cheshire-based dancer, choreographer and theologian Claire Henderson Davis and dance artist Bettina Carpi.

The choreography interacts beautifully with an original soundtrack by composer Gary Lloyd, recorded at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall by the Scottish Session Orchestra conducted by Adam Robinson. Under this same banner, Claire and Bettina have also curated a series of Chester-based community events taking place at Storyhouse and Chester Cathedral providing all ages with ways of participating in Refugee Week locally.

Comfort blanket

The piece opens in pitch black, and, as the light from a single spotlight grows we see a pile of abandoned clothes. Slowly, limbs start to emerge and then retract, pulling items of clothing into the pile as if pulling them close in the same way that a child clings to a comfort blanket.

As the two female figures emerge, one carrying the other on her back, so begin the interweaving stories (in English and Arabic) of three pregnant women: a Syrian woman journeying to the UK, a British woman describing her struggle with poverty, and the story of Mary visiting Elizabeth to share her good news.

Emotional journey

The piece explores themes of loss, endurance and new beginnings through a female lens, not in a linear or literal way but through evoking the inner, emotional journey of the women and we see just how differing cultural and religious beliefs shape their lives, hopes and dreams.

For me, the overriding emotions were loss and hope. The terrible situation of having to leave one’s homeland, not being able to provide for your family, fighting to stay alive every single day against all the odds but, crucially, taking hope from small but significant acts of kindness and the promise of something better to come, where there is life, there is hope.

Despair, loss and hope

The dance element, beautifully performed by Claire and Bettina, draws you in and I was captivated by their every move, so much so I barely made any notes and forgot to take any photos for this review. Their trust in each other is absolutely clear as they perform this incredibly intricate and expressive piece, telling each story whilst taking us on a rollercoaster of emotions from despair, loss and finally, hope.

The piece is interwoven with a soundtrack which includes an original score by local composer Gary Lloyd which uses strings and ethnic instruments including percussion to great effect, rooting the work firmly in the Middle East and adding greatly to the overall mood of the piece.

Moving testimony

Lloyd’s score has an almost spiritual quality to it and in parts, the menace of a dark brooding thriller. The soundtrack also includes moving testimony from a Syrian refugee who has lived in Chester for seven years following the horrors of life in an Iraqi refugee camp in which she had to cope with the death of her husband whilst looking after their baby, being treated like a second class citizen and having to make a startling choice to survive.

We also hear a British woman recounting her struggle to make ends meet and keep a roof over her family’s head in the 1960s, her faith in humanity restored by a very small but nonetheless significant act of kindness.

Thought provoking

In conclusion, the trio have succeeded in blending dance, music, the human voice, costume, lighting and props to produce a piece which tackles head on issues such as poverty, displacement and how women are viewed and treated in different cultures in a most moving, sensitive and thought provoking way but, don’t take my word for it, why not pop along to Storyhouse and see for yourself.

Take Refuge Under My Shade will be performed in the Garret theatre at Storyhouse on Thursday 21 June at 1pm & 7.30pm with a Q&A session following the performance. Running time 60 minutes approx. Tickets £10, www.storyhouse.com

Response to Passion at Ely Cathedral

 “I have no doubt at all that this realisation of the Passion story is one of the most creative pieces of liturgical theatre around.  It works simply as theatre – that is, it is coherently conceived, physically well-shaped, emotionally engaging and challenging in a very high degree; but it is also a genuinely liturgical process, involving group movement and the fresh use of an historic spiritual space.  It has quite clearly impressed a variety of audiences enormously, and I believe that it needs to be far more widely known and studied – both as a performance in its own right and as a model for work in this area that is unsentimental and demanding, and also deeply rooted in traditions of reflection and worship.  Personally, I found it constantly surprising, posing without obtruding a number of deep questions about gender and power as well as the more obvious challenge of the Passion narrative in words and actions. It grows out of an unusual intensity of thought about the nature and the future of liturgy.  It is, in short, a genuinely significant piece and I would strongly support any ways of making it more widely available.”

- Rowan Williams, 3 July 2015

Poetry and dance among the ruins

Posted: 13 Mar 2015 @ 00:28

by Pat Ashworth

LARISA DIZDAR

In the Coventry ruins: Claire Henderson Davis and Fraser Paterson, with Malcolm Guite in the background

STARK expressions of suffering abound in Coventry Cathedral, from the Charred Cross rescued from the ruins to the twisted and misshapen Cross of Nails on the high altar and the spiky crown of thorns canopy above Spence's choir stalls.

Against these backdrops, Claire Henderson Davis's Passion was played out among the audience, and with a profundity that could still to absolute silence. Darkness and the chill of night added to the drama and tension in the illuminated ruins where the journey began. It was told in Malcolm Guite's sonnet cycle The Stations of the Cross, in the embodied movement of two dancers playing all the roles (including the cross itself) , and through the improvised dialogue of saxophone (Dan Forshaw) and oboe (Jan Payne) (Features, 20 February).

