Euripides Laskaridis, Titans, The Coronet Theatre

Euripides Laskaridis, Titans, The Coronet Theatre, March 3, 2023

With the announcement of their Spring season 2023, The Coronet Theatre has added to its reputation as a venue with some of the most eclectic and interesting dance and movement works in London. First up is Euripides Laskaridis’s Titans, a ‘bold and absurd fable blending dance and performance art…’ Laskaridis has worked previously with Dimitris Papaioannou and Robert Wilson from whom he has picked up not only ideas about craft but a love of Greek mythology. He has also learned from Papaioannou to use props in a surreal way to help unfold a free-flowing narrative, but he has taken it a step further in Titans in that he uses props as the narrative and as instruments of their own mythmaking.

There was a palpable anticipation in the first night audience who packed into the auditorium at the last minute in front of a dimly visible stage area littered with sundry props and scenic elements that seemed to relish a silent chaos of its own. The program note sets the action ‘before the world’s beginning’ — a time where all mythology belongs — and goes on to describe a place where ‘two solitary beings live between darkness and light, playing an endless game with no apparent purpose.’ This is a reduction of the original twelve Titans who in Greek mythology were the children of Uranus and Gaia, a parricidal offspring whose infighting led to a ten-year war with the Olympians. Laskaridis’ interest in the myth seems less in its detail than in searching for its contemporary resonances. Of the two solitary beings, one (Dimitris Matsoukas) is a hooded, dark-clad figure who merges into the dark surroundings or is seen in silhouette manipulating props, and the other is a grotesque vision inhabited by Laskaridis himself as a ludic provocateur, teasing us with technology that affects everything from the lights to his own amplified, high-pitched voice. 

Laskaridis has spoken in an interview about his need to distance himself from his theatrical alter-ego by using masks, and in Titans his mask is his entire body: a pink-skinned being with a large forehead, a long up-turned nose and a pot belly. His legs and feet, often in heels, complete the aspect of a cross-dressing agent of a mythical world in a constant process of revolution, a revolution inspired by whimsy, caprice and volatility and fuelled by a magic white dust. In this kind of world, extrapolated through a vivid imagination, any purpose in the endless games and ruses these two characters play — or even in the relationship between them — is hard to discern except for the palpable sense of enjoyment in their theatrical effect, a relish in the possibilities they unleash. But like the mythical language Laskaridis employs as an extension of his physical gestures, the focus of Titans is essentially inwards, an existential whirlpool that draws the action in on itself in a never-ending spiral of self-absorption. Is this perhaps Titans’ reflection on our current zeitgeist?

One can sense the end approaching as Laskaridis ratchets up the turbulence by setting all the suspended props in motion — how he avoids them as he dances around the stage is a brave piece of choreography in itself — accompanied by a faux Hollywood film score that in turn ratchets up the emotional effect. It’s a magical moment where everything implausibly seems to coalesce, where the possibilities of a conclusion (and Titans is nothing if not a medium of possibilities) remain in mid-flight. The ending, by contrast, feels oddly contrived as Laskaridis, collapsed in the corner with the artificial flowers and the pedal bin sprinkler, takes Matsoukas into his arms like the image of an instant Pietà. It’s as if Laskaridis has lost control of the forces he has unleashed in Titans and has imposed, with mischievous humour, a recognisable image of spiritual acquiescence like a white flag of surrender. 

The benefit of Laskaridis’ approach to theatre is the constant sensory provocation of an imagination let loose on effect, although theatrical overload is never far from the surface of Titans; one episode of prop manipulation follows another, searching for a meaning that constantly eludes us. But it’s a brilliantly achieved stage performance, both by the performers and the entire stage and production team. Hard-hitting may be a publicity term for emotionally provocative work, but with Titans it takes on another, more literal meaning: the raw physical aspect of material excess. 

Dance Umbrella 2021: Dimitris Papaioannou’s Transverse Orientation

Dimitris Papaioannou, Transverse Orientation, Sadler’s Wells, October 21

Dimitris Papaioannou, whose new production, Transverse Orientation, was presented at Sadler’s Wells as part of Dance Umbrella 2021, might well agree with the late photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo who noted that, “Down here everything is symbol and mystery.” Papaioannou, who trained in the visual arts, has made his reputation by presenting symbols and mysteries for the three-dimensional stage. In addition to his 8 performers, he has an extraordinary team to help him, with set designers Tina Tzoka and Loukas Bakas, lighting designer Stephanos Droussiotis, costume designer Aggelos Mendis, props constructor Nectarios Dionysatos, and mechanical inventor Dimitris Korres. Dance Umbrella presented The Great Tamer in 2018, in which Papaioannou introduced a complex array of theatrical images that referenced a trajectory from Greece’s ancient heritage to NASA’s landing on the moon, harnessing his powerful graphical theatre to an overriding theme of cultural archaeology. Transverse Orientation anticipates a future archaeology by mapping the effect of human intervention on natural environments. The irony of the title, which refers to the nocturnal moth’s evolutionary method of travel, is that moths are notnaturally attracted to a bright light; they are deceived by it. Their evolved nocturnal navigation system is short-circuited by anything brighter than moonlight to the point of paralysis and potential death by predators.

