November 12th, 2009 §
The first thing you see these days when you walk out on the main alleé in Bratislava, is a huge advertisement across the front of the opera house for an ultra modern show. The image is of a woman looking up, surrounded by what appear to be mystical creatures. The name of the show: Everest.
I was certain that the very sexy poster - all over Bratislava - was for a visiting performance, an updated Lord of the Dance. But I was very wrong. Everest is home grown.
After two years in Bratislava, Slovak National Ballet Director Mário Radačovský has staged his second full length evening work. His first Warhol was a strangely mainstream look at an artist who was a determinedly avant garde. I'm not sure if others ever made more sense of it than I was able. Warhol was one of the first productions to grace the new stage of the Slovak National Opera (SND) and did properly fill the grandiose new space with its three story decorations.
Soloists and Choir During Everest Ballet of SND in Bratislava:
multimedia plays a huge role: notice the large projection
photos: Ctibor Bachratý for SND
With Everest, Radačovský has set his sights far higher. Everest seeks to communicate four stages of existence: life, death, after-life and resurrection. But the theology is definitely more pagan than Christian. Everest begins with the crawling and fluttering of Lemurans, the half-animal half-man inhabitants who antedate Atlantis.
SND Premiere: Everest from Mario Radačovský Continues »
October 26th, 2009 §
Agata Maszkiewicz torn by fellow dancers in Komposition:
Anne Juren's simple and poetic co-creation was the highlight of the evening
If nothing else, the season opener at Tanzquartier was extremely ambitious. Ten different performance venues in the TQW Studios, Halle G, Jungl, museumquartier21, the courtyard of MQ.
There were over twenty different performances in these venues starting at six. The performances offered a cross section of almost everything we've seen in TQW in the last five years. The evening was meant to be more inclusive than exclusive, a chance for the new director to work with all the resident choreographers and performance hangers on of TQW.
I managed to see about seven different shows. Here are my impressions.
Erste Tanznacht Wien: Lots of skits, a little dance Continues »
October 1st, 2009 §
Six different performances from five choreographers in a single evening. This starts to reminds one of Choreolab. And in fact one of the Choreolab choreographers did manage to make the main stage. No great surprise that it is fellow Hungarian Andras Lukacs and protegé of ballet director Gyula Harangozo.
Duo by Andras Lukacs & Alice Firenze
The good news is that Lukacs' piece Duo while short was the most emotionally moving of the works danced that night. Duo is simplicity itself: rich purple costumes covering just the torso (Mónika Herworth) and a simple dark stage. The lighting was atmospheric but at the same time clear. We weren't squinting in the dark.
The emotional character of the work had much to do with the music of Max Richter (from the Blue Notebooks) and with Rafaella Sant'Anna's performance. She is in the prime of young womanhood, a powerful dancer with graceful curves.
Her scissors in the air cut sharp like steel. Generally Sant'Anna carried her role with the class of a Paris Opéra étoile, though her footwork could sometimes be more accurate.
The Brazilian Sant'Anna has been in the Staatsoper a long time but despite her dramatic gifts and natural talents has been left to drift much of the time. Whenever she has had the opportunity to dance outside the corps she has always shone. It's nice to see her have this chance on the main stage.
While emotionally cooler than Sant'Anna, her partner Masayu Kimoto supported her performance with élan. He was always in the right place and handled his lifts as though effortlessly.
Ederlezi by Maria Yakovleva & Mihail Sosnovschi
The opening piece of the evening Ederlezi from choreograph Myriam Naisy was quite the opposite. Shrill, bathetic music as if from a second rate Hollywood melodrama bathed the audience in bathos. Goran Gregovic must take the blame. The choreography did little to rescue the situation, despite some pretty lifts, particularly notable when Kirill Kourlaev held Irina Tsymbal horizontal over his head in an acrobatic pose. To their enormous credit, both handled this visually effortlessly.
Ederlezi by Roman Lazik & Karina Sarkissova
Glow was a more ambitious work than either of the first two, with a cast of twelve dancers. Musically, choreographer Jorma Elo reaches directly for the sky, mixing a Mozart symphony and a Philip Glass's concerto for piano and orchestra. The music was live making Glow a perfect fit for the Vienna Staatsoper, which may have the best ballet orchestra in the world. Unlike other ballet orchestras, the Staatsoper musicians have the opportunity to play a mixed repertoire and do not become as jaded and cynical in their playing.
The piano playing by Lucas Mais was superb: you could have closed the curtains. Anything that happened on stage was a bonus to the concert level playing.
