ABSTRACT
One of the brightest discoveries of contemporary British dance in the mid-1980s was the Cholmondeleys (pronounced ‘chumleez’), a hilariously, startlingly original trio named after an Elizabethan painting hanging in the Tate Gallery. Choreographer-dancer Lea Anderson, like her company co-founders Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward, was a graduate of London’s Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. A dropout from St Martin’s School of Art, she had fronted rock bands prior to emerging from the Laban chrysalis. This background may help to explain her visual flair, and her early habit of constructing dances with the impact of a 45 rpm record; even some of her later, fulllength work possesses the deliberate consecutiveness of an album or music gig. Another reason for the brevity, and scaleddown detail, of the first Cholmondeleys pieces was the size and nature of the venues they played: cramped clubs, rough pubs, even a space in a tunnel beneath the Thames, or on board a small riverboat-cum-art-gallery. This was fringe/chamber/cabaret dance. Perhaps Anderson, with her eye for offbeat, code-like gestures and telling physical quirks, was simply a born miniaturist.
