Joshua Beamish, photo by David Cooper
I went to a performance of Joshua Beamish/Move: The Company at the Joyce last night first and foremost to support my friend Janie Taylor’s budding costume designing career, but I was also curious about Beamish’s choreography. Prior to yesterday I had only seen online snippets of his work with Wendy Whelan’s Restless Creature project, but at the Joyce he presented three full pieces of his choreography (one a world premiere, and one a US premiere) plus one excerpt. It was a Beamish crash course and I very much enjoyed it. It seems to me that his ethos borrows from jazz, modern, and ballet. He seems really interested in turned out vs turned in positions, and he incorporates floorwork often. Gaze appeared to be an important factor, as did undulating spinal articulation.
Most distinct to me was his use of funny little gestures. Many choreographers—like Christopher Wheeldon and Jorma Elo—play with flexed hands and fidgety, non-balletic port de bras. But Beamish used these tics as linguistics, not just aesthetics. His dancers seemed to be conversing with each other, like they had some odd sign language that only they understood. But the more I watched, the more I realized that it was actually easy to understand what they meant. The gestures were unconventional but legible. These were not the abstract semiotics of Bournonville, these were universally human gesticulations. A fist to the mouth, an elbow stabbing into a
Most distinct to me was his use of funny little gestures. Many choreographers—like Christopher Wheeldon and Jorma Elo—play with flexed hands and fidgety, non-balletic port de bras. But Beamish used these tics as linguistics, not just aesthetics. His dancers seemed to be conversing with each other, like they had some odd sign language that only they understood. But the more I watched, the more I realized that it was actually easy to understand what they meant. The gestures were unconventional but legible. These were not the abstract semiotics of Bournonville, these were universally human gesticulations. A fist to the mouth, an elbow stabbing into a
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