Olga Esina showed up the entire cast with her long arms Dancers like Olga Esina are the reason to justify a trip to St Petersburg or Moscow to see the Marinsky or the Bolshoi. Kudos to Gyulo Harangozo for bringing Esina to Vienna and keeping her her. When you see her on the program, don't miss the ballet. Kirill Kourlaev was the best of the men and partnered Esina adequately but for the moment the Staatsoper haven't found a man to match Esina. The search goes on though: she will be dancing Swan Lake with four different partners in October and November.
Glow Stop by Ketevan Papava & Alexis Forabosco
Of the other women in Glow - Stop, Ketevan Papava's long arms nearly matched Esina, but her movements have a more deliberate and posed feel. I prefer the natural and effortless style.
Throughout Glow - Stop, the dancers mix and pair and mix again, like the river of life which brings people together and takes them apart.
At the end of Glow - Stop, the last dancer makes some small mechanical gesture with his arms and hand, as it the dancers are marionettes. We are just puppets moving frentically through life driven by our feelings.
Slingerland is a short duet by William Forsythe, originally staged on Stefanie Arndt who came to pass the role on to Olga Esina. Esina this time was paired with Eno Peci. Strangely, while both of these dancers are very talented, something did not work in this performance. Stefanie Arndt is a very angular and sharp dancer. Esina has a silky smoothness to almost all her gestures, even when stacatto. Her grace is out of place in the brittleness of Forsythe's later works. Eno Peci is more at home in this idiom but he never seemed to hit full speed, nor was the any extraordinary chemistry between them. With all of the caveats above, Slingerland is the kind of work of which there should be more of in the Staatsoper repertoire and both Peci and Esina did sufficient justice to their roles. It's just the trifecta Forsythe-Esina-Peci raised higher expectations on paper. The music didn't help as it was a scratchy grinding bit of modern composition from Gavin Byers which irritates far more than it engages.
Slingerland pas de deux by Eno Peci & Olga Esina
Slingerland by Eno Peci & Olga Esina
The end of the evening was given to Juri Kylian with two of his masterworks, Petite Mort and Six Dances.
Petite Mort involves swordplay and fake dresses and great swooping pieces of fabric which are carried across the stage, set to sweeping Mozart concertos (Nr. 21 and 23). A lot of Petite Mort's effect is based on visual gags and surprises. I've seen it a few times, perhaps in Paris as well. To be frank, it was a disappointment for me last night. The men were very sloppy with their swordplay, not in sync. They didn't seem to have any military discipline in their timing. The women didn't move me either. Petite Mort did not seem to have the precision necessary or to be fully rehearsed. Had it been the first time I'd seen Petite Mort, perhaps I would have sufficiently delighted by the eye candy and visual surprises to forgive many of these faults. I've seen it danced better elsewhere. Staastsoper should be dancing work like Petit Mort, so I'd like to see them go back to the rehearsal room and get it right.
Petite Mort by Karina Sarkissova & Mihail Sosnovschi
Petite Mort by Rafaella Sant'Anna & Jaimy van Overeem
Six Dances is again the duo Kylian - Mozart, but this time in an overtly comic context with white pancake makeup on the dancers. Juri Kylian has a secret fascination with the word of slapstick silent comedy. He indulges this passion to the hilt with six dances. The dancers drove the staid audience to laughing out loud and put a smile on my own face. Under the white face I couldn't tell who was who among Alice Firenze, Gabor Oberegger, Céline Weder, Marcin Dempc, Iliana Chivarova, Thomas Mayerhofer, Liudmila Trayan and Richard Szabó but nobody danced badly. The danseuse who opened up Six Dances was perhaps the funniest of all. In addition to his talent for creating beautiful and emotional movement, At the end of Six Dances beautiful soap bubbles float down from behind the stage. The dancers look up and are surprised. They share their surprise directly with the audience, looking us in the face and shrugging their shoulders as if we were there on stage with them. And interesting breaking of the third wall before the curtain closes on their strange mime world.
Sechs Taenze by Mayerhofer & Chivarova & Szabo
Sechs Taenze by Trayan & Oberegger & Dempc & Firenze
New World Dances is the closest I've seen Staatsoper come to one of those splendid Opera de Paris Palais Garnier evenings of contemporary choreography. Never mind that most of the creations here were made in 1980's. There are a couple of newer pieces and this is a huge step in the right direction. There should be one or two of these evenings made every season. Costume ballets and classics are fine but to breathe a major ballet company needs this work too. I'd like to see newer works and less name choreographers but perhaps to sell contemporary choreography to the Viennese audience, it's a necessary evil.
All photos copyright © Das Ballett der Wiener Staatsoper and Volksoper/Axel Zeininger
August 7th, 2009 §
Actually the full title is "Manteau long en laine marine porté sur un pull à encolure détendue avec un pantalon peau de pêche et des chaussures pointues en nubuk rouge"
In other words: "A long wool coat in navy with worn over a sweater with a soft collar worn with peach leather pants and pointy red nubuk shoes".
