Dance and performance art: reflections by two practitioners
Sarah White and Kait Dron reflect on eachothers’ performances for their MFA research degree at Trinity Laban, London UK
I Remember (You) Changing, by Sarah White
22 July, Studio Theatre at Laban Building
Review by Kait Dron
A woman stands in front of us, barefaced, wearing her hair as she might any other day. Dressed in blue, like water, alive. She gesticulates manically, patting herself down, chewing the air as if it were hay. She oscillates between a wild, animal gaze, wide-eyed and glaring, and a very human hyperactivity, smiling, waving her hands, her mouth rapidly moving as if telling us something, bursting with excitement.
She walks over to a microphone, shy. ‘I want to tell you … two stories …’ She speaks of ‘a man who sees nothing and a donkey, who sees everything’. She hunches over, repeatedly tensing her arms like a strong man. Sarah White’s surreal storytelling paints private personal memories, monologuing through movement and speech. She speaks to us closely, she sits in front of us making eye contact, she asks questions.
There is hospitality reflected in White’s practice of selflessness, ‘inhabiting the movements, words and energies of those we encounter’ as theological enquiry, as well as in her personal life, evidenced by the diversity of the audience. Her attention to minutiae, finding God glimpsing through life's lattice, kneading it like bread over and over in her body, births the unexpected. A non-judgemental, innocent experiencing of the other, asking us to question how we perceive. ‘You were not what I thought you were.’ The accompanying booklet, a collection of memories, correspondences and inspired quotes, tells us.
This is not random, thoughtless art to baffle. This is an invitation into the paradoxical, playful and perplexing character of Wisdom; a place where our ideas of reality can shatter, where it can question the ways in which we may have idolised, domesticated or simply underestimated God.
Through embodied imaginative interpretation of Balaam’s Donkey, White brings us to engage with scripture in an unanticipated way. Brightly lit, she moves us around the space, inviting us closer to her. Becoming more donkey throughout the performance, she chews on the microphone, describing an unfathomable, problematic scene. It's funny, touching, unnerving.
White’s work pulls to the forefront those moments where familiarity is split open to make way for an unimaginable reality to break through. God here is a surprise, an intrusive, confusing bringer of clarity, compelling us to empty our preconceptions of reality, asking us to trust and be changed in the face of the impossible.
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Tree in the Forest, Kait Dron
21 July 2025 at Laban Theatre, Laban Building
Review by Sarah White
‘Let him kiss me with the kisses of His mouth … Draw me, we will run after thee … O, how right it is to love thee!’ I read these words from the Song of Solomon with Kait Dron three weeks before her performance of Tree in the Desert at Trinity Laban. We read slowly, collectively, over candlelight, in the basement of a church in Hampstead. Savouring the intensity and eroticism of Jesus as lover. Then we drew and danced together. I had never imagined a God like this. I often find myself living vicariously through the faith of others, and I find myself here again.
When I witnessed Dron’s solo performance at Laban I saw manifest in her body this attention to God as lover, and her obsession with the Song of Songs as a soft, erotic encounter with the One who forms us, names us and calls us. For 20 minutes she moved in dim light as if on a turntable, encircled by her audience. She began in a pulsating light as a seed germinating, being born again. Over 20 minutes she moved from horizontal to vertical to horizontal, never leaving the light of the small circle she was contained within. She would turn towards me, then disappear. I missed her and longed for her to face me again.
As she turned, she transformed. From foetus to wild animal, to ageing woman, ice queen, oak tree, mountain, ghost, spirit and death. Dron’s training in Butoh dance is pivotal to her performance work. Butoh originated in Japan in post war 1959 and despite proliferating all over the world it retains the qualities of transformation, reduction and hyper-presence.
In Tree in the Forest Dron’s body became both creator and created one. At times she reminded me of the shape-shifting God of the Bible who appears as fire, wind, dove, lion, man, lover, spirit and voice. Then she becomes the created one, inhabiting multiple creation myths in one body. She was a walking oak tree, moving with hope, dragging her deep roots, before turning into sand and disappearing into the wind. She spoke out loud as she was being created. Remembering her maker, she told us; ‘he came to me like the wind … and he named me … mighty oak (clay man)’.
As the performance developed Dron took on a formidable form. A breathtaking, towering figure, an enchanter. As her outer dress was gradually removed we saw her fragile vulnerable frame beneath a thin white dress and the large iron cross hung heavily around her neck. In this moment her beauty was demonstrated as ‘powerful, dangerous and honest, full of frailty and paradox’. The common Christian phrase, ‘the beauty of the cross’ contains this tension of passionate, beautiful love, and horrific, violent suffering. Dron’s moving body is a revelation to us and to herself. Dying to self, we are stronger than we have ever been.