On That Day, This Body, That Time
Before we enter Dancehouse, I exchange a nod with a man who stands apart from the crowd, smoking a cigarette. He carries a large bag and carries himself apart from the group of babbling audience members spilling out onto Princes Street.
After the piece, he is one of the first to talk to solo performer Jonathan Sinatra. The man is focussed on his story and his bag, which turns out to be full of vinyl records. Sinatra, in the heady post-show emotions of opening night, provides only snippets of context. For those of us gathered to celebrate Sinatra’s work, the story clicks into place in fits and starts: the man runs an op-shop where the choreographer sourced some records for his set earlier this week, and he has come to see the show!
I smile. This is the exact kind of story that Sinatra gathers like a magnet drawing in loose filaments, stories of chance encounters and everyday people. It is the kind of story that we have been privy to for the last hour, as Sinatra recounts conversations with security guards, truck drivers, and pedestrians. It feels right somehow, the choreographer’s guerrilla practice asserting itself even as it is reframed for a black box.
The enthused audience mills around Sinatra, people from every corner of his dance community and beyond wanting to say congratulations. I smile again, knowing how hard he has worked for this moment.
I must confess to a small does of schadenfreude seeing him finally get the recognition he deserves. Those of us who have worked with Sinatra know him as ‘Jono’, a selfless collaborator and rigorous practitioner. We have also seen his work overlooked for years. Not, I suspect, with any malice, but because it takes place in alleyways and beneath underpasses, and because it is shared with the world using social media. To a dance community accustomed to seeing development in these spaces ultimately realised in a theatre performance or in a signposted, ticketed site-specific performance, I think people just failed to bring their attention to the magnitude of the work that he has done. Equally, I must admit that I was unsure whether this transposition would work; Sinatra is full of memories, ideas, and relationships, and I wondered how these could be strung together cohesively. Would it just be a guy talking at us for an hour?
I need not have worried. Sinatra’s years of curating action within a frame has sharpened his directorial eye, and with further assistance from dramaturg/outside eye Kevin Jeynes, That Day, This Body, That Time has a strong throughline. The work is an exploration of place as captured through Sinatra’s lens - his camera and his eyes. His dancing moves between direct and abstract relationships with the videos playing on three screens behind at the back of the space. In one poignant section, he replays a dance with his mother who has dementia. On screen in black and white, she walks slowly away from camera, while he orbits around her. On stage, Sinatra mimics his own motions, dropping into the sensation of that day. “I asked her to just walk, and at the end to give me one gesture,” he says, “and then…” he invites our attention to the video, where she reaches for his hand. At other times, videos are overlapped, colour graded, or cropped, which encourages us to see them more as a montage and to refocus on this dancing body before us. Sometimes, Sinatra describes a moment that took place before his daily dance practice started in 2019, such as dancing with Russell Dumas for 20 years. The screens go dark as Sinatra performs excerpts of a ‘long solo’ made on him during those years, reminding us that the body is also an archive, not as precise as film but no less accurate.
It is a vulnerable work, addressing Sinatra’s childhood adoption, the moment (while filming a daily dance, of course) that he learned of his father’s death, and moments from the last 6 years when his passion dried up. In the second ‘scene’ of the work, a video of Sinatra’s bare skin on beach sand plays, before he steps onto stage nude. The usual tightening of the audience’s attention followed, each of us suddenly aware of the person on either side of us. But this choice felt right to me. In a performance encompassing 6 years of practice and 56 years of life, with extensive video to look at, there was always a risk that Sinatra would be swallowed by it all. Indeed, for me personally, watching the daily dances as his skills and technology improved, I have often been paying more attention to the cinematography and environment of the videos than the dancing. This early scene reminded me that my colleague has a vast library within him, and set me up for the rest of the work to revel in seeing him dance for more than 90 seconds at a time, to see his sweat and the subtle distinctions in his movement between sections.
The end of the piece is beautiful. I won’t reveal it here, because the season has three shows remaining - tickets are available at the Dancehouse website. (When the season finishes, I will update this piece as a full review.)
Our applause is loud and long. Sinatra bows, beckons his collaborators onto stage, bows again. Still the clapping continues! He looks around sheepishly, a hand on his heart. Clearly making a decision to sit in this moment, he takes a sumptuous bow.