Pouring out of the ruins, the music was wild, primeval, cacophonous: in the new cathedral, the cascade of notes caught the echo and continued to be awesome. The echo did less for the narration of the second stage of the journey, which took place in

front of John Hutton's soaring glass Screen of Saints and Angels. Spoken from memory and often on the move by the poet himself, the sonnets are so strong and clear and vital that no single word can be sacrificed to an echo or a turning away.

But in the chancel, the effect of the piece was awesome. Henderson Davis's Christ, surrounded by the Women of Jerusalem (locally recruited women in everyday dress), is literally stripped from the waist upwards of her garment. Her nakedness, seen only from the rear, expresses utter vulnerability, most manifestly in the bareness of the bent and exposed neck. In a complexity of portrayals of different kinds of divine love, there are bridal flowers, an abruptly terminated lovers' kiss, a crown of thorns extracted from the wheeled shopper pulled along with grim determination by the oldest woman.

In inspired staging using the cathedral's fixed furniture, Christ's body was first laid on the wooden altar table that stands some distance below the high altar. The unexpected interlude of Guite's solo acoustic guitar, awakening and quickening, heralded the resurrection, with the barefoot Christ walking the length of the cathedral to make the approach to Fraser Paterson's Mary Magdalene in the Garden. Here, the actions are beautifully matched to the words of the last sonnet:

and He blesses every love that weeps grieves And now he blesses hers who tood and wept
And would not be consoled, or leave her love's Last touching place, but watched as low light crept her stirs. . . Up from the east. A sound behind

It ended with a spinning, whirling dance of exultation, a playful chase around the altar, now an empty tomb. Reclaiming cathedrals as performance space is one of Henderson Davis's prime motivations. It worked in Coventry, a building designed to make worshippers journey to the Cross of Nails before turning round and, in retracing their steps, find the real glory.

At Chester Cathedral, 12 March; Ely Cathedral, 3 April (Good Friday); and St Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, 11-13 August. www.passiontour.org

REVIEW: FALLING WIDE IN OUTSIDER DANCING AT TOYNBEE STUDIOS

PERFORMANCE: 13 JULY 2007 REVIEWED BY LIBBY COSTELLO - SATURDAY 14 JULY 2007

The main event of the evening was clearly the final reconstruction of Rainer’s work by Henderson Davis. This reconstruction used a variety of different bodies to great effect, creating the almost dynamic free unison work Chair/Pillow. This work included twelve dancers, along with their chairs and pillows performing to the Tina Turner classic, River Deep, Mountain High. The initial trio set up this repetitive sequence of movement before being joined in turn by a row after row of dancers, chairs and pillows. The movements saw the dancers sitting on their pillows, standing on their chairs, dropping their pillows and slapping their chairs, all with a focus devoid of any emotion, regardless the actions being performed. It can only be hoped that this exceptional reconstruction will be performed for many more audiences.

BRENDAN MCCARTHY

Choreographer Claire Henderson Davis has fused dance with theology to create a modern walk to Calvary

SOHO is London at its raciest. The streets to the north and east of Piccadilly Circus are home to the capital’s sex industry and to many of its theatres. They are a magnet for millions of visitors, most of whom have little sense that Soho has a permanent community of 6,000 people. This is a complicated little world, in which many newcomers – the French, the Germans, the Greeks, the Jews – planted their first roots in the capital. Today Soho is home most visibly to London’s Chinese community and to a thriving gay culture.

The local Church of England parish is St Anne’s, down a passageway from Dean Street, and just a few seconds walk from Old Compton Street, Soho’s gay enclave. For the congregation at St Anne’s the exoticism and occasional menace of the surrounding streets are impossible to miss.

A year ago during Lent the theologian and choreographer Claire Henderson Davis began work with a group of parishioners on a dance theatre project, which was finally staged at the Soho Theatre last Sunday. It was a passion
play, but not in an epic sense. Instead A Walk through Town – Divine Encounters in Soho was rooted in the ordinary. Its dramatic focus was the recent murder of a well-known local man in an apparently homophobic attack.

This was not quite the piece Henderson Davis set out to make. She originally intended to create a contemporary Stations of the Cross, punctuated by everyday encounters between victim and community. She set to work with a tape recorder, “listening to Soho”, and recording many hours of actuality: encounters in a health centre; the Chinese community centre; an old people’s gathering; a meeting of the Soho Housing Association. This became the eventual soundtrack for her piece. The theatre dance dimension grew from a study group at St Anne’s on theology and movement. The participants became her dancers. But she decided as the work took early shape that the explicit language of the Stations of the Cross was “too alienating” for secular groups. She abandoned it, but only for a time.

Then Henderson Davis interviewed three gay men. They talked of the murder of David Morley – Cinders as he was known through- out Soho – a bartender at the Admiral Duncan gay pub. There was a particularly cruel irony about this, as a nail bomb had exploded at the Admiral Duncan in 1999 killing two people. Cinders was injured in that explosion, which was homophobically motivated, only to meet his own death a few years later. The story of Cinders recurred in other conversations. Clearly his tragedy was etched deep in Soho’s collective memory.