In other words, you know this piece will be frivolous before you even get there. Frivolous not as in pointless, but frivolous as in the écume des jours (Froth of Days) of Boris Vian.
The stage is bare, without curtains.
The dancers enter from the house, each dressed in the sports clothes of the down on their luck, carrying a large plastic bag. Certainly from not such a good neighbourhood, ordinary folk. They begin by stripping off the ordinary clothes and showing off their very showy bodies.
Nadine Fuchs does gymnastic stretching in pink lingerie, staring matter-of-factly at the audience.
Delgado Fuchs © Sophie Ballmer
You can see this pair are either making the requisite sacrifices for their art. Neither of them has an once of fat on either stomach or hips. Either that or they hate food.
We are now firmly in the domain of the unpredictable. The conventional down on your luck dancer in sweatclothes to world class gymnastic stretching, it's extremely unclear where this is going. In the background there is very faint music.
dress change © Alec Kinnear
Now they dress themselves up in something else again. Marco is in black tie and patent leather shoes, his strange long hair making him look like an out of work British rock idol from the eighties.
Nadine puts on green hotpants and a lacy cowgirl shirt with tall boots. The pair circle one another warily, begin to dance and kiss. Nadine flings herself passionately on Marco but then starts to pull herself higher on his chest still thrusting her hips at him.
They make us believe for a moment it might be real passion and then it just changes into absurdity again.
Nadine Fuchs
by Catherine Leutenegger
Eventually the pair get to talking. Nadine speaks about Marco to the audience in first person.
"He got his start in dancing at a club in Brussels called Happy Fee, a strip club," she accuses him. At this point Marco is down to bare chest and black pants again. He lingers over at the side of the stage.
"Marco is waiting for a moment," continues Nadine. "A moment where the positive energy of the moment and the body come together." It's hard to tell if she is serious or not.
When Marco begins to dance now, slow turning movements, a spine sloped backward, hands at awkward angles, we get contemporary dance improvisation 101. Both Fuchs and Delgado are mocking their opponents, the earnest contemporary brigade.
Delgado is clearly comfortable and in control of the idiom which makes his mockery of it all the more delicious. At the end of his parade across the stage he stops and stands in one place. Fuchs strolls by to make some adjustments and distorts his face, before moving his arm into a grotesque thumbs up position.
grotesque thumbs up position © Alec Kinnear
Delgado's distorted half clown face makes us wonder about the poses we make and the poses people want to put us into.
A little bit later they find their way to naked and dance across the stage holding one another's crotches. From naked Delgado and Fuchs move to a pink sixties outfit for Fuchs and head to toe blue tails for Delgado.
naked Delgado and Fuchs © Alec Kinnear
Curiously as soon as they are perfectly attired they set to meticulously rebuilding the stage with metal and wood. On stage, they left to life size photos of themselves. Each photo includes a hole in the wood for a self-portrait like in the surface.
self portrait © Alec Kinnear
"I'm thirsty," proclaims the pink Fuchs. "We'll be up in the bar enjoying a drink. Anyone else who would like to have a drink too, come and join us."
Delgado hands someone in the front row a polaroid camera and then they both walk up through the audience and out of the theatre.
The audience sits in stunned silence for about thirty seconds and then they start to go for the self portraits.
The perfect anti climax. We are left taking pictures of ourselves in the cutout clothes of the two leads.
Marco Delgado
by Catherine Leutenegger
I wondered about whether it was necessary to include Marco Delgado's biography in the piece. I asked Delgado about it: "Who says it's my biography?," he smiled.
That bit of stagecraft - breaking the line between the real and the imaginary seems to me to be at the core of manteau long en lain marine. Delgado and Fuchs want to take the stage back from earnest explorations of your real internal self to the magic of let's pretend.
The constant costume changes are a reminder that surfaces are just that and that one's impressions of someone are only clothes deep. This simple paradigm of blurring reality and fashion wakes the world up. You wonder who you really are and who the people you know really are. For at the end of the day, you are the sum of your clothes and your presentation.
Or at least much of the world works like that. manteau long en lain marine is a wonderful voyage into appearances and the unpredictable.
Even nudity is anything but clarity in this show.
Seen a second time, some of the magic comes off. The jokes turn out to be more closely timed than you think and less spontaneous. The improvisation and unpredictable is actually carefully choreographed.
But it is amazing how Fuchs and Delgado manage to maintain that feeling of unpredictable spontaneity most of the time. I asked Marco Delgado about it - "The freshness is essential. It is sometimes hard. We are often changing the show to keep it fresh."
