Saburo Teshigawara + Rihoko Sato in The Idiot at Print Room at The Coronet

Saburo Teshigawara + Rihoko Sato, The Idiot, Print Room at the Coronet, March 27, 2019

The filigree hands, the clarity of imagery, and the silence of the movement; the light flickering like an old film, the layers of Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Chopin and Schubert, the delirious dance and gesture: all these impressions remain vivid after seeing Saburo Teshigawara and Rihoko Sato in their adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. In many ways it is a perfect match for the intimate auditorium of Print Room at the Coronet, an eerie evocation of the past carefully reconstructed, superimposed and reduced to its essentials. 

In distilling Dostoevsky’s complex novel to its emotional essence, Teshigawara has articulated the elements of his choreography — the body, the lighting, the musical collage and the costumes — as a poet articulates language or a painter colour to form a complex unity of expression. In using his body Teshigawara seems to bypass it, concentrating on the breath inside him and the air around him to sculpt his images. His body seems to perform with its own gravitational field suspended slightly above the dark floor which is what creates the impression of silence while the thrust of his gestures — or their retraction — creates the sound. Sato is deeply attached to the earth — the waltz is her domain — creating a contrasting dynamic in the performance that is elusive and yet sharply focused. Perhaps this is what Teshigawara meant when he said, ‘I knew it would be impossible to create a choreography taken from such a novel, but this impossibility has been key to our approach in creating something completely new.’

The central character in the novel, Prince Myshkin, is, according to Dostoevsky’s biographer Avrahm Yarmolinsky, ‘a man caught in a tangle of mad passions, yet preserving a childlike purity and sweetness…’ and as the novelist himself wrote, his aim was to ‘to depict a completely beautiful human being’. It is evident when we see him that Teshigawara has taken on the humble radiance of the prince’s qualities as well as the darkness of his epilepsy and has made them manifest without the literary preoccupation with plot; they have become a dance. We see him at first alone, fashionably dressed, making polite introductions to a room full of people we cannot see; we know they are all there but Teshigawara’s focus is solely on the meekness and innocent purity of Myshkin’s gestures. When he comes into contact with the dark, willful passion of Sato’s Natasya Filippovna — a woman who has known degradation and carries those wounds within her — we see a flickering narrative in which it is clear he falls in love with her but the meeting sets off an emotional maelstrom within them both that becomes the choreographic material for its tragic resolution. 

Teshigawara’s choreography embraces Dostoevsky’s dilemma of placing a hero who is saintly to the point of being simple within a society that is awash in the corruption of values. Yarmolinsky suggests the novel is autobiographical, that the image of Myshkin is ‘a light in the darkness to Dostoevsky, a shield against the powers of evil in his own soul’. In Teshigawara’s hands, light and darkness become a powerful theatrical metaphor that unite the lighting, the musical score and the costumes — Sato is in a long black period dress while Teshigawara wears a dapper white summer outfit — to portray Dostoevsky’s existential struggle with Imperial Russian society. At the beginning we hear a tremulous violin concerto over a murky stage where shadows scurry ominously like rats until the darkness suddenly recedes to reveal the childlike figure of Myshkin in a bright downlight bowing gracefully and offering greetings to the invisible guests; the entire background of the novel has been painted in these two brief but consummately crafted scenes. The subsequent tale of compulsive infatuation pits Myshkin’s serenity against Filippovna’s stubborn inability to accept it and ends with Myshkin sitting on the floor, as in the novel, with the body of Filippovna in an adjoining room. The performances of Teshigawara and Sato are, like everything else in this production, meticulously conceived and delivered with a passion that hides their construction under a rich, seamless canvas of emotions. 

While scholars may disagree on the literary value of Dostoevsky’s novel, Teshigawara’s choreographic rendering is an utterly compelling poetic vision that is nothing short of a masterpiece in its own right. 

Mark Morris Dance Group in Pepperland

Mark Morris  Dance Group, Pepperland at Sadler’s Wells, March 21

In May 1967 The Beatles created a ground-breaking album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, produced by George Martin and engineered by Geoff Emerick. In his book White Heat, Dominic Sandbrook described it as a ‘continuous stream of sound, its studio banter, steam organs, sitars and even farmyard barking, and its combination of cartoonish psychedelia, circus vaudeville, driving rock music and gentle ballads’ that was immediately hailed as an ‘imperishable popular art of its time’. Fifty-two years later it is difficult to hear its freshness in the context of its first outing, and yet it clearly forms an integral whole — one of the first concept albums — introducing the alter-ego Edwardian brass band with wit, colour and a musical daring saturated in the contemporary zeitgeist. In 2003 the magazine Rolling Stone placed it at the top of its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

On the occasion of the album’s 50th anniversary, choreographer Mark Morris chose to celebrate it with his production of Pepperland that recently landed on the Sadler’s Wells stage as part of a Dance Consortium tour. Morris may well have felt that his own quintessentially post modern eclectic approach to dance — mixing pop cultural references with highbrow culture and merging genres, styles and dance vocabularies from classical ballet to contemporary dance, folk and music-hall — would prove a suitable match for the album’s own mix of genres; his past works like L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, All Fours and Crosswalk have an exhilarating, colourful dynamic and an intellectual vibrancy that has become his trademark.  

