Dance
Wasteland
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
four stars
He’s a Grimethorpe lad, is Gary Clarke. For him the demise of the coal-mining industry is an ever-present memory, the recurring source of images and concerns in his choreography. Coal - seen at Tramway in October 2016 - brought the 1985 Miners’ Strike centre-stage with a physical urgency that was tinged with poignant despair. That mood carries over into Clarke’s new piece, Wasteland.
It’s 1994 and - as the footage projected on an upstage screen shows - Grimethorpe Colliery is being reduced to rubble. You could say the same of the working class community that depended on it. Alastair Goldsmith - seen as a striking miner in Coal - is now on the scrapheap and on the beer: booze and a wretched defeatism render him legless. Floored,flailing, he is gripped by a futile rage... Two musicians (from Whitburn Brass Band) - along with the four Pit Men Singers, recruited locally - draw Goldsmith into a hauntingly elegaic evocation of what’s lost forever. His lad, meanwhile, is similarly without prospects. No hopes, no way out... until escapism, in the form of raves and ecstasy, takes over his mind and body. The beats kick in. Rhythmic, pounding, unrelenting. Tom Davis Dunn and a quartet of fellow ravers surrender to the hypnotic euphoria - and they dance, full-on, for what seems an (overlong) age. When the police arrive, and arrests are made, it’s as if a nightmare history is repeating itself with Dunn and his mates - like the miners before them - falling foul of Tory policies and the riot police.
Clarke’s choreography for dispirited Goldsmith, and for the subsequent posse of drug- fuelled ravers, is a canny amalgum of movements that look out of control - random even - but which are totally connected into the emotional abyss that is engulfing the whole community. The hurt of being discounted is expressed in sweat here, with Clarke and his unstinting company giving a blisteringly fierce, harrowing account of the scar tissue that remains in Grimethorpe.
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