From smoking seagulls to a Trump-like panto horse, Thick & Tight’s hymns to inclusiveness are shot through with wit. Elsewhere, love triumphs over Section 28
Sometimes the packaging is less attractive than the contents. On paper, Thick & Tight’s Natural Behaviour, “a collection of performed portraits of human and non-human life forms” that focuses “on what it means to be natural or unnatural”, sounds heavy sledding.
In practice, it is deft, funny and utterly absorbing, a ravishing selection of short dance pieces that make their points about queerness and inclusivity with wit, passion and power. It’s fabulous.
Thick & Tight’s directors, Daniel Hay-Gordon and El Perry, created their reputation with duets that yoked together an unlikely couple with something in common (Freud and Madonna united by sex, Princess Diana and Marilyn Monroe by fame, for example). Their work has expanded to embrace other dancers, including those from Corali Dance Company, which works with artists with learning disabilities, but cleverness and warmth shine from everything they do.
Each piece on this bill is introduced in amusing captions and voiceover to explain what will follow for audience members with disabilities; the effect is to welcome everyone before the dancing starts.
The works have the same sense of open-heartedness. One Horseman of the Apocalypse is a hoof-dance by a pantomime horse that resembles the American president and literally talks through its arse. Lesbian Seagull is a snapshot of two papier-mache seagulls who love fags and chips. Flies on the Spaceship Wall takes the form of a brilliantly humorous vignette in which Hay-Gordon and Perry twitch and listen to singer Katy Perry (no relation) talking about her love of Mother Earth – before hitting an eject button, preferring the abyss to her platitudes.
These are short and jokey, but there are substantial pieces too. Hay-Gordon dances to Brahms’s Piano Concerto No 2 in a solo full of soft turns, gentle shapes and moments of remembrance. It seems simple yet it exudes the sense of what it means to want to dance. Annie Edwards of Candoco mourns the loss of nightingales in a solo that responds to their sound. Jahmarley Bachelor conjures the ghost of Clement Crisp; Azara Meghie uses breaking to evoke the effect of the invocations of James Baldwin.
Detention’s solo dances convey ‘the agony of people who were being monstered by a hostile society’
Finally, in Cockroaches at the End of the World, the survivor insects are embodied by Hay-Gordon, Perry and the dancers of Corali, each waving four arms (two on strings) in defiance and joy, throwing the shadows of their shells against a fiery background. It’s a rich evening of invention.
Perry also appears briefly, on film, as a whirring Margaret Thatcher in Gary Clarke’s Detention, the third in a trilogy of political dance works set in 1980s Britain. This one focuses on Section 28, the infamous piece of legislation that prohibited local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality. Linked by narrator Lewey Hellewell and superbly performed by five dancers and five community recruits from the LGBT+ community in London, it’s a hard-hitting, emotional work.
The focus switches between great swathes of impassioned movement, conveying protest and suffering, and extracts from calls to the Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, accompanied by solos that show the agony of people who were being monstered by a hostile society.
The visceral misery described and exhibited – particularly in an extended scene where a schoolboy is horribly bullied – is a salutary warning of the dangers of intolerance, a reminder of how far we have come, and a plea for continued compassion and inclusion. As James Baldwin, quoted in Natural Behaviour, put it: “Love has never been a popular movement. The world is held together… by the love and passion of a very few people.”
Thick & Tight: Natural Behaviour is at Battersea Arts Centre, London SW11, then touring
Gary Clarke Company: Detention is at The Place, London WC1H, then touring
Photographs by Rosie Powell and Tristram Kenton
Social links
Copyright © 2025 Tortoise Media
All Rights Reserved
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.