“The Breath of Kings, which was first performed at the Dartington Dance Festival and then at Chisenhale Dance Space, drew on my experience of working on plays in mainstream theatre. It was also a reflection on the Libya political crisis of 1986. I used extracts from Shakespeare’s Richard 11 to suggest parallels between historical and contemporary wars and between principal protagonists involved in disputes. Performing the role of Richard 11 as a woman – rather than a woman impersonating a man – I was supported by two silent male escorts, Gale Burns and Fergus Early, who were supremely minimal while my performance was heightened. As they sat at a coffee table reading tabloid newspapers with headlines about the Libya crisis, I spoke Shakespeare’s great pacifist words from Richard 11:
Wrath kindled gentlemen be ruled by me:
Let’s purge this choler without letting blood:
This we prescribe, though no physician,
Deep malice makes too deep incision…”
Description from Choreographies, Tracing the Materials of an Ephemeral Art Form, by Jacky Lansley, published by Intellect Books, 2017.
Devised and Directed by Jacky Lansley; performed by Jacky Lansley, Fergus Early, Gale Burns.
REVIEWS
“…Who is this woman in a trench coat, leather gloves and dark glasses, whose pale face is made even paler by her crimson lipstick, and who has slipped into the dance studio at Dartington in the commotion of a scene change?…This is the start of The Breath of Kings, for me the funniest and most sophisticated fifteen minutes of new dance I’ve ever seen…
Breath is the physical expression of their words, and a king’s words are the ultimate in male control. But everything the performers do undermines male authority and subverts the control of words. It is not what is said but what the performer’s do that has us on the edge of our seats…Lansley makes a space between the speaking of the words and our comprehension of them, and within that allows other levels of the performance to be appreciated.”
Ramsay Burt – New Dance, Summer 1986
“Jacky Lansley, once founder member of London’s first New Dance collective, X6, applied a fine theatrical economy to The Breath of Kings, in which a dark lady (Lansley) goads two inert gents behind newspapers into the courtly scene of Norfolk’s and Hereford’s banishment…she speaks their works: they are complaisant puppets…
Lansley knows exactly how to make words and dance reverberate and here they become ironic foil for her independent feminist statement.”
New Statesman – May 1986