Belonging(s), (Brighton Festival)

At the end of Belonging(s), Maresa von Stockert‘s dance-promenade piece, a gaggle of dancers stand on the beach and stare out to sea, looking back to where they’ve come from. Longing for home.

What do you belong to? Who do you belong with? What belongs to you? In a Brighton Festival foregrounding ideas of home, von Stockert looks at the migrant crisis through the question of belonging. Her choreography, danced in concrete spaces and car parks, on pavements and patches of grass, expresses the lived experience of leaving somewhere. There’s a freedom in being fixed and fitting in. To leave is to cast oneself adrift.

Belonging(s) is a piece about journeys, but it’s also a journey of its own – unsure of where it’s heading as it stops here and there. Between routines, dancers carry cardboard boxes and bundles, light but awkward; armfuls of essentials. A wrinkled roll becomes a standard. Dancers find places to pause: leaning into lampposts and lying on benches.

It starts in a concrete basement beneath Brighton’s Council offices, so solid and secure. Dancers form a bureaucratic machine, as bodies disappear into cardboard boxes and hands pass vinyl records for processing. It’s a playful, homespun political system, everything working in sync, until the system splutters, short-circuits and spits these people out. They pick up their pieces and leave – not because they want to necessarily, but because something stopped working.

Von Stockert walks us through exposed, makeshift spaces. In a car park, a dance party erupts: partners dancing with slivers of vinyl between them, to songs that seem to belong to them. On a patch of grass, individuals take shelter beneath cardboard, the wind blowing boxes into crumples and chilling the bones. A group in record sleeve hats welcome in a newcomer. Paper birds form a flock. On the seafront, individuals fold small comforts out of cardbard: a dress or a plaything. Exposed to the elements, they dishevel.

With a community chorus, Belonging(s) builds its own politics into its form. For an hour or so, we belong to something too: a procession – an amorphous group – keeping pace with each other in slow, deliberate steps. That slowness weighs you down. It turns a seaside stroll into a trudge, and your steps become measured, one by one by one. Our walking is choreography too. You think through the piece with your body.

En route, in Brighton, however, we pass two covered benches. On both, are sleeping bags – one empty, one not – and the sight cuts through von Stockert’s choreography in an instant. The reality of rough sleeping smashes against this gentle, plaintive expression of it, and shows von Stockert’s piece for what it is: bleeding heart liberalism. Beautiful, considered bleeding heart liberalism, but bleeding heart liberalism nonetheless; a chance to contemplate a situation that does too little to change it.

Belonging(s) is at Norfolk and Norwich Festival 21st – 22nd May, and Bell Square Festival, 18th June. Full details here.