- Title:
- Pass the Buck and Perhaps…who knows
- Author:
- Claire Summers
- Date:
- 13.06.24
Burn City Krump, Pass The Buck, 2021, performance documentation, Section 8. Pictured: Bia Lil Red Lupiga. Photo: Nam Chops.
I’m running late. Sprinting up Princes Street. At more or less 15 metres from the entrance to Dancehouse, I hear it. The crowd first, then the music beneath it. Raucous, thumping, elated. Pass The Buck begins for me from this distance. Arriving in the room, I see my role in all this as being responsible for my version of the truth, so here it is: I am a tourist here. Never before has it felt so important to me to make such a declaration, to disqualify myself as knowing anything about what I have been recruited to write about. It is my job to push words around and I have pledged myself to 1000 here. Shortly after arriving, I text a friend: “fuck me this is the sickest thing I’ve ever seen,” (10 words). If I could, I’d leave it there. I do not labour under the belief that I could pull the electricity of the room at Pass The Buck into prose and do it any justice that would be more accurate or potent than that. But pledges have been made. There are conventions to be observed.
There is a very small number of chairs dispersed throughout the space. A few people have chosen to occupy them; a few more have elected the floor. Mostly, the crowd is standing. This is not to suggest that they are still. The crowd is unruly. Buck wild. It is their roar that reaches the street. Such is the swell of this immense organism, that it takes a moment for me to get my bearings and locate the dancer generating the frenzy. When I do find them, it’s only for a moment before the crowd swallows them again. The horde grunts, grimaces in seeming disbelief at what is happening before them. They hold each other back, throw their arms in the air, they move as the dancer moves, swarming around them in a heaving throng. I change my vantage point, circle the outside of the throng and cut through to find a spot on the floor. From here, I see the dancers clearly for the first time.
Fuck me this is the sickest thing I’ve ever seen.
Their craft is extraordinary. Arms thrash, feet thump, chests thrust. Bodies move through the space with a force that somehow manages to feel light on its feet. There is no possibility that I or anyone in the audience could predict what movement would follow another. It is precision without pattern; it is a procession of making random forms seem as precise as practiced ones. Krumping is evidentially individualist: the more a dancer aggressively and freely embodies their oneness, the louder the fervour.
Pass The Buck is organised into battles; one dancer against another. Two tracks, each with heavy, thumping bass lines and erratic note patterns, are allotted to each dancer. This is all the time you have to make your case. Though no formal declaration of a winner is ever made, or at least not one that I can discern, it is always clear who the victor is. After one battle, the conqueror brings the vanquished into the centre of the circle, calling for a pause to the procession of battles. Silence from the crowd. He talks about community; about how meaningful it is to be here. He declares that, regardless of who wins, everyone here shares in something meaningful through Krumping. Furious nodding. A father with a baby no more than six months old bounces her on his knee. She is smiling and so am I.
Rosie Fayman and Jonathan Homsey, Perhaps... who knows, 2024, promotional image. Photo: Nam Chops.
On an insistently warm Saturday, in the late afternoon, I return to Dancehouse for Perhaps... who knows — Rosie Fayman and Jonathan Homsey. In the Upstairs Studio, sunlight streams through large west facing windows. It prickles the exposed skin on the back of my neck and across my shoulders. Perhaps... who knows runs for precisely 45 minutes and organises itself in three distinct blocks: 15 minutes of Jonathan soloing, 15 minutes together, 15 minutes of Rosie to finish. Each block is demarcated by a small purple sand timer that the performers flick over at the end of each 15-minute interval. There is no ceremony beyond this simple turning of the timer, no elaborate changing of the guard to shift us from one block to the next. The performance is an unbroken, unconstructed line.
Block one: Jonathan stands before the audience and with very little attempt at formality, announces the start of the performance. The first movements are quick and decisive. An audience member makes a racket rummaging in a bag of chips from the downstairs kiosk. From the stage, “I would prefer that you didn’t make that noise, but if you insist on eating chips, I will dance to it.” Everyone sits to attention. There is some giggling. Something glints in Jonathan’s face. He knows he’s got us now. “There’s no fourth wall, kitty.” Meow. I’m in the room now. Until this moment, I’ve still been arriving–arriving at what I think this might be, how I think I might feel about it, distracted by how I might write about it, by the sun itching my shoulders. Jonathan continues to throw his body through its impulses and lets his mouth do the same: “IBS is a requirement to live in the Inner North” and “My solar plexus are embodying Malcom Turnbull’s ability to gaslight our country.” He alternates between movements that flow and shimmer and ones that arrive sharply at their apex. As I notice sweat drip from his nose to the floor, I feel my own sweat run down the nape of my neck. The veil between us is thin.
Block two: The timer arrives at 15 minutes. Jonathan walks towards it and rotates one half rotation, sand slinking back the way it came. Rosie rises from a seat within the audience and joins him. Perhaps… who knows promised to be ‘100% unknown’ in its online description. Yet, what can’t be hidden is the degree to which each of these bodies recognises the other, the ways the knowing has fused them together. Everything remains at a canter. The two dancers move with unsynchronised synergy, babbling and giddy. Suddenly, for a moment, both Jonathan and Rosie are still together, at the same time. I write in the notes app on my phone, “It’s so meaningful, holding stillness like that.”
Block three: Rosie’s turn. Jonathan departs. What follows is a stream of consciousness both verbal and physical. Her movements depart the sensation that she is dancing and suggest more a feeling of floating. She wanders the room, arms cutting expressive and exaggerated shapes above her head. She fixates not on the performance itself but on the way she feels about the performance, an insight she offers to us readily. She speaks for almost her entire 15 minutes, “I’m just falling out in front of you.” She states that she doesn’t care if we like it or not; she likes it. She makes gleeful exclamations before quickly dropping into hushed tones. She namedrops her grandson, sitting in the audience and cowering from the attention. When the sand in the timer runs out, she simply stops. She smiles. We clap. We all leave.
The separation between us (the audience) and them (the performers) is so ghostly it may as well be only a suggestion. Our belief that it exists is the only thing that gives it any foothold. We are in dialogue, (we as in us, we as in them) without ever saying a word. Perhaps... who knows is, from its commencement until its end, an invitation into that conversation. What remains when the sand runs out is a distinct awareness that only two performers who take their craft so seriously, who have devoted years of study to its development, could give such an unserious, unstudied air to the friction between a performance so seemingly unserious with the seriousness of its own undercurrent. It is apparent to me that any instinct and trust—in oneself, in the other performer, in the audience—as strong as that embodied by Rosie and Jonathan is a genuinely serious thing, a life’s undertaking. It is to surrender, over and over and over. And then over again.
Claire Summer’s review of Pass The Buck #6 by Burn City Krump and Perhaps... who knows by Rosie Fayman and Jonathan Homsey has been co-commissioned by Performance Review and Dancehouse.
Performance Review has partnered with Dancehouse to commission critical writing, responding to Dancehouse’s 2024 seasons. This writing has been independently commissioned and edited by Performance Review and financed by Dancehouse as a means of addressing these organisations’ mutual desire to build dance literacy in arts writing and to critically support emerging choreographic practice.
Claire Summers is a writer, editor and photographer. Her work is preoccupied with finding the phenomenal in the ordinary and quietly considering small details to which we assign greater meaning.