So take this review with a grain of salt. In a month or two, you may see a very different show than the one I saw in Vienna.
August 5th, 2009 §
The Love Piece is one of the more unique pieces in the 2009 ImPulsTanz festival: it is entirely experiential and completely different every time it is played and for every participant.
The creators and cast of The Love Piece provide an environment and a context and the rest is up to you.
The Love Piece: Where it all happens
The experience for the most part is positive, but as I wrote the quality of your experience depends mainly on you and what you bring to that evening.
Here's what the program says about the piece. This much is public knowledge:
The Love Piece unfolds along a loose score that can described as: there as many audience members as performers. As they come in, audience members are each taken by the ahand by a performer, who for the duration of the show 'give love' to his/her audience. What such a love can be, is the stake of the piece. Love songs are playing the whole time.
There are just 10 performers - so very few people had the opportunity to experience The Love Piece. I was one of that fortunate 100 and will reveal the details to you about my own visit.
*** SPOILERS FOLLOW - PLEASE DO not read farther ***
*** if you expect to attend The Love piece personally ***
ImPulsTanz 2009: Alice Chauchat - The Love Piece Continues »
August 5th, 2009 §
One of the curiosities at ImPulsTanz this week was the stage performance of Transformers, the culmination of two weeks of rehearsals and workshop led by Eszter Salamon and Christine de Smedt.
This is one of three or four professional level two week programs, mainly populated by the DanceWeb dancers. For those not familiar with DanceWeb, it is a program run by ImPulsTanz which brings about forty dancers from around the world to Vienna to study dance at the ImPulsTanz workshops and at the performances as well for free. DanceWeb is one of those great initiatives which changes the world by providing a conduit for international exchange. Often DanceWebbers end up visiting one another across the globe. I have been the guest in Venezuala on a road trip with one of my friends from DanceWeb. This is not untypical. So that is the context of this two week intensive: working professionals from around the world, but with no prior experience dancing with one another.
Some will argue that Transformers should not be critiqued as it is just the results of a workshop. Not so. It is deliberately presented as a stage work and not in laboratory format.
Salamon & De Smedt & Pro Series - Transformers
© Alec Kinnear
Black box stage. Stage environment not accented, more black curtains and shadows than raw backstage. All the dancers are in everyday clothes: blues, reds, yellows, browns. Nothing remarkable.
A curiosity are the wires going into each dancers left ear. More on them later.
The show starts off slowly with heavy breathing moving to amplified shch whispering noises and lot of meandering around the stage. The whispering slowly accelerates to quiet howls over the course of twenty minutes. Frankly this warmup session is pretty painful.
We have cute little hobbit "hee hee" noises. Let your inner voice out, seventies kind of primal scream warmup. Definitely useful for ungluing uptight dancers from stiff cultures. Not so entertaining.
accelerating Transformers voices © Alec Kinnear
They now turn it up a notch and go into spasms and fits and real primal screams. Particularly amazing is a guy who looks like one of Ghenghis Khan's lieutenants with long dark hair and high cheekbones. You fear for his life and yours as he screams and thrashes.
Particularly effective is Chris Haring's dancer Alexander Gottfarb who doesn't let the spasms go through his whole body but confines it to one part of his body at a time in a controlled rotation, focusing your attention much better on the nuance. Alexander has an unfair advantage here though as Chris uses spasms as well as part of his stage vocabulary (albeit a small part rather than the whole enchilada as here).
This thrashing and screaming goes on for at least a quarter of an hour.
Somehow it turns into a love-in with dancers merging together and blending with other groups. At first it seems heterosexual but over time same sex couples and mixed threesomes appear. The dancers keep their clothes on but otherwise with the passionate breathing and screams you are witness to a full on orgy. Somehow it is unclear if this is meant to be sensual or off-putting.
When it quiets down the stage goes dark and you think the purgatory is over. Not at all.
The lights slowly come back up and the dancers begin to assault the audience verbally.
contact audience © Alec Kinnear
"Do you know what standing by means while the government kills your fellow man?"
"What about La Hacienda?"
"It is time for a revolution."
"Stop the injustice. Just wake up and stop it."
The dancers come right up to the first row and look in the eyes and shout in the face of the audience. Most of them believe in their revolutionary text and pronounce it with fervour. Quite effective.
They then move up the staircases of Halle G shouting at audience members higher up.
Sho Ikushima © Alec Kinnear
I thought they were all going to leave the theater as in Delgado or The Love Piece, leaving the audience alone to muse on what we just saw. It would have been quite effective.
But no, they made it back down to the stage.
Fairly robust applause when the lights went up, but the audience is mainly fellow dancers and friends - hardly impartial.
