DICTION 1993 – 1994
DICTION invents an imaginary encyclopedia of physical behavior. It delights in disturbing traditional logic and constructing new expressions for the familiar world, creating a unique rhetoric of theatredance.
Diction is set in a crumbling old sports pavilion. Informed by a set of banal theatrical references, the eight performers enact matches, rounds and sets from the Book Of Diction, in an attempt to unravel the riddles of their actions. Perched precariously high on the umpire’s towers are the timekeepers whose babbling commentary rules the game. The players are all caught by back-to-front logic and ghostly presences, ending up in a world of new meanings for old words, strange combat encounters and dancing which is always tipping over into thin air.
“A giant chessboard became the playground for a marathon of physical tongue twisters, ritualized rhythmic riddles, battles of willfulness, muddles of languages, juggles with gestures, dictations of rules, breaking of bodies, a physical theater of games with obscure goals.”
Diction was funded by the Arts Council Of England, North West Arts, funding from the Coneil Generale de la Seine-Saint-Denise, France, and a Barclays new Stages Award. The piece featured in the spring loaded Festival, London, and toured throughout the UK and Germany, with support from the British Council.
PRESS:
“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”
Judith Mackrell, The Independent
“We see the silliness, the deadliness, the sublimity of people obsessed by competition and the treacherous power of those, like the umpires, who divide their victims and rule. We glimpse, in passing, the ruthless arbitrariness of fate and the universal predicament of the blind leading the blind. It’s also typically paradoxical of Snaith that these base rules of human experience should be so lucidly present in a work whose greatest pleasures lie in its riddles, its absurdities and its vagrant imagination”
Judith Mackrell, The Independent
“The games are hypnotically intriguing, as routines achieve a ritualistic force…The piece is a teaser”
Financial Times