At the Southbank Centre

A Wound with Teeth, the first half of the choreographer Holly Blakey’s recent double bill at the Southbank Centre, reminded me of some of Paula Rego’s busiest paintings. It seems to come from the same dreamscape: deconstructed fairy tale costumes, densely arrayed symbolism, a certain shagginess of expression, animal heads, predatory gender relations (going both ways), triumphant victims, grotesque sexuality, maximalism, a powerful sense of mischief, an elaborate, multi-perspectival choreography of confrontations, subplots and cursed couplings.

The resemblance doesn’t extend to Rego’s depictions of dance itself. She painted ballerinas – most notably in the Dancing Ostriches pictures of 1995, inspired by Disney’s Fantasia – and designed costumes for a ballet performed three years later. The quietly mournful circularity of The Dance (1988) feels worlds away from the confrontational choreography of A Wound with Teeth, a relentless blast of high-speed transitions and simultaneous tableaux melting in and out of one another, their creative abundance and chaotic energy quickly overwhelming the occasional footholds of narrative coherence, but revealing an underlying structure in their wake. The Rego-ish way that Blakey and the Southbank Centre chose to describe the piece bridges the gap, however:

How can loss of memory be a site of potential? … Blakey uses her own experience of forgetting to create a work that questions our ability to remember, and also to imagine and invent, at the border of the rational and the irrational. In a world that is sometimes terrifying and perverse, fighting for our own survival also means creating stories, and our own monsters and beasts.

The ‘experience of forgetting’ that inspired A Wound with Teeth is more specific than this suggests: Blakey was sectioned as a child and spent a year at a mental health facility in Manchester, an experience she blocked from her memory. After making herself ill by starting to uncover this period of her life many years later, she decided instead to embrace the idea that ‘my body had let me forget’, and started work on a new full-length piece driven by that impulse, Lo, which will be performed next year. A Wound with Teeth is a preview of one section of it.

(In a way, Rego’s experience was the exact opposite, the more familiar tale of psychoanalysis unblocking her unconscious and allowing the real work to begin. It’s never that simple, though: she hid the Depression series of large-scale pastels, which were born out of an especially debilitating depressive episode in 2007, for a decade, because she was ashamed of them.)

The second half of the double bill, Phantom, wasn’t conceived as a film but had to become one because of the pandemic. It is brilliantly effective in that form, as Blakey’s cascading, high-contrast, widescreen work invariably is (she has choreographed music videos for Rosalía and Harry Styles, among others). The performance at the South Bank was Phantom’s live premiere, extended by about eight minutes. A response to a miscarriage, it is ‘a ritualistic summoning of something that never arrives’, drawing on ‘pagan fertility rites’ and some of the same folk horror-adjacent reference points as A Wound with Teeth. It also shares that work’s super-dynamic, whole-ensemble approach, but its more regular shapes – interlocking lines, rotating circles – narrow the focus towards solo dancers in a different way. Solo dancers sat on the ground, arms stretched behind them, legs spread, bodies convulsing, howling.

For important periods, the focus of Rego’s paintings narrowed too: the dog woman pictures and the abortion series both created in the 1990s, for example. Phantom brought to mind both series, and the discomfort I felt in front of them, the feeling of not knowing how I was supposed to look at them. At the risk of stating the obvious, a miscarriage is not the same as a backstreet abortion – though there are also visceral commonalities, of course – but people didn’t know how to look at the film version of Phantom either. As Kate Lloyd’s profile of Blakey puts it:

When a clip of the performance first debuted online in 2021, Blakey was shocked that something that felt cathartic to create caused a ‘real stink’ with the commenters. She received ‘so much hate, infinite appalling, appalled messages’. What does she think triggered it? ‘Honestly, I think the moments that leave audiences asking: “Is this woman in orgasm, or is this woman in some form of pain?”’ She pauses. ‘I’m not trying to shock anyone. I didn’t think it was shocking in any way.’ What she was trying to capture, she says, is the multiplicity of being a woman.

I’ve recently experienced a miscarriage. Is that right? My partner lost a pregnancy, our pregnancy; I was there. But also not there. Not there. While the gender dynamics of A Wound with Teeth are pretty balanced, the churn of patterns swiftly disrupting or inverting the preceding arrangements, in Phantom, the male-presenting dancers play more supplementary roles, standing back, banked in a secondary line, the screaming mostly coming from women, the convulsing soloists always women.

The score, though, of shredded guitar and handclaps, was created by Gwilym Gold. Gold is Blakey’s partner; the miscarriage also happened to him. ‘There’s something about Gwil being my partner and writing the music for this thing, the music of this miscarriage, that felt really important to me for this work,’ Blakey said when the film version was released. They joined the dancers onstage together, for the final bow. The music sounded just like the pressure in my head, as I sat, both completely invested and somewhat removed, looking on – at the stage, or in a hospital room.