One could argue that Transformer is a workshop and not a performance to be critiqued. On the other hand, Eszter Salamon and Christine de Smedt made a conscious decision to present on mainstage and not in a laboratory session.
My neighbour Keith Hennesy complains about these white European kids appropriating the text from the Civil Rights movement (The Last Poets). This critique doesn't seem particularly relevant to me. The issue is with revolution and injustice, not with colour and civil rights. Colour is a very narrow view of injustice which has become as much as an economic issue as one of race.
I could live without the half hour of painful buildup as the young dancers build their nerve up to explode on stage and then do their love-in.
But the peak moments did have a genuine character, enough to make one reflect on what humanity means and the differences between man and beast. Apparently not a lot. A fair enough conclusion. Beasts do less damage to the earth as we do.
I do have issues with the technology used. Apparently the wire into the left ear is actually an earphone attached to an iPod shuffle. Each dancer has a soundtrack with both noises and instructions on it, to guide him or her through the performance. For me, giving them a constant hidden soundtrack to perform to is the equivalent of cheating on exams. Almost all of the sound the audience gets is from the dancers.
The dancers should have learned how to generate these noises unselfconsciously without doping themselves with dialogue in their ears. If the dancers need a conductor or fluffer, that should be provided from the first row.
However, Christine de Smedt says the title Transformers is about transforming those sounds and those instructions from the iPod shuffle into performance. Okay, but this is not really preparing the students for the true internal work on themselves. As a prep exercise okay, but I'm not convinced.
Technology should be used to enhance, not as a crutch. I'd like to ask the participants about how they feel. If any of them read this, feel free to leave a comment about the experience of performing to recorded instructions and audio.
© Alec Kinnear
It should be noted there is scant little dancing in Transformers, but given the sparsity of dancing in the entire ImPulsTanz festival, there appears to be scant need for contemporary dancer performers to be able to dance. If all pro dance workshops go in this direction, we are bringing up a generation of dancer cripples who will be able to do little else than howl and writhe.
Despite that caveat, Transformers is far from the dullest show among this year's mainstage performances. There is movement, there is emotion, there is excitement, there is a point.
Performers:
Sandro Amaral, Tim Darbyshire, Kathryn Enright, Elisabete Finger, Alexander Gottfarb, Arianne Hoffmann, Tahni Holt, Sho Ikushima, Lenio Kaklea, Benjamin Kamino, Igor Koruga, Karen Lambaek, Enora Riviere, Bert Roman, Salka Rosengren, Liz Santoro
August 5th, 2009 §
Of all the pieces I've seen at ImPulsTanz this year, Last Touch First is much the most careful art design work.
Last Touch First © Robert Benschop
The stage opens on the interior of an imaginary eighteenth century manor house, where three pairs are standing. There are window frames and doors to give a sense of place. The whole group are standing on a a great canvas sheet.
The light is sculpted and three dimensional. There is a slight sepia tone, like in the best preserved photos of the period.
Last Touch First mirror scene © Robert Benschop
The music is an atmospheric ting-ting-ting on a piano (Dirk Haubrich). Recorded as far as I could see and hear, rather than live, but still unnerving and compelling.
The trick of Last Touch First is the motion. The motion is unbelievably slow. The cast are all dancing but in stopped time.
The working group was formed on the ruins of Nederlands III, the company of retired stars who can still dance. Apparently it was just not possible to get enough funding to keep Nederlands III running. Jiri Kylian is still disappointed about it, as he was personally very closely associated with the founding.
When you see Last Touch First, you can understand why.
Nederlands III was the very best of Kylian's artists, nurtured over the course of decades into artistic forces. Each of them is able to command a stage alone, there are no beginners or mediocrities. All the dancers are charsimatic and spellbinding performers.
It is hard to believe that such a successful company would be scattered to the winds of time, a horrid reminder of the ageism of dance.
Rather than do what Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker did this year with the restaging of Rosas dans Rosas, and have older dancers do a show written for younger dancers, Kylian uses the special skillset of these dancers to have them control motion.
This is a much better approach to take to working with older dancers: give them work in which they can outperform younger dancers rather than moves which highlight their weaknesses in strength and speed and snap.
I'm still wondering what it all means. But the beauty and strangeness of Last Touch First remains after the noise of the rest of the festival all dies down.
Kylian & Schumacher choreography
© Robert Benschop
The underlying theme appears to be that bourgeois appearances are just that appearances. Under the finery and the well-set tables, each couple is world of primal violence and fractured intimacy. Pretty close to the truth. A mature truth - this is not Romeo and Juliet. But then most of life isn't either.
