Notes on a film: A Response to Tha-at's Right by Rowland Hill
Motor Dance Journal, Issue 3, 2024
Commissioned by Rowland Hill.
"Tha-at's right is a film in which three dancers and a small crew attempt to choreograph a dance from a dance review, written in 1957 by critic and poet Edwin Denby titled Three Sides of Agon. Denby’s review articulates Stravinsky’s final ballet Agon via an idiosyncratic stream of metaphors. Tha-at's right takes Denby at his word, translating his imagery back into the language of dance." – Rowland Hill.
My response to Tha-at's Right performs a kind of re-translation, reinterpreting the film back into language.
Film stills courtesy of Rowland Hill. Watch the film in full here.
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It begins with a room pushed out to its edges. Flatness rolled into it. A paper backdrop in royal blue, rolled down from a thin metal frame over wall and floor, secured to the boards with a slick of dark tape. An L-shaped blank, a stage. Centre of this is the back of a girl. She wears the soft, stretchy clothes of rehearsal. Loose hair down the back of a white t-shirt, backs of bare calves, bare heels planted in the blue. When she spins to face you, time trips in the sequence. Little vertigo reel of a body arriving before thought – thought arriving to find the body already there – the face revealing nothing but “here I am”.
My beginning is L-shaped and blank also. Warm and beginning to whirr atop my thighs – what is it to translate a dance into language? To score is to carve into: to scratch, to scar; an irreversible mark – and I've never been good with finality. Sound enters as a traffic of horns bleating “I want! I want!”. Clamour of all the ways I’d like to write against the ways that writing happens to me. I pause and try to arrange in my body a posture of focus: straighten the spine, slacken the jaw, fingers hovering, patient and limber. I arrange the body in order to forget it. I want writing like the smooth vacancy of a paper back-drop: distractions pushed out to the edges, the soft stretch of time in rehearsal.
She is jumping, skimming, elbowing herself around the space. She throws out her arms as if to reach some flung-out thing, but her expression has no want in it. Like the disjointed bursts of a screen-test she makes images, not narrative. Cropped below the knees, she slashes her hair back into the frame just to show you what it looks like. The bleating horns simmer into a dry, plucking spit then fall away. A sly cut produces a second dancer without introduction: now two stiff bodies dodging and leaping like jolts of liquid in a blender. Loose hair is thrown in weird loops, faces remain stiff – some private game between them.
The film often drifts or cuts from its blue-papered artifice, as if distracted, or turning away to think. Language spirals outwards, as if to tighten a centre. The hand draws an arc, the camera traces the hand, the arc rises from warm blue towards the lunar silence of the ceiling. I keep dragging back to watch the silhouetted hand slide, nudge, kiss an eclipse over the unlit bulb. The eclipse is a gentle ‘stop!’ to the film’s ceiling daydream. Cut again to the hand in blue, entering from the left and here comes the net. What language does to things – a net around them? Metaphor is invited, then mocked. Try again but faster: drop, fall, pounce, snatch. Have the net pounce even if the hand is willing. Tease the fingertips into a backwards flex. After the hand – a perfect portrait. The net grabs this too.
Likenesses are compulsive. To be writing about a film of a dance is to carry cut-out pieces of it in my head wherever I go, and I can’t stop looking for moments that match up: Tha-at’s right. I’m in the park studying the galloping courtship of big dogs; I’m in my kitchen watching two hard-boiling eggs crouch patiently in the pan. Tonight I’m at a performance in a cleared-out car garage where a dancing body is cut and spliced in gaps between the perfumed necks of a crowded audience. Later, drifting (again) towards the greying dusk of my ceiling, I notice that three large flies are locked into a frantic ritual just below the unlit bulb. Together they form a determined triad, churning up a horizontal slice of airspace, tight scribbling punctuated by a lurch sideways, rotating their positions at mechanical intervals.
In this new leather jacket she's suddenly so much a person. Going somewhere, doing something, a newly lacquered attitude. Thoughts of a life and a voice outside: a me, mine, I. Flat of the hand indicates STOP but also ‘look at my hand’. She jabs herself into the centre and the camera whirls to take it all in, but already the persona is rattling loose. Movements lapse into disembodied gestures like flicked-through tricks: watch – this wrist a swan’s throat, this hand a soaring wing, these fingers a puppet’s felt-tongued shout: “ha-ha”. In the camera’s spinning background, glimpses of a dim and absent audience, slumped on the sofa, charging and checking their phones. Still, she builds the pace, kicks up a leg, juts out her chin. If she moves with an audience in mind, it isn’t us. A pirouette gives way to a jarring parody of a lewd thrust, then abruptly she straightens, crossing a hand over her chest for a deep, smirking bow.
There’s a strange confluence between the images on screen and the disjointed transmissions of sound that accompany them. No – ‘accompany’ isn’t quite right. Neither would admit to being an accompaniment to the other. If there is synchronicity or logic here, it is fickle, non-committal. A thin, dry whistling, like a thought left to boil in an adjacent room. Close-up grain of a foot’s pinkish blur, marshy void of a soundless landing, ticks and scrapes of something knocked, moved, adjusted. Sometimes it all falls into sequence: an alignment of focus and process, sweeping limbs and sustaining notes moving from shape to shape like well-ordered sentences. Elsewhere, silences are calculated pauses for punchlines to swell in. Sentiment, I think, is carefully untuned, but I could point to pride: it’s a withheld grin, a starkly pointed toe. A sudden burst of laughter scuffs the surface of my thought – attention whirls for the joke I missed.
There’s a moment like victory but it isn’t an ending, just press shots for some yet-to-be glorious resolve. A major chord, the sun is out, a bright slant across the corner of the stage. All three arranged like podiumed athletes: one kneeling with hand on heart; one on the floor with a leg stretched vertically; one with bicep pumped, a yellow-ribboned medal around her neck. Poses are held, faces smug, then flash – cut to listless inertia. R steps in to take a light-reading, S appears to adjust the backdrop, but these interruptions are a performance too – another choreographed pause to defer the film’s conclusion.
‘Desire is deferral’, R once said to me (though I’m sure I’m paraphrasing). To sustain the pleasure of desire, you have to delay the consequence. I want to say that a rehearsal is a kind of deferral, a kind of desire. The pleasure of rehearsal is the not-quite-yet-ness of its dangling goal, and all the gestures of play, process and indecision that this affords. R’s film, with its fickle cuts, drifts and parodies, is indulging in the textures of rehearsal, while the finality of performance is only a flirtation.
But it does end. It ends like it began. A solo framed by blue. A dancer with white-bleached hair and proud dark brows becomes ornamental and lithe, twirling and splaying her hands above her head. She moves in time to a clean little wooden clop-clop. A neat step forward, a neat step back. She bends her knees for a sharp flurrying of arms up and down, then turns to walk cooly off-stage.


