Trajal Harrell / Zürich Dance Ensemble, The Köln Concert, Sadler’s Wells East

Trajal Harrell / Zürich Dance Ensemble, The Köln Concert, Sadler’s Wells East, April 4

The challenge Trajal Harrell faces (and he seems to have taken it up) in using Keith Jarrett’s iconic 1975 Köln concert as a choreographic score is that the entire late-night concert was improvised, and although Jarrett later authorised a piano transcription, it’s impossible to re-capture the free-flowing atmosphere of that late-night concert in any form. As music critic Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim wrote, “without the live, improvised element, the magic is lost. Unlike a piece of classical music, “The Köln Concert” is a masterpiece only in its recorded format. And it requires an audience that participates in the unfolding act of creation each time anew.’

Presented at Sadler’s Wells East, Harrell’s The Köln Concert, created on himself and six dancers from his Zurich Dance Ensemble, perhaps started off life in the studio as an improvised exploration of part of Jarrett’s concert (Harrell uses only the first 26-minute movement, or Part 1, of the album) but it has since become, like the recording, fixed. One advantage Harrell and his dancers have is that any live performance inevitably embodies some element of improvisation within the choreographer’s more or less defined lines. 

The very opening of Köln Concert begins with Harrell standing in bare feet on the edge of the stage watching the audience take their seats; he is wearing a white shirt and black pants but he has a dress tied casually behind his neck and hanging down his front like an apron. If we have never seen Mr. Harrell before, we may be wondering if this person should be there at all, but he remains in place, enjoying watching as well as being watched. In conversation with Philip Bither of the Walker Arts Centre, Harrell says he does this a lot in his performances, that he enjoys communing with the audience in this way ‘and I don’t need to be hidden before the show.’ 

The stage (conceived by Harrell) under Sylvain Rausa’s even lighting is stark, with seven low, grey benches spread out in a parallel pattern on the front half of the stage and a speaker mounted on a stand behind, signifying recorded music. But when the music begins, it’s not Jarrett’s Köln Concert but Joni Mitchell singing My Old Man from her album Blue. Harrell begins to float his arms loosely to a gentle lilt of his feet that has the feel of a private, trance-like improvisation in the public arena. Perhaps Joni is the dress and Jarrett is the black pants and white shirt. Another song follows from the same album; the piano of The Last Time I Saw Richard is reminiscent of passages in Jarrett’s Köln Concert, and while it’s playing Ondrej Vidlar wanders on stage to sit on a bench and begin his own variation of Harrell’s floating arms. Rob Fordeyn, Songhay Toldon, New Kyd, Thibault Lac and Maria Ferreira Silva each enter in turn to sit on their respective benches with variations on the floating, percolating arms as Joni sings It’s Comin’ on Christmas and Both Sides Now. It’s a long prologue that blends the idiosyncrasy of the dancers in their colourful, quirky costumes (by Harrell) with the homogeneity of the gestural choreographic language. By the end of Both Sides Now all the dancers have left except the tall, imposing figure of Lac, who taxies upstage to prepare for takeoff. 

The Köln Concert was conceived at a time Harrell was studying Butoh, and in the same way Jarrett plays those first distinctive notes of his concert (inspired apparently by the Köln Opera House intermission bell), Harrell sets the tone of his choreography with a Butoh-inflected fashion runway as Lac minces unsteadily downstage looking steadily at the audience. The other dancers follow in a suite of languorously intoxicated variations while re-arranging and swapping items of clothing on each appearance; as much is happening in the wings as on the stage. What comes across is an improvisation on individuality with its accumulation of dishevelled, raunchy imagery. The sometimes over-eagerness of the dancers to embody it  can lead to affectation, but when New Kyd launches into her variation the smooth exhilaration of her movement approaches the heights of Jarrett’s inspired playing. In the closing of Part 1, Jarrett plays a rousing section over an ostinato bass that Harrell interprets as a round dance where each of the dancers, when they arrive at the front, improvises a short solo before joining the circle again. It’s a heady climax that resolves into a beautifully modulated conclusion where Jarrett and the dancers finish their ‘unfolding act of creation’.