Absolute Solo II is a sequel – 22 years later – to the Birmingham-based choreographer’s first solo show Rosie Kay. If time has changed her, this three-part performance also shows what has endured: a full yet disciplined physical style, limbs slapping and sweeping around a supple spine; a love of dancing with or about music, emotion, even beauty; a woman’s struggle to define herself, inside and out.
These are already apparent in a video of Kay performing Patisserie from that early 1999 show. beauty and her own body, which bends madly as it fails to step aside or embody such trivialities as “dress to impress” or “a woman should take care of herself”. Even meditation becomes beset with self-improvement anxieties, less a retreat from the beauty business than an extension of its reach.
Before that comes Artemis Clown, a 2018 solo originally created for dancer Gemma Paganelli that blends images from the Baroque painter’s life and work. Artemisia Gentileschi with the spirit of Artemis, young goddess of the hunt. Initially undermining its own composure with slips and missteps, it gives way to a more introspective vibe that culminates with Kay basking in cascading piano glissandi.
The highlight is its new adult dancer, who makes these themes explicitly autobiographical. Kay gives her always physical style the seriousness of age and the strength of experience. The story revolves around a single axis: what makes her dance? Passion, family ties, career heights, fascination. What stops it? So many. Sometimes the dance itself: its list of injuries is long and brutal. Also, childbirth: she and her baby nearly died, an experience reflected in a piercing sequence where Kay collapses in on herself, as if blindly but deliberately digging into the darkness. Also: sexual harassment, from pre-puberty, a whole continuum from daily antagonisms to separate incidents of assault, kidnapping, rape.
Adult, female, dancer – the tensions within and between these terms leave Kay sloping, hunched, diminished. Pause. A lap. It’s Patti Smith’s rock anthem Gloria – and it’s Kay’s return, kicking and pumping so fiercely and so finely that you know, absolutely, that the adult plus the woman plus the dancer not only adds to the tension, but to the strength.