Revenge is best tasted cold. After the closing of NDT III, Last Touch First was crowned dance production of the year in 2007 in Holland.
Dancers:
Kristen Cere, Pedro Goucha, Cora Bos Kroese, David Cecil Krugel, Ester Karin Natzijl, Michael Scott Schumacher
August 1st, 2009 §
George Blaschke gets off to a running start with Rachmaninoff music and a tall thin dancer in a grey prison suit climbing the walls and sprawling on the floor. Really compelling movement.
Petr Ochvat © Georg Blaschke
The idiom is a bit dated and Chaplinesque but strangely compelling. Alas after about ten minutes it's over and two other gentlemen walk out from the back of Kasino. Everything is very cordial, they nod and greet the dancer and then sit down.
We watch the dancer rehearse some more and then a home movie is shown of the three men on stage in a rehearsal studio. The two gentlemen sitting turn out to be a choreographer and a dancer. The sixty year old choreographer Harmen Tromp learned this material directly from the original dancer/choreographer Andrei Jerschik (Linz 1902-1997). And he taught it to the forty year old teacher George Blaschke. Who is now passing it on to the young Czech dancer Petr Ochvat.
Jetzt bist du dran © Georg Blaschke
George Blaschke is a piece about passing material on from one generation to another. Perhaps the passing of choreography should be an impenetrable mystery to audiences. To me it's just a given. That's what happens.
In this context, the pickings here are slim.
Ten minutes of compelling dance and ten minutes of dull rehearsal and ten minutes of rather mediocre film.
On the plus side, I would like to see the dancer perform again. I would like to see more of the choreography again.
I'm not sure about the advisability of taking 12 euros from people for what is a non-show and a rather bare bones demo. Apparently I was in the minority and most of the people attending were actually on a whole evening ticket which included Maguy Marin and so you got a lot of minimalism for your 25 or 30 euros.
July 31st, 2009 §
Rosas danst Rosas is a historical work, the second mainstage full length work by then young choreographer Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker in 1982. One of the performances which moved me the most in my life is Rosas's A Love Supreme so I was eager to see Rosas danst Rosas in its entirety live.
Rosas danst Rosas has been filmed at least twice, once in something like the original version, more recently with the current cast. Rosas danst Rosas is something special, the seminal work on which a great dance company was built.
Normally every generation of Rosas dancer must learn Rosas danst Rosas and so the piece remains perenially young, each Rosas dancer taking her place as the latest incarnation of de Keersmaeker and her predecessors.
Rosas Danst Rosas
© HermanSorgeloos
This year, Anna Teresa did something completely different. She rejoined the production herself and recruited some of her top teachers, dancers from the past, all born about 1970. Her motivation for doing the piece this way is not quite clear.
Is her quest to try to break down preconceptions about the older body and aging? Is she seeking to reveal the difference of time? Is she seeking to immortalize herself before she leaves this earth?
This wouldn't be the first time a great dancer had such an idea: the very great Russian dancer Maja Plissetskaya had a 70th birthday gala where she danced much of her repetoire from her prime.
Indeed, our generation (I'm about the same generation as the second generation Rosas dancers) is very interested immortality or at least in remaining forever young. The eponymous New Romantic tune of the 80's foreshadowed our ongoing efforts to stay vigorous and attractive our entire adult lives.
So how do De Keersmaeker and her dancers succeed in their dance with time?
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Cynthia Loemij & Sarah Ludi & Samantha Van Wissen
© HermanSorgeloos
Rosas danst Rosas begins with industrial sounds and floor work. Eventually the dancers rise from the floor to reveal themselves in grey shirts and leggings, surprisingly contemporary - almost like Japanese school girl uniforms. Dark hair, long legs, slender waists, intelligent expressions: sophisticated European beauty incarnate and quintessential Rosas women. Anna Teresa De Keermaeker herself is very much in this mold. I sometimes wonder if her predelection for this type is narcississtic or just a matter of tast.
The opening section is all about breath. It's sound, it's feel. One didn't notice anything different about these dancers in the dusky light until the first hard falls, which the cast bravely took on at a speed to make the floor crack. All of the dancers showed extraordinary sensitivity to the floor and to weight. There was a great deal of finesse to all of their movement.
In the second movement, the choreographic language becomes more explicit, more about the dancer and less about atmosphere. The movement is predicated on the state of mind of a young woman from the age of 22 to 30. Each dancer revels in the physical magnetism of a woman of that age. During those years of her life, a beautiful woman may struggle with her emotional life but masters her exterior world and basks in her own perfect physical presence.
Alas sometime in the early thirties, this symphony of fertility and time comes to an end and either a woman tends towards too thin or too thick. Her curves become either lines or bulges and her face begins to crease. She wears confidence like a mask rather than as part of her own skin.
