The Cholmondeleys

The Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs have been working under the directorship of Lea Anderson for 25 years. They have performed at Glastonbury, in theatres large and small, at Duckie at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern, on Vauxhall Bridge, at Tate Modern, on beaches, ferries, lifts, in a garden store, in cars, towers and in the laboratory in Anderson’s work with DNA.

Evolving languages
For Anderson creating a work is still about creating a unique concept, identifying key influences and concerns and evolving that research with the dancers through studio processes. For a while Anderson worked with sketchbooks, collecting images; these might come from film, painting and fashion, then she would move on to developing a performance language alongside collaborators.

For example composers Drostan Madden and later Steve Blake, designers Joanna Parker, Sandy Powell and most recently Simon Vincenzi. Her collaboration with the photographer Chris Nash was also key in evolving a unique signature statement and a company identity, the creation of publicity material as much part of the rehearsal process as the creation of movement material.

This bringing together of elements conceptually might be described as in relation to a collage or post modernist approach because the work can be read in relation to its’ inter-textual references; perhaps another way to approach Andersons work might be to consider how dance in the 21st century reads and then re-thinks theatre.

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The ghost of a show
The work often plays with the idea of a show, the ghost of a performance haunts the company’s archive in spatial plays, in the titles of the dances, in what can be read as a set list or variety programme of short episodes, in the breaks in between dances in works like Birthday (1992), The Show (1989). “The band” in various forms has existed in the catalogue either as one of Steve Blake’s many ensembles in the staging of dances, or perhaps we can find it in a playful reading of the Featherstonehaughs as a kind of contemporary dance boyband.

But “the show” is always in inverted commas and its iconography has appeared in the repetitions of images, the reverse stripteases of the beautiful solo made for Rossana Sen, Venus In Mourning (1988) and in Cold Sweat (1991), most interestingly in the fantasy of a chorus line which unspools itself from 1988’s The Big Dance Number through “Smithereens” and finally to Yippeee!!! (2006). The cabaret is a key genre for Anderson and sometimes this cabaret is actually “Cabaret”, Fosse’s film of Kander and Ebbs’ musical about putting on a show.

Cabaret as a cultural form began in the early 1900s but it was the Weimar cabarets and those of Nazi Germany where it became a site for political discourse in a unique environment combining dance, drink and spectacle as a way of processing what was going on outside the performance.

Liz Taylors Cold Sweat/Elvis Las Vegas/Martha Grahams and Mary Wigmans Smithereens/Jackie Kennedys Car/Vivien Girls 3/ Falconettis Flesh and Blood/ Audrey Hepburns Crosschannel/