Pepperland opens on a spare stage marked by an electric blue backdrop that changes to lurid green, orange and pink for subsequent numbers. Designed by Johan Henckens and lit by Nick Kolin, the set also includes a low, static line of crushed silver foil mountains across the back of the stage that flicker in the changing light. The bright colours match and contrast with the stylishly sixties costumes (replete with sunglasses) by Elizabeth Kutzman. The dancers are initially introduced by taped announcement as some of the celebrities and historical figures like Shirley Temple, Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, and Floyd Patterson in Peter Blake’s Sgt. Pepper’s album cover collage. Morris’s approach to gender is fluid and his grasp of mimicry exquisitely camp as the dancers parade in the dazzling light of a Hollywood set before joining hands in a Morris folk circle that coils on itself and then unfurls. It is already clear that the Beatles have taken a back seat to Morris, just as Ethan Iverson’s arrangements of the music for a jazz septet have little in common with the original album apart from the tunes; he includes some but not all the tracks and intersperses them with his own compositions. 

Morris’s movement and imagery flow effortlessly from 1960s dance floor steps to classical ballet, from Hollywood films to Broadway musicals, but his propensity for quotation has a sense of déjàvu; the references do not come from the diverse canvas of allusions that made the Sgt. Pepper album so conspicuously original but from Morris’s own works. Pepperland barely extends beyond the self-referential — and perhaps even the self-reverential — dulling the pace and invention of the work to a curiously one-dimensional continuum in which the punch and pun, the brashness and edginess of his earlier works are gone.

Morris is lauded as a musical choreographer but his translation of the textual imagination of a song like A Day in the Life borders on a game of charades on a summer’s day and renders not only the imagery of Pepperland but its musicality literal to the point of banality. Like the reprisal of the opening theme of Sgt. Pepper at the end, Morris finishes as he begins with a folk circle but unfortunately we haven’t traveled very far in between. 

Paul McCartney had suggested the idea of an alter-ego band for the new album to allow the Beatles to detach their celebrity from the creative process and reduce the risk of imitation. Morris, it seems, has no such inclination; he invokes his own renown so freely in Pepperland that his creativity becomes a parody of itself. 

Ian Abbott at Bristol International Digital Arts Festival

Bristol International Digital Arts Festival, Bristol, March 9

Submerge, the producers of Bristol International Digital Arts Festival, have curated a timely programme that ‘questions what it means to belong, what happens when objects, people and communities fracture; and how you bring them back together.’ Taking place in multiple spaces around Bristol for the first ten days of March, I sample works from Duncan Speakman, Ultimate Dancer + Robbie Thomson and Guillaume Marmin with a commonality of how the body is centred when surrounded by digital anchors.

Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then is one of the early works framed under the Ambient Literature banner, a two-year, AHRC-funded collaboration between UWE Bristol, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham that was established to investigate the locational and technological future of the book. Speakman’s work self-describes as ‘a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara.’ 

Moving my body through the city of Bristol, I encounter cartography as choreography bringing fresh perspectives and alternative awareness to architecture, obstacles and people as I navigate in and around them. All the constituent parts of dance are present; there is music, there is a body (or bodies), there are movement instructions and there is (lots of) space. By any other means this is a dance work. As I listen to the audio histories and read the accompanying book I am making decisions about where to go, what to see and placing my own markers across the city; it’s an embodied experience, it hangs around, it leaves its trace in and on you.

Following the three stories of the three maps in three parts of the world, I encounter physical boundaries, global narratives of change and porous edges. Where do we go? Why do we go? Ambient Literature could be a description of a type of score; it’s non-invasive, like an anti-sat nav. Rather than prescribing your route, it rewards you irrespective of your coordinates or navigational hunger. The idea of split attention is in play as you have an aural narrative consistently feeding your ears and a visual safety narrative that makes sure you do not to die by vehicle as you choreograph your way through the city. Although your body is engaging in an outward journey it also attempts to play an internal, introspective channel. It gives you 70 minutes to wander physically and intellectually in a terrain that might be familiar or unfamiliar. 

It Must Have Been Dark by Then could be the digital offspring of Wrights & Sites’ A Mis-Guide To Anywhere from 2006 and Rider Spoke by Blast Theory from 2007. You set beacons across the city (to which you will return afterwards), but it is slightly clumsy as you have a GPS device in one hand and an A5 book in the other to read chapter by chapter while you’re given instructions. You are never left alone quite long enough to get lost in another world; there’s a gentle interruption every three or four minutes and I’m left wondering what would happen if you were to take it and stretch it out to 140 minutes instead of 70, let yourself wander and get lost in the city and its narratives. But it’s an enjoyable time in the drizzle of Brizzle and how many dance works actively submerge the body whilst covering a political position and leaving an emotional residue?

