There’s no one quite like Wendy Houstoun. At 64, she’s not ready to retire, but she warns us that her latest show, Watch It!, part of the Undisciplined dance festival in Brighton, may be her last. Why? Because she doesn’t trust her mouth not to say something that will offend someone and get the plug pulled.
“Offensive” is not the word you’d usually use to describe Houstoun. “Silly” certainly is. And in the midst of that silliness there’s pathos, protest and bemused observation. “Maverick” is another word that follows Houstoun around (although she doesn’t care for it), a shorthand for independence and idiosyncrasy.
Houstoun has been performing for 43 years. She started as a dancer with DV8, Nigel Charnock and Forced Entertainment, all artists experimenting with text and theatre alongside movement, breaking out of the boundaries of polite abstract dance. Houstoun made her first solo work in the mid-90s, a kind of dance-meets-theatre-meets-standup that doesn’t fit into any of those boxes. Over the years, the balance has tipped towards text until here’s Houstoun at the mic, just bopping and bouncing on the spot with the occasional gesture to underline her words.
Watch It! starts with Houstoun transported through a tunnel of memories. 1980: “bombing up to London on the train, polystyrene cups and vinyl”; moving through the decades of pop and politics: “The Price is Right … The Satanic Verses … Oh, here come the M People … Mandela, Mugabe, Milosevic.” She has a great way of swerving away from expectations, her train of thought suddenly switching tracks, crashing a couple of ideas together. Her delivery is distinctive, in that it’s utterly ordinary. There’s nothing performative about her speech, which is mild and even-toned. She could be telling you what time the bus is coming.
But the whole idea behind Watch It! is Houstoun’s worry that her mild-mannered speech is going to get her in trouble, that meeting the world with wry humour and questions has left her out of step. She conjures very well the regrettable last scroll of the phone before bed, sucked into social media to a point where suddenly the world of the phone seems more vivid than the room around you. She types an offhand comment and by the time she’s cleaned her teeth someone’s told her to “Die, bitch.”
The black and white of social media “debate” is at odds with Houstoun’s discursive musing, her undemonstrative, inclusive manner, talking directly to the audience. Her solo work has always been like this, such as the early triptych Haunted, Daunted and Flaunted, describing her own actions as she dances, bringing the viewer on board. Her routines often feel off the cuff, but they are carefully structured and Houstoun has always been great with a one-liner. In 1999’s Happy Hour she played a barmaid, monologuing to the audience, a hint of Jennifer Saunders in the delivery: “If you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs … Then maybe you don’t understand the situation.”
She loves to rework sayings and cliches: in Starbucked, performed at queer club night Duckie in 2010 there is deft wordplay: “We’re all running around scared that if we were to fall apart for just a minute, then the world would stop.” And there are visual gags. In 2015’s Stupid Women the dancer Anna Williams held up a sign saying “Down with Anna”, and repeatedly dropped herself to the floor, following the instruction. It’s something you could imagine in a Reeves and Mortimer sketch.
But among the jokes Houstoun has more to say. Her award-winning 50 Acts (2012) mused on ageing – there was a memorable scene where her freedom to dance is stymied by a series of health and safety measures – and its sequel Pact With Pointlessness was her response to the emptiness she felt after the death of her great friend Nigel Charnock, an outspoken ball-of-energy performer, whose voice also appears in Watch It!
In Desert Island Dances (2006) she summons a sense of disappointment over life’s promises, setting out her paradisiacal island then playing out a series of compromises, getting the audience to imagine what the show could have been. “You would have loved it,” she told them wistfully. Amid the low-key nonsense there’s real poignancy, and many other things that go to make up life: insight, stupidity, wisdom, playfulness, confusion, and lots of grey areas.
There aren’t too many sixtysomething women exposing their thoughts and flaws on stage, and Houstoun says that she feels threatened. “Who do you think you are?” the anonymous voices demand online, for daring to stand in the spotlight. You have to hope this won’t have been her last performance.