That young arrogance and naive joy in her own beauty is so much a part of the movement here that for the most part it seemed very strange on these dancers, all around forty. At one point each dancer touches her chest, her breast repeatedly. In Cynthia Loemij's movement you could see the inherent self-confident sensuality of the gesture. But in the architect of the movement, De Keersmaeker there was a tangible disinclination to touch her own breast, almost a sort of dislike of her body. Certainly devoid of any sensuality, at best perfunctory.
The dryness of performance almost feels like a betrayal of the original material, which is a celebration of life and sensuality.
Later on the dancers take turns to show the audience first one bare shoulder and then the other. Samantha van Wissen and Cynthia Loemij both invest themselves seriously in the seductive gesture. Again De Keersmaker is reluctant, perfunctory. As she knows the content of the choreography better than anyone else, I am surprised she wanted to appear in it on stage if she did not want to respect its spirit and fulfill its intention.
As the dancers whirled and flirted, one felt in some way like one was watching ghosts of Christmas past twirling on stage.
Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker & Cynthia & Sarah & Samantha
© HermanSorgeloos
Of all the dancers, only Cynthia Loemij still danced like a Rosas dancer, swift of foot, supremely feminine, assured without arrogance. As Rosas dancers are wont, by the end of the show she had soaked with sweat her long hair, which whipped wet through the air across her shoulders. Her mouth bloomed red with exertion and her eyes flew wild from the passionate movement.
Loemij's energy, intensity and natural Rosas sensuality only made it more clear how strange it is to resurrect this work on an older cast.
Rosas danst Rosas speeds up enormously towards the final climax. At the end, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker just couldn't keep up. The steps created by her 27 years ago overwhelmed her and she fell first a half step and then sometimes a full step behind.
All three of the ex-Rosas dancers enjoyed themselves. De Keersmaeker seemed more than a little dissatisfied at the end. Was she cross over missed steps or with her choreography?
De Keersmaeker should neither be surprised nor cross with herself...we all lose steps. Being fit is not enough. I think nothing of cycling the hundred kilometers from here to St Polten along the Danube. But in dance, I've lost a step now. There is nothing I can do, that faster half step is gone. This is the deal with mortality - and there is no other deal on offer.
Strangely as the architect of so much sensual feminine beauty and so much emotion in movement, Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker is severe and often dry in public and even to some extent in life. I don't quite understand her compulsion to perform her own works herself now.
A years ago in Desh, De Keermaeker and Marion Ballester were able to offer something different from the usual. Desh was an original work, built on their dancing in the here and now. What the reprise of older pieces with herself in the lead means, I am not certain.
The technology and availability of recording images has improved a lot since 1982, along with interest in the Rosas company and their financial support. Perhaps De Keersmaeker is seeking to leave permanent documentation, to fix a record of her own performance as well: images which will live on after she is gone when perhaps even the Rosas company will be dance history and not contemporary.
In artistic terms, I would find these recreations of older works more interesting if De Keersmaeker would rewrite the emotions on the dancers in the here and now: dance for forty year olds rather than twenty-five year olds. That transcription would be far more interesting than this imitation of what was then.
As a reflection on time and mortality, this restaging of Rosas danst Rosas provokes enough to leave no regrets. But that perhaps one has not used one's short time on this earth as well as Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker, whether she dances on or not.
July 26th, 2009 §
A new piece from Ultima Vez is always a big event in the dance world since Wim Vandekeybus first set the European dance world on its head with Les porteuse de mauvaise nouvelles and his physical theatre in 1989.
The last few years have been a bit strange, with a reprise of Les porteuse de mauvaise nouvelles in 2005 and the creation of a greatest hits piece Spiegel 2007. On the film side, Vandekeybus did find time for more original work in the full length piece Blush in 2005 (partially based on the stagework of 2003).
At the root of Vandekeybus's creative process has been a group of longtime dancers making up Ultima Vez, fellow travellers with Vandekeybus himself. The original Ultima Vez lived together, slept together, created together with Vandekeybus as a kind of Faustian overlord, an object of love and hate, respect and loathing. One could feel the intense group dynamics on the stage. You can see these deep relationships work themselves out in both Vandekeybus's films Blush and In Spite of Wishing and Wanting.
Nieuwzwart - The New Black is a bit of a double entendre. The group of dancers for Nieuwzwart are all new. No one remains from the original Ultima Vez (as late as Les porteuse de mauvaises nouvelles there were some original cast members in the shows). After an intense audition period, Vandekeybus gathered a new group of seven dancers and set to work for four months.