Ultimate Dancer + Robbie Thomson’s YAYAYA AYAYAY self-describes as a way to  ‘Challenge your perceptions and immerse yourself in a sensory performance that teases your imagination. YAYAYA AYAYAY is an ultra-terrestrial temporary dance…In 2015, Ultimate Dancer went into a darkness retreat for five days — a purpose-built room isolated from all light and sound. Ceremonial darkness as a shamanic tool is a classical method for accessing vibrant unconscious and super-conscious states.’ 

After we make our glacially slow and fumbling way into the darkened theatre I still manage to scrape my shins even though there are white-gloved ushers to guide us. Not a speck of unnatural light permeates the stage or auditorium but luckily our seats are marked by tiny squares of white tape. Our entrance into the auditorium bleeds into the opening fifteen minutes of audio-only performance; it is a rare position to be left alone with our thoughts among a hundred strangers in the darkness (but aware of other audience members who are having conversations about Yaya Toure and Dining in the Dark). 

YAYAYA AYAYAY is a date with deprivation, an active heightening of senses with the removal of the audience body. It is so well constructed that when hundreds of tiny white stones erupt out of the air and land on the floor, I stare at them…and keep staring at them. They are the only data points for my eyes and they look like they’re moving, an army of micro maggots pulsing to white noise. Where am I? Am I gazing up or down at a constellation of stars from a galaxy? My orientation is skewed.

When we see the body and performative choreography of Ultimate Dancer it feels insignificant in comparison; seeing them twitch, swarm or grind across the floor doesn’t match the power of the previous effects. Other works by Ultimate Dancer (Louise Ahl) — For now we see through a mirror darkly and Holy Smoke — suggest there are few artists able to match her intensity and unswerving drive in the pursuit of such a radical practice. It may not always be enjoyable, likeable or even palatable but there is a rigour and commitment to the shamanic and eerie choreographic practice that marks the Ultimate Dancer as an original choreographic voice in the UK night sky.

Licht, Mehr Licht is an installation by Guillaume Marmin constructed as a dark corridor 4 metres wide by 12 metres long that is empty except for dozens of pin-thin paired lights. They create lines of light at floor, shin, waist, head and overhead levels within a mild haze in which the audience can walk, sit, stand still or wait. Imagine a roofless shipping container with ghostly lines of light flickering and pulsing to a pre-programmed light sequence across a 12-minute score. It’s an insta-friendly spectacle and with a limited capacity there’s a 20-minute queue to get into the gallery. With children dashing about trying to eat light beams this digital playground pulses with sound and reminds me of a glitch-riddled, Blade-Runner-stained version of Waltzing Waters but without the water.

Ultima Vez, Mockumentary of a Contemporary Saviour at Queen Elizabeth Hall

Ultima Vez, Mockumentary of a Contemporary Saviour, Queen Elizabeth Hall, March 1

Since he started his Brussels-based company, Ultima Vez, in 1986 the prolific choreographer, filmmaker and director Wim Vandekeybus has sought innovative approaches to dance and theatre beginning with his first work, What the Body Does Not Remember. One might say that he has established choreography as a form of discourse on a wide variety of subjects that preoccupy him — myth, belief, faith, subconscious desires, dreams, life and death. (In May the Brighton Festival will be presenting his latest work, TrapTown, that questions conflict and freedom). As in modernist architecture’s mantra of ‘form follows function’, each production takes on a form that grows out of the subject but Vandekeybus nonetheless remains true to a physical movement vocabulary that embodies tension and conflict, risk and impulse, intuition and instinct, passion and endurance. In his recent work, Mockumentary of a Contemporary Saviour, presented at Queen Elizabeth Hall, he draws on the different cultural traditions of his seven performers — Anabel Lopez, Maria Kolegova, Jason Quarles, Wouter Bruneel, Yun Liu, Flavio d’Andrea and Saïd Gharbi — to create an ironic, perhaps even caustic documentary of salvation.

In an era of unprecedented migration with its underlying plurality of faiths, Vandekeybus broadens the scope of Mockumentary of a Contemporary Saviour to include any religious remit that promises the kind of salvation where utopia and dystopia are interwoven. The set with its circular centre conceived by Vandekeybus and Meryem Bayram describes a nondescript place reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker in which three men and two women have been saved as the ‘chosen ones’ and as in Stalker, there is no way out. It is into the midst of this circle, dominated by a transparent halo-like ceiling, that Bruneel, a big-bellied, lusty western psychologist in orange safety overalls, suddenly appears: his ‘corpse’ drops through the halo and lands with a thud on the ground. His body is ‘still warm’ and the community, already conversant with the notion of a saviour and convinced he is a sign of divine intervention, revives him. Ironically Bruneel’s unexpected arrival sets off a cacophonous dispute about belief, death and preparations for the next life. Even if the location of the space is indeterminate, we learn from Bruneel that the world as we know it is in a state of disintegration, suggesting this is a purgatorial staging post; hence the importance of signs that might lead to a possible way out.  

