# Elaine Mitchener Delivers Dramas Of Defiance At St. George’s, London: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/02/25/elaine-mitchener-delivers-dramas-of-defiance-at-st-georges-london-video/
- Published: 2018-02-25T11:01:29+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**This Hawksmoor church in Bloomsbury is by no means familiar to the majority of
jazz audiences. It is not on the recognised circuit of venues. But that in itself
is telling. Although she is a known quantity in the world of improvisation, Elaine
Mitchener resolutely resists easy categorisation. St. George’s should suit her constituency;
whoever does not subscribe to a rigid separation of music, dance, mime and theatre.**

[jazzwisemagazine.com](http://jazzwisemagazine.com) She is a vocal and movement 
artist, and this premiere of ‘Sweet Tooth’ is a cross-disciplinary piece in which
sound and vision, and, perhaps more importantly, the specific layout of the space,
are all used in the course of a quite gripping performance. A meditation on slavery
in Jamaica, and the closely related sugar industry, a hugely lucrative business 
and culturally transformative phenomenon in the UK, the piece is as thought-provoking
as it imaginative, effectively conveying the dehumanisation of bondage by way of
chilling detail as well as compelling stagecraft. In real terms, that means that
the spreading of sound sources around the pews and altar – **Jason Yarde**‘s baritone
saxophone, **Sylvia Hallett**‘s violin and **Mark Sanders** drums – creates a disturbing
sense of oppressive forces enclosing the listener, as if the rumble of the horn,
buzz saw of strings and skitter of percussion mark out borders not to be crossed.

![Mitchener IMG 2450](https://i0.wp.com/jazzwisemagazine.com/images/FEB2018/Mitchener_IMG_2450.
jpg?resize=640%2C449)

When all the performers move slowly around the audience with birches that might 
well represent cane stalks that they then whip crisply in the air, it feels as if
runaways are being apprehended and punished before they can clear the limits of 
the plantation. The sense of discomfort around me is palpable. As is the moment 
when Mitchener reads a list of slave names from an 1813 inventory without accompanying
music with such mechanical precision that it seems the roll-call is endless, the
descriptions of the human cargo blurring into anonymity only to be punctuated by
a terribly poignant entry such as ‘Delia, sickly’. Mitchener’s entirely visceral
gestural range, directed by Dam Van Huynh, which involves pulling her hair, lashing
her buttocks and twisting and contorting her mouth to evoke the heinous ‘scold’s
bridle’ used to torture slaves, provides an equally potent counterpoint to this 
passage of calm, controlled menace.

Divided into six movements that draw on far-reaching historical material such as
kumina, the Congo-derived religious song and the ‘scramble’, the unseemly jostling
for prize specimens at auction time, ‘Sweet Tooth’ is an uncompromisingly graphic
treatment of a traumatic subject. Mitchener’s considerable theatrical and vocal 
ability lead her to draw out nuance in a single broken phrase, the juddering clicks
well enhanced by the braying overtones of Yarde’s soprano and the wavering of Hallett’s
accordion, a kind of morbid Scottish reel amid the wasteland of blighted lives.

From the moment she runs at full pelt, screaming into view, Mitchener adopts an 
artistically brave stance that has notable historical precedents. It was in Abbey
Lincoln’s hugely controversial evocation of plantation rape in America on Max Roach’s
_Freedom Now Suite_ and also in the revolutionary poetry of Aimé Césaire’s _Cahier
D’Un Retour Au Pays Natal_, where the author raised ‘le grand cri negre’ against
the deaf ears of those who refused to hear the ongoing echoes of post-slavery psychosis
in Martinique. ‘Sweet Tooth’ is a vital black British addition to those seminal 
creative statements of resistance and defiance from the African Diaspora.

**– Kevin Le Gendre; http://jazzwisemagazine.com
 – Photos by Robert Piwko

![](https://i0.wp.com/jazzwisemagazine.com/images/FEB2018/Mitchener_IMG_3406.jpg?
w=640)

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