The work is based on a poem by Peter Verhelst about his experience at the end of the world along in Alaska. The poem is an existential lament about the sky and solitude and travel. Kylie Walters alternates from reading, chanting, singing and reciting the sombre lyric. Often she appears as a an early 90's David Bowie in white shirt and short blonde hair and mature elegance.
On stage we begin with what looks like huge piles of leaves rustling on stage. Out of nowhere we hear a huge sonic explosion. A few figures appear on stage in blue uniforms with flashlights. They search the stage and find naked creatures under the leaves. They stand over them and shine lights in their eyes, force them to move about the stage. For all the world, the uniforms, the flashlights, the naked victims, reminded me of nothing more than the awful photos out of the Abu Graib prison a couple of years ago.
naked creatures under the leaves
© Pieter JanDePue
Eventually this prologue comes to an end and some real dancing begins. For some reason, the dancers dance away from the stage and we see their faces very little. There is some solid solo work in here from the long limbed Tanja Marin Fridjosdottir and the astonishingly acrobatic Olivier Mathieu. A little bit later an unknown dancer hits the center of the stage wrapped in the golden heat blankets of the beginning, raging about the stage in a sort of blind frenzy. This golden apparition looked like one of the dragons from a Chinese New Year and seemed desperately out of place from the naked bodies of the prologue and the pure dancing in between.
wrapped in the golden heat blankets
© Pieter JanDePue
Eventually we return to high speed Ultima Vez dancing. Vandekeybus has a penchant for hard bodied men with long curly hair and beautiful women breaking their bodies at high speed. Ultima Vez 2009 is no exception. Ultima Vez is famous for their casualty lists, with more dancers knocked out of commission on a per capita basis than any other company before or since. And one sees why. Over the head foot flips at speed, high speed body slams, running spins from the opposite direction.
Tanja Marin Fridjosdottir & Olivier Mathieu
© Pieter JanDePue
It's all very spectacular, but we've seen it before. And one seeks a higher sense to the madnessm an artistic motivation to all the music and movement.
I had trouble finding it.
The music varies between Jim Morrison's American Prayer, David Bowie, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus. The music was originally created by Maruo Pawlowski for Nieuwzwart and performed by him and the Belgian rock ban dEUS. Often in spite of chameleon-like changes, the music was very good. With her Australian/British accent and Bowie look and the dark atmosphere and naked bodies, one feels that one is in an extended outtake of Tony Scott's The Hunger's nightclub scene.
I don't mind as The Hunger is one of my favorite not serious films: The Hunger is more an exercise in style than a serious treatment of immortality.
And so is Nieuwzwartz an exercise in style.
At the end of the piece, more sonic booms and the dancer reappear naked and scuttle across the ground like crabs into the darkness as Kylie Waters wanders among them with a flashlight.
The whole theme appears to be you are born naked, you struggle a great deal and then you return naked to this earth. A timeless and honorable enough theme - but still something is missing here.
Perhaps Nieuwzwartz would work better with just two or three more outstanding choreograpic moments and a few less stage tricks. The golden heat blankets just don't make any sense in apposition to the wilderness theme - they look more like something out of a space story. Five huge panels for generating thunder sounds on the left hand of the stage go underused. Either they should be integrated into the story or removed. One often feels music or sound is used for effect and not purpose.
For me the biggest issue with Nieuwzwartz is the dancers. They are just not at the level of past Ultima Vez groups yet. They seem a junior company just getting into the flow of it. With few senior hands around to help them develop their numbers and no past historic relationships to develop further through their stage partnerships, they only seem to touch the surface of what they are doing.
The oustanding flips and high speed enthusiasm of Benedicte Mottart left an impression, particularly in her short duets with Olivier Mathieu, as did Tanja Marin Fridjosdottir in her frenetic solos. For some reason in her duets (most often with her fellow red clothed partner Mate Meszaros), Fridjosdottir did fine but not on the same level as her early solos.
Otherwise, the dancers disappeared into a kind of anonymous obscurity. In earlier, Ultima Vez shows one could remember each of the dancers for days afterwards, their individuality seared onto one's visual memory.
Vandekeybus appears to be at a creative crossroads, not having found the new nor having abandoned the old. His recent film work has been more spectacular and original than his stagework and he is still in development of a full length feature script with Verhelst.
Nieuwzwartz is a well-made show and not one to regret seeing. For the moment, it is not at the hauteur of Vandkeybus's previous works. The greatest rival of the master is often not other artists but his or her earlier self. And so it is here with Vandekeybus.
Performers:
Tanja Martin Fridjosdottir, Dawid Lorenc, Olivier Mathieu, Mate Meszaros, Benedicte Mottart, Ulrike Reinbott, Imre Vass, Gavin Webber, Kylie Walters