The internal conflicts, cultural differences, and encounters between the characters are played out as physical and verbal commotions against a rumbling score by Charo Calvo in which Vandekeybus’s characteristic muscular idiom articulates their grief, desires, hopes and sense of resignation. Although a spoken text devised by Bart Meuleman and Ultima Vez predominates as the main expressive form in Mockumentary of a Contemporary Saviour, it is the heightened physicality of both voice and body that unleashes the full dynamics of the contradictory forces within the community. Lurking close to the surface of the bonds that tie the seven people in their precarious existence is a violence that threatens to destroy them. 

Vandekeybus’ timely reflection on the power of belief is based not so much on the presence but rather the absence of ‘the child’. We learn that Lopez is a mother whose son has died; early in the piece she is addressed as Martha. Gharbi, a blind seer who represents spiritual clarity, suggests she has to let go of her dead child if she wants him to forgive her. The deliberate conflation of her personal salvation with the biblical Martha’s acceptance of Christ’s resurrection is further corroborated when her son, once freed from her motherly love, is lowered down into the space like an effigy and immediately recognized by the community as proof of the saviour’s existence. Armed with this conviction they clamber enthusiastically over the audience to proselytize in their respective languages till they make their exit through the auditorium doors, leaving the blind Gharbi on stage communicating with the sound of his clicking fingers alone. Vandekeybus thus ends his provocative interrogation of faith with Gharbi’s quiet, meditative gesture that in its simplicity elicits a response from the audience without any misplaced belief or truth assigned to it.  

Mockumentary of A Contemporary Saviour is a reminder from continental Europe of the robust role choreography can play in philosophical debate. In this country we are not familiar with it being used in this way and it pushes hard, if uncomfortably, against a prevalence of aesthetic movement that risks limiting the art form’s full development. 

National Dance Company Wales in Awakening at Riverfront Theatre

National Dance Company Wales: Awakening, Riverfront Theatre, Newport, March 1

Opening their Spring 2019 season, Awakening, in Newport, National Dance Company Wales offers ‘three unique dances to amuse and amaze’. With two premières — Fernando Melo’s Afterimage and resident choreographer Caroline Finn’s Revellers’ Mass — alongside Marcos Morau’s Tundra from 2017 we are welcomed with a five-minute pre-show speech by the new artistic director, Fearghus Ó Conchúir, outlining his support for the ‘brilliant performers’ on stage alongside the plurality of what dance can be and the benefits it offers to our communities, stages and studios across Wales.

Tundra is a 30-minute work for eight dancers that ‘tears pages from the Russian history books on folk dance, mass parades and revolution, revitalising old ideas with renewed meaning. It’s as mesmerizingly beautiful as it is robotically precise.’ If you’re going to self-define to these high expectations then you have to have the skill, discipline and technique to execute; unfortunately the NDCWales dancers do not. 

With an air of religious menace in the opening scene we have eight bodies smoothly and footlessly hovering about the stage in competitive Japanese walking patterns, their bell skirts covering their feet as they glide across floor in formations of treacle. This is followed by an attempt at choreographic precision that sits somewhere between a multi-part canon, a pedestrian domino rally and a kaleidoscopic image but executed by more than a quarter of the company surprisingly poorly for a national organisation. If a work demands such a degree of precision and musicality then dancers cannot be one or two beats behind or five degrees out of alignment, especially when Joseff Fletcher’s back-lit lighting exposes and emphasises the exact site of legs, arms and torsos. The discrepancies draw our attention because only five bodies are adhering to the choreographic instruction. Choreographically it is a work full of illusion that succeeds in the front-to-back cluster as we see bodies slowly tipping off balance like pendulums and then reversing back to centre. It’s visually clever and would be more satisfying if it were better rehearsed.

Afterimage by Fernando Melo is a 20-minute work for six dancers that uses the effect of Pepper’s Ghost to make figures appear and disappear in this look at loss, memories and sliding door moments. It describes itself as ‘a journey of fleeting images; of appearance and disappearance. Mirrors are used on stage to form a unique theatrical experience where the past and the present collide with a poetic and creative style of dance.’ Sat at table with two chairs we see encounters between pairs of people who move on and off stage, in and out of light delivering letters from beyond the grave or from another time. Melo’s regular artistic team of Shumpei Nemoto, Yoko Seyama and Peter Lundin make the company look great. It’s a study of simple movement and a bundle of what-ifs that match the stillness, mood and reverence that the work demands. 

However if you’ve seen Melo’s work before, Afterimage is essentially a recycling/stitching together of three of his previous commissions for other companies: If walls could speak, Les Enfants du paradis and Pepper’s Ghost. We have the same table, the same chairs, the same mirror, the same mood. As a choreographer for hire this is not unusual; with any commission what you’re getting is a time-limited licence for an existing product and a name that enhances your own brand and gets you into new touring territories.

