Resolution 2026 – the free-for-all dance festival

If it’s January, it must be Resolution, London’s festival of contemporary dance, which has been running for more than 35 years. It marks a generous beginning to the dance year, thanks to its open-hearted,p that allows aspiring dance-makers to do their thing without much restriction.

But it also demands persistence and tolerance. Three short works a night are programmed almost randomly; you never have a guarantee of anything on any given evening.

Sometimes patience is rewarded. On a rainy Tuesday in January, it was a joy to come across a new work by Seirian Griffiths, an outstanding dancer who has worked with Punchdrunk, Kim Brandstrup and Russell Maliphant, now making his way as a choreographer.

Interchange is a moving and thrilling solo piece that imagines Griffiths trapped in a bureaucratic purgatory, waiting to be reincarnated but forced, through instructions from Sam Booth’s voiceover, to get rid of his “excess baggage” in the shape of the loves of his life who haven’t been accounted for. Under Andrew Ellis’s swiftly changing lights, Griffiths runs through a quicksilver series of movements that suggest encounters – with his mother, with lovers – and his reaction to them. He moves with extraordinary, fluid grace, using the vocabulary of hip-hop in ways that emphasise both softness and strength.

Griffiths’s endeavour was the triumphant conclusion to a programme that revealed a lot of promise. In Archive/Flesh/Echoes, the Chinese choreographer Qi Song sets her cast of dancers basking in the after-effects of a rave, raising their heads to the artificial light as if sunbathing, reluctant to let go of the dance’s propulsive patterns.

Isadora D’Héloïsa’s Entrecuerpos (pictured), another solo show, is an intriguing mixture of flamenco and voguing, featuring three outstanding musicians (Bryan Reyes on guitar, Ago Hernandez on percussion and singer Carlos de Luisa), inventive arm-ography and a brilliant use of a flounced skirt. Unfortunately, in an in-the-round setting, it was designed to face entirely frontwards so I saw mainly backs.

On the opening night, also in the round, Paxton Ricketts, who has worked with Nederlands Dans Theater, presented Pet Peeves: An Incoherent Rambling, wrapping himself in stiff brown paper that covered the floor, making an illuminated cave by burrowing while holding a light. The effects were sometimes striking. At one point, he rose holding the lamp like an eerie Statue of Liberty, at another hopped like an off-balance satyr. But the intent and the voiceover were muffled.

Meanwhile, Esther Cheong’s Kiasu was a clever group dance in which characters betrayed a fear of losing their place in a line – or in the world.

Resolution 2026 is at The Place, London, until 25 February

Photograph by Jemima Yong