Subconsciously Henderson Davis began to reinstate her Stations motif. Cinders became a Christ figure, not in an heroic sense, but as a symbol of one who is persecuted and violently cast out. There was a crucifixion, Walk’s climactic moment. The waiting room at the health clinic, the lunch at the old people’s centre, became “stations” on the way. But Henderson Davis never made it explicit to the participants that passion and crucifixion were her driving theme. “It didn’t need to be said. There was a lot of space for cast and audience to do its own work and to see what it wanted.”

Various threads ran through the piece like interwoven antiphons. There was a love duet, emblematic of sexual love as a path to salvation. The sound track made the life of Soho vivid and present. This on its own could have been a rather stylish radio documentary. But it was the dance theatre dimension that gave the material a transformative character.

The pleasures of “community theatre” are usually (and best) confined to the partici- pants and their friends. But it didn’t require an emotional investment in its success to find

real intelligence in A Walk through Town. The method was novel and the theatre dance values were sharply developed. Henderson Davis is a professional dancer: she has worked with Mikhail Baryshnikov and his White Oak project and she had advice on Walk from the choreographer Gaby Agis, a leading force in British contemporary dance. There was no special pleading, with the work intended to stand or fall on its theatrical worth. That said, Henderson Davis has pitched her tent on a frontier between performance art and liturgy. It is an under-explored area, despite the fact that several leading twentieth-century choreographers – Balanchine, Ashton and Cunningham – were profoundly influenced by a childhood experience of serving Mass.

Ask Claire Henderson Davis to define herself and you get a complicated answer: dancer, choreographer, director, and liturgist. Pin her down and she admits: “I think I’m a liturgist and what I am making is liturgy. But for me the Church’s liturgy is dead and terribly internally focused and outdated. There is a need for liturgy which is engaged with the contemporary language of the world and which is characterised by ‘listening deeply’ and reflecting back images of love, forgiveness, death and resurrection, so that human imagination is expanded.”

The word “liturgy” recurs as we talk. Her father was Charles Davis, Britain’s leading Catholic theologian of his time, who startled the world when in 1966 he left the priesthood and the Church. She cannot, she says, help but think of life in terms of liturgy: it is in her blood and bones. There is also a deeper issue, she argues, about clerical identity. Priests too often see themselves as amateur psychotherapists, or social workers, and are not sufficiently animated by the Second Vatican Council’s central insistence that it is through the liturgy that “the work of our redemption is exercised”. Henderson Davis is one of those rare spirits who is seized of the redemptive possibilities both of the liturgy and of the theatre.

Her Walk ends with an act of inclusive- ness, with the audience invited to wear “glowsticks” shaped into haloes. It might have been a moment of the most dreadful schmaltz and “cheap salvation”. Instead it recalled the reality of the Crucifixion: that Jesus Christ died not only for the virtuous but for sinners and for the most despised: for drug barons, for pornographers, for child sex abusers, for those who exploit the poor. Salvation is not merely for some, but for all.

And You Held Me

Devised, choreographed and directed by Claire Henderson Davis, this is a liturgy, very much the work of the eight women offering it, involving song, music, dance and spoken word. Each person contributes her own sense of self and method of self-expression, but the whole is much more than the sum of the parts and this is a tribute to Claire’s imaginative direction.

The piece was put together for Mothering Sunday but carries none of the conventional sentimentality associated with that occasion. Rather it is an exploration of the nature of contemporary life and the struggle of human beings – in this instance women – to explore the meaning embedded in the complexities, banalities and richness of their own lives. In parts it is very specific to the experience of women and addresses powerfully the issue of where our sense of identity originates.

The cumulative effect is of a multi-layered piece offering humour, beauty, pathos, angst and energy. Those watching almost inevitably recognise references to the circumstances of their own life and being. It is a piece which resonates, not always comfortably, but always intelligently.

Claire is a dancer of significant talent whose theological understanding and knowledge of the human psyche work in creative synergy with her artistic gifts. Those gifts include a keen perception of visual impact and a deep appreciation of words.

This piece therefore includes words of scripture concerning Jesus’ life and death set alongside extracts from textbooks of psychotherapy. The resulting insights into the Gospel story are quite startling. Church music and contemporary sounds are present, and in one instance the women all sing together a haunting and disturbing ‘drone’. The shipping news is featured, the energy of dance evokes the freedom and zest of childhood gradually evolving into an awakening to the presence of others in the world whose intentions towards us may or may not be friendly.

As a liturgical experience And You Held Me is unorthodox, brave and provocative. It is always thoughtful, at times disturbing, and ultimately profoundly moving. In liturgical and performance terms Henderson Davis’s work is innovative and refreshing. I look forward to further experiences of it.

Rosemary Lain-Priestley