Finn’s Revellers’ Mass ‘delves into a world of ritual as an unlikely group gathers for a dinner party, where etiquette is put to the test. Curious choreography and characters are inspired by historical paintings.’ Finn’s première for nine dancers is a presentation of Dionysian revelry. There is excess, but for a 30-minute portrayal of a rousing banquet it is just too clean and dainty; no one is letting go. I lack a belief in what is being presented because the dancers don’t appear to believe in what they’re doing: artifice leaks out their bodies and faces. Revelry has to be embodied, as Gareth Chambers showed in his Excess at Chapter last summer where he explored revelry’s sweaty and transgressive relationship to ecstasy and pleasure. Throwing together movement, a hotchpotch of soundtracks, multiple lighting designs and a water-filled trough on stage smacks of choreographic masking. And we need to talk about the ending which cheapens an already lightweight work.

Do I believe in the dancers? Do I believe in what they’re being asked to do and are they able to deliver it? In Afterimage yes, in Revellers’ Mess and Tundra, no. If the financially safest and largest dance company in Wales is presenting apolitical, light, under-rehearsed entertainment at the opening of their Spring season, what message does that send to the rest of the ecology? NDCWales receives a similar amount of public subsidy and operates at a similar scale to Scottish Dance Theatre but the difference in the quality of dancers and choreographic choices is marked; when you’re in receipt of the highest public subsidy the critical lens should be at its sharpest. This triple bill has been inherited by Ó Conchúir (he came into post late last year) and it will be interesting to see how the company moves forward under his artistic leadership. 

Yukiko Masui and Léa Tirabasso double bill at The Place

Yukiko Masui and Léa Tirabasso double bill at The Place, March 2

In a well-curated double bill of works by two choreographers each creates a context for the other. On the surface and in their treatment of their respective subjects Yukiko Masui’s Falling Family and Léa Tirabasso’s The Ephemeral Life of an Octopus are quite different, but each is based on a personal experience about the nature of life and death. The subsequent self-questioning creates a bridge between the works that allows us to confront mortality in ways that, as Masui writes, are ‘simply not expressible in speech.’ While Masui takes us into her Falling Family with a heightened sensibility that creates feelings of empathy, Tirabasso’s The Ephemeral Life Of An Octopus leads us through the confusion and corrosion of life’s breakdown with a confrontational performance that ends up counter-intuitively expressing an exhilarating sense of joy. 

Falling Family builds on the metaphor of dominoes; different arrangements of coloured tiles are used throughout the work while the four performers — Julie Ann Minaai, Annakanako Mohri, Daniel Phung and Yumino Seki — demonstrate within a loosely defined family structure their support for each other, their interdependence, and their disorientation and vulnerability when one of them is no longer there. As Masui writes, the work ‘taps into the dark, conflicted, emotional space that cracks open when we encounter a loved one’s illness, mental breakdown or even death.’ 

The subtlety of Masui’s conception reflects the passage of time in meticulously constructed moments that suggest rather than define until metaphor and narrative become so intimately entwined that they coalesce. She introduces us to the members of the family one by one in separate sections delineated by Ben Moon’s lighting and Ezra Axelrod’s spliced snippets of Japanese conversation. As the work unfolds, relationships begin to overlap and then build up in a choreographic layering in which the characters move with a resigned sense of self-control that their use of articulate gesture further refines; Mohri’s opening hand gestures of everyday life in Moon’s precise downlight sets the tone for the entire work. Seki’s quiet presence is the one that starts to retreat into itself; Axelrod’s score becomes plangent in its final evocation of drama, leaving Mohri — reflecting perhaps Masui’s own response — challenging fate in a final, uplifting solo of rage against the dying of the light. 

The visual contrast between Fallen Families and Tirabasso’s The Ephemeral Life Of An Octopus is marked. Nicolas Tremblay’s high-voltage lighting keeps the levels high on a white stage littered with black microphone cables while the subtle hues of Giulia Scrimieri’s costumes are replaced by bright splashes of coloured swimwear for the four extrovert performers: Caterina Barbosa in Prussian blue, Alistair Goldsmith in pink, Joachim Maudet in green and Rosie Terry Toogood in bright orange. Stark juxtapositions abound, perhaps none more so than that of the romantic third movement of Brahms’ second piano concerto with the flagrantly staccato, animalistic contortions of the performers (Gabrielle Moleta is listed as Animal Transformation Coach). But given the work is informed by Tirabasso’s own experience with ovarian cancer, such contrasts are not as virulent as might appear; the romantic notion of life that Brahms lays before us has no place in it for the contemplation of disease. 

