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JOHN, POLLY AND THE MARK BRUCE COMPANY Queen Elizabeth Hall, London by Victoria Segal (from NME, 1996)
Another world. From The Astoria to the South Bank, from plastic beer beakers to glasses of wine, from noise and clatter to reverent silence - tonight is one of those crossover events that generally make right-thinking people slightly twitchy. The potential for disaster has been well explored : mix rock music with other art forms and you can bet those dread words "performance art" - or even "David Bowie" - come ominously to mind. It’s little wonder (ha) that most people interested in what Sundays papers would grimly call "The Arts" tend towards a purist stance. As Matt Groening puts it, "Is there anything more frightening than an open-mic poetry reading?". You know, if you ever see a real dancer straying near to a concept album, then run like the wind. They can only mean harm. Wrong. This, this is amazing, exhilarating, crushing, a perfect synthesis of Mark Bruce’s choreography and John Parish and Polly Harvey’s Dance Hall At Louse Point album. Set as a stage, with Polly and the musicians as house band and the five dancers as clientele, the piece works so well because it’s a projection, both a living album and a visible manifestation of the singer’s persona. The bareknuckled, red-raw rock’n’roll and sultry showtune swagger, mixed and matched like stubble and an evening gown, are lit by mirrorballs and yellow pools of spotlight, clothed in black velvet and satin. All those blues-bruised, devil-at-the-crossroads metaphors are made seductive flesh. Flesh. For all her restraint, her constant mystery, Polly has always been the most uninhibited of performers and writers. They might not be any vulgar full-frontal-soul exposure, she doesn’t bundle her secrets up to sell in neat packages, but in every desirechoked yowl, every intimate image, every compelling pose, she untethers herself. Her sheer physicality is reflected in the dancers firecracking across the stage, lustful yet scared, abject yet domineering, entwining in vicious courtship rituals to the rippled wash of Girl, seeming to eviscerate themselves to the tangled neuroses of Heela. It’s no coincidence there’s a song called Lost Fun Zone From the first moment, Parish’s music pulls the strings - most disturbingly in the sequence to Taut where Polly prowls among the dancers, seeming to control a brutal male-female struggle with a swing of her skinny fist. "Even the Son of God had to die, darlin’", she hisses, between her inchoate muttering, like the sight of a crucifix would reduce her to dust. It’s like that old story of God and Satan playing chess for lost souls - whoever she is, she’s playing to win. The music is drink-blinded, ripe with trouble; the dance is spectacular - but if any alterno-rock-star was going to carry it off, Polly was. Forget distinctions between contemporary dance and contemporary music - when PJ Harvey crosses over, it’s not just to another cultural world. It’s to the other side.
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