Léa Tirabasso, In The Bushes, The Place

Léa Tirabasso, In The Bushes, The Place, March 7, 2025

There’s a curious blurring of perspective in Léa Tirabasso’s latest work, In The Bushes, commissioned by South East Dance and The Place, co-produced by Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg, and presented at The Place for two nights. Whatever is happening in the bushes, we can’t quite see what it is; the frame of reference keeps changing. We know there are six dancers — Catarina Barbosa, Georges Maikel Pires Monteiro, Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Laura Lorenzi, Mayowa Ogunaikke and Stefania Pinato — but from Monteiro’s very first entrance in his remnants of cross-period costume it is clear some transformation has taken place; his outer features are incontrovertibly human, and he is laughing, albeit hysterically, but his gait and gestures seem driven by another state of consciousness. The rest of the cast appears similarly afflicted. Afflicted? Among themselves the performers converse and act with knowing familiarity and, to our evolutionary pudeur, a disarming lack of self-consciousness. When Lorenzi takes off her clothes and wipes herself down before continuing on her trajectory she is seemingly unaware of our gaze. Throughout In The Bushes, Tirabasso plays with our gaze and that of her performers, to sometimes jarring and uncomfortable effect, but there is always a healthy dose of self-deprecatory wit to compensate. 

In the post-show talk Sarah Blanc aptly suggested that In The Bushes is a kind of Masque, not, as originally conceived, a festive courtly entertainment but a festive entertainment nonetheless, with the audience as sovereign. At first I felt as if I was looking through Ben Moon’s crystal clear lighting at an unequivocally chaotic presentation of the six dancers — dressed for the occasion in Jennifer Lopes Santos’s whimsical, colourful costumes — unified in their feral desire to reveal their behavioural eccentricities. Unlike story ballets that require a minimum of explantation, In The Bushes left me reaching in the dark for the program notes or, as on this occasion, waiting for clarification in the post-show talk. 

What we learn is that In The Bushes is built out of an interpretation of evolutionary theory, specifically by British paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, Henry Gee, in his book The Accidental Species. One of the evolutionary concepts Gee rejects is that humans are fundamentally superior to other species — the notion of ‘human exceptionalism’. Tirabasso’s choreographic take on this is for her dancers to embody a movement vocabulary of insects or animals as a way of subverting this exceptionalism. At the same time — which is where the blurring of perspective comes into the choreographic equation — she questions our assumptions about the animal world relative to our ability to create, to think, to express and to function as a society. 

This is not the first time Tirabasso has developed such an idiosyncratic language; her two previous works, The Ephemeral Life of an Octopus and Starving Dingoes were developed with the help of Gabrielle Moleta, an animal transformation coach. Moleta does not appear in the credits for In The Bushes which suggests Tirabasso is taking what she and her dancers have already learned from Moleta in a new direction. In these previous works, animal movement was part of an allegorical framework; here, Tirabasso injects it into the bloodstream where it takes control of the choreographic framework. This requires of each of the dancers a Kafka-esque state of mind to allow them to inhabit another species without relinquishing their human form. It is the psychological tension in this dichotomy — and the brilliant achievement of the dancers in embodying it — that makes In The Bushes so arresting.

Dance is not the best medium for intellectual argument; to grasp Gee’s evolutionary theories it is probably better to read The Accidental Species than to watch In The Bushes. But Tirabasso’s evident stimulation by Gee’s thesis is what has engendered her creation of a powerful composite form of theatre that has the complexity of a Hieronymus Bosch painting and the dream-like imagination of the surrealists. It is precisely when she juxtaposes extracts from opera and choral work — spliced into the score by Johanna Bramli and Ed Chivers — that the imagery is transformed from the evolutionary to the surreal. Pinato’s memorable duet with Pavarotti’s voice, and the funeral ceremony for Barbosa officiated by Bishop Brekke in his flowing purple robe (not to mention the subsequent ascension) to the Lachrymosa from Mozart’s Requiem attest to the power of choral music as a characteristic of our human evolution. 

It’s another blurring of perspective.