Tirabasso’s metaphors derive from philosopher Thomas Stern’s essay, The Human and the Octopus, in which he takes his own illness as a starting point for discussing the relationship of mind and body, quoting on the one hand from Proust who sees the mind with which we identify as trapped inside the body of an alien — an octopus — and on the other from JM Coetze for whom the flesh of the body and its susceptibility to pain is an incontrovertible reminder of our humanity. In The Ephemeral Life of an Octopus, Tirabasso uses the dance body as a thick brush with which to paint these conflicting notions. 

Corrosive metaphors of physical breakdown are not unfamiliar in art but there is an undercurrent of wit in Tirabasso’s choreography, in her choice of music (including an original composition by Martin Durov), in the colour and light of the production and in the relentless play of healthy bodies in a compulsive setting of dis-ease that negotiates a path between spirit and flesh, between intellect and play that taken as a whole borders on an unequivocal celebration of life. 

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch in Bon Voyage, Bob… at Sadler’s Wells

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Bon Voyage, Bob…, Sadler’s Wells, February 22

The two full-length works created last year on Pina Bausch’s company by choreographers Dimitris Papaioannou and Alan Lucien Øyen and presented recently at Sadler’s Wells mark a watershed in the company’s post-Bausch existence. Bausch died in June 2009 and while both the current works deal with her death they do so in inverse ways. In Since She Papaioannou creates a memorial to Bausch in which his half of the company (each choreographer has a cast of sixteen dancers) is working with him from the outside looking in. By contrast in Bon Voyage, Bob… Øyen has created a memorial in which his half of the company is still very much on the inside looking out. There is a clear sense that ten years after her sudden disappearance Papaioannou and Øyen have each allowed the company to publicly commemorate Bausch in works she has not authored, but their respective creative approach suggests that closure for the entire company has not yet been realised.

Øyen accepted without hesitation the invitation to choreograph a new piece for the company as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He knew Bausch’s work mostly through videos, and had only seen the company perform seven years after the choreographer’s death but, as Sarah Crompton observes in the program, his creative approach turned out to be close to Bausch’s own method of gathering material from the dancers and slowly weaving their different narratives into a work. Bon Voyage, Bob… is thus uncannily Bauschian in its shape and vocabulary, with her characteristic intersection of theatre and dance — so much so that Øyen’s cast gives the appearance of having choreographed much of the work themselves. Its form resembles a long psychoanalytical session in which the dancers replay the past in the present with an overwhelming sense of resignation; dreams fail to realize because ‘they have already been dreamt’. 

Alex Eales’ set is designed as the backstage area of an unseen work (presumably by Bausch) whose scenes revolve to be used as the backdrop to the company’s own existential drama; it is as if Bon Voyage, Bob… comes together whenever the dancers happen to be off stage. Andrey Berezin is the psychoanalyst in the first scene firing questions at Héléna Pikon sitting across from him at a table recounting the death of her brother. Throughout there is a feeling of guilt, helplessness, and disquiet as memories of dead brothers, dead fathers, and stories of loss become the displaced tropes of Bausch’s own death. Øyen structures the work as a linked ritual of obsequies that allows each of the sixteen dancers to express their feelings in solos of either verbal narrative or movement. It is especially poignant to see the older members of the company speaking Bausch’s gestures naturally through their bodies while the younger dancers who never knew her, such as Çaǧdaş Ermis and Stephanie Troyak, absorb them with stunning eloquence. 

However the ‘work’ of mourning that Bon Voyage, Bob… represents does not seem to have enabled what, in psychoanalytic terms, would be a ‘working through’ the suffering that can lead to new levels of freedom and expression. When Rainer Behr angrily assembles a pile of chairs shouting, ‘This is all our shit!’, the depth of pain ten years after the event is heartbreakingly palpable, but it is also clear how far Øyen has retreated from this deeply personal outpouring. And as if three hours of saying goodbye is not enough to make the point, he allows an empty chair to remain in the spotlight as the curtain falls around which the company reassembles for the bows.

The works of Papaioannou and Øyen leave us inevitably with questions about the current state of the company and how it will proceed. Papaioannou suggests a way forward with the creative adoption of Bausch’s incredible legacy of dancers in alternative forms, while Øyen offers a solution that too easily resembles the former company in a new theatrical image. While it is impossible to know what Bausch would have wanted for her company after her death, it is doubtful she would have wished for it to be trapped in forever looking back; and yet her legacy is so intimately related to her works that finding a way forward without her is still fraught with challenges.

Resolution 2019: works by Lam, Rouzet and Martinez, and Vivas

Resolution 2019: works by Heather Lam, Rouzet and Martinez, and Mara Vivas, February 12

One can almost sense the curatorial hand putting these three works together on an apparent theme of insubstantiality. Hazel Lam ‘aims to highlight the power in gentleness’; Laura Rouzet and Alejandro Martinez set out to explore ‘genderless movement’ and Mara Vivas translates time into space. This is not so much a program of action but one of reflection where dance evolves from the physical to the metaphysical. In reality it is only Vivas who follows through by refusing to compromise.

