THE coronavirus has had a particularly disastrous effect on dance, which is normally dependent on close bodily contact between dancers and on interaction with a live audience.

Digital works are seeking to fill the void by tailoring their choreography to suit creative filming techniques and the Ella Mesma Dance Company’s Papyllon is one such.

Based on the butterfly’s life cycle as a means to “interrogate identity, privilege and imposter syndrome,” Ella Mesma uses long aerial silks as her only props and wears an unpretentious flesh-coloured leotard which echoes her creamy mixed-race skin tones,

Mesma begins seated cross-legged on the rumpled silk, with her back facing the viewer. From central spine to angled knees, her body’s outline and stillness echo the symmetry of a settled butterfly.

Still seated, she skilfully articulates the skeletal frame of her upper body from shoulders to vertebrae to fluttering finger tips, as if testing the possibilities of movement within restrictions.
 
Like a butterfly’s sudden flight, she abruptly shifts into extreme convoluted poses. Still cross-legged, she rests her entire body on her head and a lone shoulder and then moves into a head stand.

Continuing to test herself with such technically difficult, highly controlled poses, Mesma then imprisons her body and head in the aerial silks by rolling on the floor, recalling a resurrected Egyptian mummy.
 
Mesma’s increasingly desperate struggles to escape this trap with fast, sharp expressionist movements are constantly foiled, as the silk turns out to be fastened from the ceiling.

She bangs against the Fire Exit Only sign on the room’s doors, like a trapped butterfly against a window. After attempting to escape by climbing the now twisted silk like a sailor climbing a ship’s rigging, she finally succeeds in untangling herself. A triumphant ending which offers hope.

Much of the works’s emotive effect comes from Marv Radio’s eerily meditative live music which is an entirely improvised response to Mesma’s dance. Recalling a butterfly’s beauty but also its achingly ephemeral life, his music’s haunting beauty is a discovery in itself and deserves to be heard as an independent work.

Technically impressive, Mesma’s choreography draws upon close observation of butterfly movements to expresses struggle against oppression but also the possibility of its success.

Inspired by James Baldwin’s dictum that art is a means of speaking to people, she creates a work which does just that without using words.

Available for livestream at http://ellamesma.co.uk/papyllon