Showing as part of the digital content collection at this year’s Dance Umbrella, this production from Lea Anderson is a vibrant, intelligent, and disconcerting piece of online theatre.
Egon Schiele, American expressionist artist, meets the Featherstonehaughs, Lea Anderson’s all-male dance troupe, in this lively and sensual dance presentation.
In The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, the drawings and paintings of the artist come to uneasy life in a square ring.
Like boxers or statues, the dancers move and pose, writhe and stretch. Their costumes suggest an element of nudity, a depiction of muscle and bones. Faces are smudged with make-up, torsos seem distored and disturbed.
Stylish, robotic, and measured, Anderson arranges her dancers in pairs and dictates their movements within the parameters of Schiele’s line and structure.
Heads, hands, feet, fingers are deployed to make the smallest of movements or the snappiest of reactions. It’s slightly off, and slightly comic.
As a filmed performance, this benefits from angles and close photography to capture what’s going on.
Originally created in 1998 as a live work, The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele was remade as a film in 2010 in collaboration with Deborah May of Kinoki and with new music by Steve Blake and Will Saunders.
The film has never been publicly aired and is a world premiere for Dance Umbrella 2024.
Anderson’s work with The Featherstonehaughs (pronounced ‘Fanshaws’) and her all-female dance group The Cholmondeleys (‘Chumleys’) has been been a positive force for four decades. They are both classical and unclassifiable.
At 53 minutes, this production is both typical and atypical of Anderson’s work, immersive, idealistic, and intense. Unapologetically raw and deeply subversive, it captures the elegance of the physical athlete with the challenge of the original artworks.
That it has taken fourteen years to be released to the public is quite remarkable, but this truly is the centrepiece of the digital programme this year and is worth the price of the pass alone.
Dance Umbrella continues at various venues across London and online.
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Image credit: Pau Ros