It’s the set of Heather Lam’s Lighthouse that initiates us to the nature of the evening, a suspended forest of translucent soft pvc tubes arranged like the tentacles of underwater sculptures. Just upstage the seated figure of Lam sways in the tide to the chatter of the arriving audience until the lighting of Bert Van Dijck and Margot Jensens submerges us in this marine environment. Lam indulges in some innocent foreplay discovering the translucent tubes in which — a little disingenuously — she sets up some doubt as to the strength and reliability of the material. Only then does she give it her full weight and confidence as she climbs up, rolls down, and uses its pliability to create aerial shapes that offer a quiet meditation on the ability of the suspended body to express its equilibrium. Max Morris sets his score to the same register, creating with Lam what she sets out to achieve. And yet there is an underlying irony in the work that flaws its conception: Lam’s dependence for her ‘power of gentleness’ on a material that in the form of waste is suffocating our oceans and the balance of its ecosystem; there is a clash of ideas that are too mutually opposed to be overlooked. 

While the premise of Rouzet and Martinez swirls around its title, Ondule, only the opening matches its physicality. The couple is seen in a genderless mass eerily joined at the head in a costumed fringe so the two bodies behave as one. But the desire to extrapolate the idea into separate solos of popping, voguing and dancehall immediately exposes the gender patterns inherent in their respective movement; keeping their heads wrapped in material can’t hide what’s going on below. Rouzet’s costumes, set and projections are elaborate and Martinez is responsible for the lighting: they’re working hard and meticulously but the idea of genderless movement has escaped their scrutiny.  

Mara Vivas’ time/less is a courageous meditation on loss that carves absence out of the stage volume by translating time into space. The opening is sublime, with two women (Lynn Dichon and Tara Silverthorn) in Matthias Strahm’s burnt ochre dresses like classical sculptures in an asymmetrical relationship to one another, unable to move under the weight of grief. Where does movement come from, how does it manifest in the body and why? These are questions the two women seem to ponder for some time in silence; there are no shortcuts and Vivas is not interested in choreographic platitudes. The miracle is that we can’t decode a point of departure any more than we can see a fever passing; there is no intention, only an emotion that uncannily becomes motion. Silverthorn follows an invisible sinuous path in silent steps and as the dance develops the two women invoke each other and perhaps comfort each other in the sharing of the grief that has become the space between them. Silence becomes physical too, and just where we need some air Vivas introduces Filipe Sousa’s soundscape like a breath of light. If there is a weakness in time/less it’s that the solemnity that underpins its formality is sometimes undermined by the process of improvisation that helped create the work. The materials are all there and the landscape is carefully delineated but the fine line between the freedom to act out of inspiration and the constraints of formal expression are demanding — but not implacable — partners.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Since She at Sadler’s Wells

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, Since She, Sadler’s Wells, February 16

Over two weeks Sadler’s Wells is presenting two full-length works that have been created on Pina Bausch’s company by choreographers Dimitris Papaioannou and Alan Lucien Øyen; each of the choreographers has worked with half of the dancers of Tanztheater Wuppertal developing specific responses to their respective commissions. It is a major shift for the company that, since Bausch died in 2009, has been performing her repertoire as a kind of continuous wake around the world. 

Papaioannou, who has been deeply influenced by Bausch’s work since he first saw Café Mueller and Sacre du Printemps over thirty years ago, has essentially marked the end of this period with what appears to be a memorial in which he has superimposed the visual grid and cultural allusions of his own work (and his own creative team) on the heart of Bausch’s company. Tina Tzoka’s stage is dominated by a stack of charcoal grey foam blocks piled at the back of the stage that form interlocking plates not dissimilar to the tectonic configuration in The Great Tamer. Here it gives the set, under the lighting of Fernando Jacon and Stephanos Droussiotis, an archaeological aura as if we are below the rim of the living world, in an excavated underworld teeming with workers in Thanos Papastergiou’s costumes uncovering each other and revisiting the relics from their past. Since She is a dark, intricately layered procession of images that moves in all directions and hinges on precarious balance, cruel wounds and uprooted history bound in a common grief. And yet, despite quotations from Bausch — the chairs from Café Mueller, for example, form here a complicated bridge across the stage and act as a tangible leitmotiv to Papaioannou’s imagination  — the work doesn’t look back with regret or sorrow but marks a solemn occasion where the future might well begin. It is the company that is in the process of being excavated in a post-Bausch world, revealing itself in a new light; the dancers carry Papaioannou’s imagery superbly. 

Ruth Amarante repeatedly mounts to the top of the pile of foam blocks, makes her treacherous way down and disappears into a crack; a naked, swathed Breanna O’Mara slides down slowly head first, limbs interlaced in the unfolding motion of life toward death. To the sound of sawing emerges a head of John the Baptist that Papaioannou’s sleight-of-hand then turns into that of Medusa between the legs of Scott Jennings. Oleg Stepanov is a Hyeronimus Bosch-like figure stumbling across the stage on two poles stuffed through his trousers, Franko Schmidt a cymbal-carrying musical compère, and a chorus of high-heeled feet teasingly dances upstage behind a cardboard dress. Two upturned tables become boats on a sea of cardboard rollers: it’s a calm outing on the river until all the performers crowd onto one of them to evoke the classical crossing of the Styx by the souls of the deceased. Throughout Julie Anne Stanzak in an elegant black/gold evening gown presides goddess-like over the unravelling incidents and tableaux. 

