Review: Still Laughing at Resolution 2017

Photo credit: Charlotte Levy

Every year, The Place hosts Resolution, a festival of new dance showcasing some of the brightest new choreographic talent around. Our piece Still Laughing was performed at the festival on Feb 1st 2017 and it was reviewed by professional and non-professional dance critics, and here they are:

E. E. Cummings is quoted in saying “the most wasted of all days is one without laughter” – through Bite Dance’s Still Laughing, we have not wasted one moment. The duo, comprising Zoë Bishop and Alice White, has concocted an elaborate and complex score that not only keeps us engaged in its talented execution, but entertained through intelligently crafted humour as well. The gestural genius we are presented with leads us from absurd face-pulling, to fiendish mimicry, to a dark juxtaposition of their neutrality against the dizzying hysteria of laughter on a recorded soundscore. Still Laughing is a surreal, fresh and powerful lungful of hilarity.

- Fergus McIntosh, emerging reviewer

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best. Still Laughing is an investigation of laughter in all its guises: brief, focused, affecting and memorable. Bite Dance’s Zoe Bishop and Alice White, wearing white suits and spats, initially keep straight faces as they hold curious poses, which make sense only when they contort their expressions into grins. As voice snippets discuss the nature of laughter, the pair run through the repertoire, from dainty tee-hees to raucous guffaws, laughing at themselves, each other, and audience members, exploring laughter’s gestural language, then sliding into vaudeville-like movement, with Chaplin-esque struts. But there’s a discomfiting dark edge to the fact that they turn off the laughs in a moment, and regard us severely.

- Siobhan Murphy, professional dance critic

Photo credit: Charlotte Levy