August 16th, 2009 §
On a balmy August Saturday night I was making my way home when I found two groups of people dining in the street. One group had a table under Karlskirche on Karlsplatz. The other were taking bowls of soup from the back of a van by the Vienna Technical University.
These two locations are just a few hundred meters apart.
Cities and differences.
Dinner in Vienna Soup Kitchen Technical University
Dinner in Vienna Karlsplatz Church
This was supposed to be a post not associated with ImPulstTanz. Ironically, the group dining under Karlskirche turned out to be associated with ImPulsTanz. It's the theatre usher team. I only realised when preparing the photo for publication at 100% magnification. Great idea to take a table out and eat on Karlsplatz.
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 27th, 2009 §
July 27th, 2009 §
The Bagwell in me begins with a man in drag in a bathtub with his/her feet up.
performance begins - man in a bathtub
"Hi my name is Sherry, feel free to stop the show and ask us any questions as we go."
The audience for the most part is quiet throughout the evening despite Young's attempt to knock us out of our stupour.
Ann Liv Young is hiding behind a white plastic bead curtain at a table with a Macbook Pro on it.
Her opening question kicks us all in the crotch, men and women. "Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who can't get it up?" The voice is steely and male coming through a distortion filter like the one they use in horror films.
Ann Liv Young
"Have you ever lived with someone you can't fuck?"
A girl titters. She seems like a plant but promises she isn't after the show. Young comes after her: "Why are you laughing? What is so funny? There is nothing funny about being horny and not being able to fuck. It's very frustrating."
This was just the prologue.
Ann Liv Young is a phenomenon unto herself. The Bagwell in Me is the third production I have seen and reviewed. Each year Young takes her on stage shock therapy further. The first year, for Melissa is a bitch it was just fat girls naked dancing to pop songs and a lot of dirty talk. For her last visit two years ago with Snow White it was penetration while Young was seven months and very visibly pregnant.
Ann Liv Young & Michael & Jaguar
In The Bagwell in Me, Young manages to take matters even further. To get our attention and to play out her own peculiar fantasies, this year Young brings a pen camera on stage which is hooked up to a video monitor. That way there can be no mistake about the open legged masturbation, cuninlingus, fellatio, golden showers and full on penetration which takes place on stage. They are not simulating, this is live sex.
Beyond her joy in shocking and disturbing people, what seems to concern Young is hypocrisy and injustice. At a deep level, Young feels life is unfair and she and her friends are getting the short end of the stick. And she will make society pay for her suffering. Here Young is attacking blind American patriotism and its foolish jingoist ideas. George Washington is known as the greatest American president and a freer of slaves. But as Young points out, Washington's slaves were freed upon his death when he no longer needed them. Which makes Washington first and foremost a slave owner. Young asserts that Washington was the father of one of his slave maids children. Naturally his wife Martha objects. Young's vision is very dark indeed: the story ends with the maid in prison and George Washington sexually mutilated.
Michael with towel over his head & Ms Young as Martha
The two strongest moments in "The Bagwell in me" are the dialogue between Washington and his wife Martha and the dialogue between Martha and Oney Washington's slave mistress. Young plays both parts most of the time, switching frenetically between voices. Apparently there is a version of The Bagwell in me with another female performer, who perhaps handles the second role sometimes.
To manage all these impersonations Young has rubber masks, white wigs, black wigs, blackface, frocks and little black baby dolls.
On Sunday night a videographer Jaguar in a zipped up purple jumpsuit filmed the entire performance. Her prim suit and hairdo was a striking contrast to Young's open legs and wild flying hair. Young told us that Jaguar was only there that night - but an integral part of the performance. Young's work seems to follow a rough scenario but with episodes which can change as it strikes Young's fancy. She plays off her own mood and that of the audience.
Ann Liv The Bagwell in me
The contrast between her controlled reasonableness when she comes out of character and her frenzy in character is exceptionally Brechtian. Young lets us lose ourselves in her experiential world and then knocks us out of it and asks us to consider seriously her ideas on subjugation of races and women.
Someone at the end of the show asked why so much sex?
The show is about an illegitimate child, Young explained. Contempt and quiet rage slips into her voice as she explains the obvious. "How do you get a child? Only by fucking, so if that's what my show is about, why should I hide the fucking? Of course there is sex. You would have to be really stupid or really naive to make a show about an affair and hide the sex."
When I asked her why she wanted to treat this particular theme, Young went into the ramble you can read in the program about her forefathers being slave owners and visiting distant aunts living in southern estates in Virginia with what are now called black maids instead of slaves. Hogwash, I say. There are deeper reasons Young is obsessed with sexual hierarchy and legitimacy. I'd like to know what they are. Young also seems obsessed with infidelity and the pain of women reluctantly sharing a man both want.
While to retell it all of this sounds merely sordid, Ann Liv Young is a consummate showman now and the show rarely flags. She skips from one hysteria and pop song to another bringing out the voyeur in all of us. You don't want to watch but you must as she commits one effrontery after another and orders Michael her common-law husband and father of her child around with despotic nonchalance.
The show alters between explication and explicit sex to karaoke numbers as varied as "Billie Jean" to "Slip Sliding Away" to disco to strange cute pop songs from the 1920's. Young doesn't sing too badly considering the limited attention she pays to her singing.
But after The Bagwell in me what is there left for Ann Liv Young to do on stage? This time we had bondage, urination, fellation, cuninlingus, full penetration with a dildo, genital organ mutilation. All that remains are anal sex, rape, eating of feces.
While The Bagwell in me didn't perturb me much, I'm not sure I will be able to handle Young's next show.
At the end, Ann Liv Young seemed very concerned that we felt we got our money's worth. Her question set me thinking on what terms? I once heard live sex acts in the New York area run about a $100/head admission so at 25 euros perhaps The Bagwell in me is excellent value. On the other hand, there was scant little dance or much uplifting. Ann Liv Young is a sexual enigma wrapped in scatological mystery. Be glad that she is selling visitors passes to her world and not one way tickets.
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