The work ends with Michael Strecker collecting and piling on his back the bridge of chairs one by one until he collapses under their weight, while Amarante delicately surfs on the cardboard rolls under her bare feet, a ghostly figure wafting in the evening light along the seashore. The other dancers gather around her for a group photograph against a golden tombstone; as it gently lowers and the performers disperse into the dark on either side, stars shine through it to Tom Waits’ song Green Grass: ‘Don’t say goodbye to me, describe the sky to me’. Since She is, as Papaioannou admits, a love letter to Bausch that shows not only his debt to her imaginative world but his response to its rich, dark, impenetrable roots.

Resolution 2019: works by Vain, Minogue-Stone and Ben & Fred

Resolution 2019: Works by Vendetta Vain, Elliot Minogue-Stone and Ben & Fred, January 29

This year The Place has partnered with, among others, Jackson’s Lane, to cross-fertilize choreography with circus arts at Resolution. It’s a welcome initiative that hopefully develops the gene pool of both choreographic and circus expression rather than simply expanding the catchment area for Resolution’s artists. 

Vee Smith, who performs under the name of Vendetta Vain, trained at the National Centre for Circus Arts and Butterface is her first circus solo work. She is not the first to perform naked on a trapeze (though perhaps the first to do so at Resolution), but she approaches her performance with as little coyness and pudeur as apology. The title of her work is a derogatory noun for ‘an attractive woman with an undesirable face’, which is clearly understood to mean an attractive female body with an undesirable face. Vain makes this point quite evident by hiding her face, for most of the performance, under a muslin concoction tied loosely at the neck to which she attaches false eyelashes and a rude approximation of lips. But while our focus in Butterface is on the body and what Vain does with it, it is on our minds that Vain has focused her argument; the two don’t always acknowledge each other in the formation of her ‘message’.

There are two sets of projected texts, one that is designed to ease Vain into the performance as she enters behind two large feathers, and the other conveys the sexual animosity and stereotyping of the female circus artist as she performs on the trapeze. Because our eyes are watching her rather than the texts on the back wall, there is an argument that Butterface would benefit from Vain speaking the second set of texts while performing. It would give the taping together of her legs, for example, an edge of satirical wit over the comic absurdity of her actions. Vain’s choice of songs (Flawless, Paper Bag and She) show a natural sense of self-deprecatory humour and her subversive intelligence will not suffer fools. It’s a potent mixture.    

Elliot Minogue-Stone is a graduate of the incommensurable Orley Quick and the Hairy Heroines, inviting us in Sighs, Cries and Lies to ‘delve into platitudes, taboos, tangibility, big questions and odd sensations’ with the same lack of disambiguation he once brought to discussing big dogs and screwdriver heads. He takes an important step from performer to choreographer by creating Sighs, Cries and Lies on Isabella Arboleda Tovar and Pauline Thuriot who translate his sense of the absurd into another key. At first it’s a very low key, as the two bounce on to the stage in red shorts, white tops and trainers, arms enigmatically raised in front of their faces. But as Tovar begins to deck the stage in a wealth of props from a bright red shopping basket, the key begins to modulate. Sighs, Cries and Lies is not a work that can be defined by its external shape but by the paths that run through its apparent chaos, a physical grammar of associations and collisions that offer a fractured landscape of vulnerability. You make of it what you will; its meaning coalesces around a free association of props, popular songs, wit and repartee that Tovar and Thuriot weave into an emotional pattern that ultimately holds them — and us — together. 

Ben & Fred’s The Juggling of Science brings together two jugglers, Frederike Gerstner and Ben Nicholson, in a light-hearted introduction to quantum physics. The recorded voice of Professor Circumference introduces his two understudies with the tone of Listen with Mother but the principles in ‘possibly the most fun science lecture you could hope to see’ are staged rather than heard. Gerstner is a scientist in a white lab coat at her desk waiting for Dr. Dextrose (Nicholson), to arrive. With their wit and an ability to illustrate complex scientific notions like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the construction of an atom, dark matter and neutrinos through juggling, Gerstner and Nicholson have created a gem of crossover stimulation. The problem is that the crossover bypasses almost completely the choreographic nature of Resolution’s program. In his collaborations with Seeta Patel and Alexander Whitley, Sean Gandini has shown how the disciplines of juggling and dance can learn from and stimulate each other, but The Juggling of Science frames itself resolutely and unapologetically within science; it’s not a question of the excellence of the work but of the programming choices of this ‘festival of new choreography’.