COURT BY THE TAIL 1990 – 1991
Doors open on enclosed spaces where we experience a disturbing confusion of time and place. The future infests the past, the past invades the future. In a world composed of fragments of text, objects, and film, games and rituals leave the performers precariously caught in-between conflicting times.
“If we take away from the present, moment that is just gone by and the moment that is next to come, the solid basis of sense and reality, will reduce itself to a pin’s point, a hairline, on which we will have some difficulty to maintain our footing without falling over on either side.” William Hazlitt, Victorian essayist
Where am I? What time is it? Who are they? Many audience members were convinced that “The Glass Bead Game”, by Hermann Hesse, had inspired me. I had never read it, so I had to read it, and when I read it I wondered if I would have made ‘Court By The Tail” if I had read it.
COURT BY THE TAIL was funded by the Arts Council of England and a Digital Dance Award and featured in the Dance Umbrella Festival. The work toured throughout the UK as well as performances is France and Belgium between 1990 and 1992, with support from the British Council.
Press:
“Here she has found a vocabulary which merges the athletics of physical theatre with dancing of purity and precision, producing strikingly dramatic forms”
The Scotsman
“The invented worlds of Yolande Snaith are rich with plunderings from fairy tale, history, philosophy and art. They are worlds, too, that rarely obey daytime logic. Her dancers enact rituals that are bound by strange commands, topsy-turvy motives, magic or dreams.”
The Independent, London
“Yolande Snaith makes work that is baffling, wry, complex, haunting and deeply British. (Though I’d rather call her as Americans would, a performance artist.) She creates dream worlds packed with symbolic images. I often feel lost in a maze, happily so”
Financial Times, London
“The work isn’t constrained by current trends, rather it is a reflection of what has caught her imagination by the tail, what amalgam of discovered snippets- musical, textual, historical, fanciful – have permeated together in her own delightfully questing mind…….The whole piece is resonant with a sense of time-honored intellectual status quo being challenged by new ideas, even as the past is challenged by the now and what might be”
Mary Brennan, The Glasgow Herald
“Snaith brings together an erudition, the context of history, sly satire and sassy showmanship under the umbrella of her own remarkable talent – and the result is an original fusion of music, film, movement, text, and design that opens much needed vistas within dance”
Mary Brennan, the Glasgow Herald
‘I’m hooked from the first image’
Financial Times, London
“The oblique approach is charged with a kind of mystery that is designed to fire the imagination.”
Keith Watson, Hampstead And Highgate Express, London