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.

Lola Maury, BROUHAHA, The Place

Lola Maury, BROUHAHA, The Place, May 29

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a brouhaha is ‘a noisy and overexcited reaction or response to something’, but the opening of Lola Maury’s BROUHAHA prompts an opposite reaction; as we sit on three sides of the stage at The Place waiting in the dark for what we think might be the beginning of the performance, nothing happens. Has something gone wrong? Then as we accustom our eyes to the darkness and our ears to the silence, we hear a prolonged whistled note from somewhere in the auditorium, and then another with eerie harmonics and the sound of Big Ben chiming in the fog. A sense of relief ensues as the notion of a beginning takes formal shape; the whistled harmonics are like reeds blowing in the night and from a single corner light we can ascribe their source to a trio of performers (Juan Corres Benito, Laureline Richard and Alexander Standard) arriving slowly on the still-overcast stage with rasping intakes of breath. What sounds come from the performers and what are embedded in Alberto Ruiz Soler’s ruminative, diaphanous score is difficult to tell, but Maury and her team seem to be setting up a theme of acclimatization that tests not only our senses but our expectations of what a performance might be. What we hear evolves into what we see: three evanescent figures flecked in silver slowly evolving under a brooding light. The trio naturally draws our focus but it is the scenic interplay of form, sound and light that vies constantly for attention. Ben Moon’s lighting corroborates Ruiz Soler’s growling collage of sounds while the layered forms of Cesca Dvorak’s gender-neutral costumes shroud the body in mystery. 

Maury’s description of the work as ‘a multi-layered experience; a sometimes chaotic, sometimes harmonious mess of sonics mashed, spliced and woven which chimeric sequences of movement’ seems almost too defined. The smooth articulation of the performers is independent of any known narrative and defies any recognisable relationships; whether it suggests amoebas expanding their reach in a protoplasmic effort to survive or simply an imaginative deconstruction of formality, the very ambiguity of the spectacle spawns inevitable attempts at interpretation that are never allowed to coalesce into a cogent frame. At one moment one could imagine three children playing in a field at night or be reminded of the tidal interaction of waves; on a more comprehensive scale, we might think of the work as relating to space and time in an era before our definitions of such notions began to measure, control, change and transform them. Or is Maury channelling a response to the Anthropocene by layering corporal landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes on to one another in a brouhaha of vertebrate chaos? 

While it is usual for dance movement to guide or be guided by the rhythm and melody of a score, Maury enlists Ruiz Soler’s soundscape to influence the dynamic shape and volume of her choreography. Integral to his rumbling leitmotif is the muscularity and vitality of extrinsic sounds — be it a music box, traces of ritual chanting or spoken word — entering the space as swirling matter that the performers imbue with their own articulation. But the relationship between performers and sound is porous; voices within the score imperceptibly manifest in the voices on stage and vice versa so that aural stimuli never appear long enough or clearly enough to generate a specific picture or image. It’s as if Maury and her creative team are keeping their own interpretive involvement as neutral as possible to allow the audience to see through the sound and to hear through the movement. BROUHAHA is clearly the fruit of a rich, organic collaboration and in bringing together its diverse threads, meanings and significations its performance is an acutely meditative experience.

Having taken us on this journey, it is the performers who assume the responsibility for resolving the brouhaha by vocalising, as it were, their own demise until the stage empties and falls silent. The audience’s applause is an abrupt reminder of space and time. 

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.