Tzoka and Bakas present a bleak, almost two-dimensional stage with a long back wall, a fluorescent light fixture high on one side and a door flush with the wall on the other. The stillness is charged with dramatic possibility until the light crackles into action and the door opens to a small swarm of anonymous, two-legged arthropod figures in black carrying a ladder. Seen in silhouette, this ballet of frenzied walks and gestures is a masterpiece of comic exaggeration and surreal invention (one of the moths — Breanna O’Mara — returns later to do a rousing tap routine). 

When Emma Gladstone asked Papaioannou in the post-show talk about his creative process he narrowed his response to describing the constraints of a deadline on both the period of creation and on the shaping and editing of the material into an integrated performance. But for someone like Papaioannou who delights in creating work as a palimpsest of imagery derived equally from ancient mythologies, renaissance art, and surrealism, the choice of what images to gather and how to place them in his theatrical universe must correspond at times to the attraction of moths to a bright light. 

This is an essentially existential metaphor that could relate both to the creative process and to the ideas around which the images are circling. In the opening section of Transverse Orientation, Papaioannou illustrates this metaphor with sardonic wit, making us laugh with him as his moths teeter precariously around a light source that is subject to electrical and mechanical failure. But then he subjects us (literally) to a powerful, roving search light that temporarily blinds us, a theatrical sleight of hand introducing us to more familiar territory: a colossal bull tamed and nurtured by a naked man and giving birth to a woman who is then carried away naked on the bull’s back. While Papaioannou is not averse to reusing visual imagery from his creative storehouse, he uses it here under a different light. The young woman (O’Mara) may reference Europa whom Zeus, disguised as a bull, abducted to Crete, and the young woman in her dotage (Tina Papanikolaiou) returns movingly to see what has become of her namesake. While Europe may be at a critical juncture in its history, its political situation pales into insignificance in the face of the current climate emergency. Two further images link the allegory of the moths to Papaioannou’s depiction, in drawn-out theatrical time and space, of the current environmental crisis. The door in the back wall opens on to a solid wall of granite blocks. They begin to force their way through the door seemingly of their own volition, an interminable stream of earthquake debris along with the odd surviving body. The bodies then pile up the rubble on the side of the stage and leave it there, a mere inspiration for acrobatic games. In the final image the goddess of abundance tips her bucket of water on to the stage while slowly descending beneath it. More water is poured on to the stage while the performers rip up the floor sections and scatter them on either side. Standing in the water is a man with a bucket and mop, acutely aware of his own inadequacy. 

What started off as parody has turned by degrees and digressions to darkest satire.

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.

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.

Dance Umbrella 2018: Dimitris Papaioannou’s The Great Tamer

Dimitris Papaioannou, The Great Tamer, Sadler’s Wells, October 16

A scene from Dimitris Papaioannou’s The Great Tamer (photo: Julian Mommert)

Dimitris Papaioannou is an image maker. His work, The Great Tamer, presented at Sadler’s Wells as part of this year’s Dance Umbrella, is yet another unique expression of Pina Bausch’s dance theatre legacy, though he does not so much choreograph on the body as use the body as an element in his choreographic manipulation of images. Both the body and the images are in turn dependent on a scenography that anchors the entire work. At once the prow of a ship, the surface of the moon or the scaly, fenestrated skin of a mythological globe, Tina Tzoka’s set is the archaeological repository for Papaioannou’s narrative. Costumed by Aggelos Mendis and under the lighting of Evina Vassilakopoulou, the bodies of his performers emerge on to or are dug up from the depths of the stage as a succession of images that form a complex, slow-release system of cross-cultural references over the course of an hour and fourty minutes. One could spend the evening forensically identifying the images, which might be easier — though less rewarding — than connecting them to the arc of Papaioannou’s vision. The Great Tamer is more like a cinematic montage that relies for its effect on the cumulative association of its individual sequences whose pace Papaioannou carefully controls. He is in no rush to run his images by us — if it takes ten minutes to brush up the debris from a broken plaster cast and put it in a plastic bag, we have that much time to appreciate the ruse — but he also risks losing us in the wealth of connections and references that make up the work. True to the nature of his wordless reflections there is no synopsis in the program to use as a guide; instead he uses the grammar of strong, sometimes visceral imagery, wit and potent juxtaposition to set out his visual landscape. In his post-show talk (which you can find online thanks to a partnership between Dance Umbrella and Middlesex University’s ResCen) Papaioannou’s landscape comes not only from his own fertile imagination but also from that of his performers during improvisation sessions. However, he is the one who sets the tasks and organizes the trajectory of the resulting imagery.

His ten performers are named in the program but their personalities are subservient to the rendering of Papaioannou’s visual vocabulary. His almost dispassionate use of bodies as corporal fragments, mythological hybrid beings, fully suited astronauts or as painterly tableaux vivants reduces the emotional impact of the performers and in a work that evidently relishes the naked body the effect is more clinical than sensual. Papaioannou has been making work for more than thirty years so he knows what he is doing; the challenge in seeing The Great Tamer is to identify where it lands in our own universe. There are images of pure circus that in their surreal associations, like the performer who digs his rooted shoes out of the floor and walks off on his hands, destabilize or perhaps redirect our poetic appreciation, while others, like the man with his fist excavating the womb of a supine woman as she slithers off stage are unsettlingly oblique.

Archaeology is a metaphor throughout The Great Tamer; it is the act of uncovering or digging up artifacts that connects our knowledge of ancient civilizations with current history. The astronaut excavates not only floating moon rocks — Papaioannou is a master of theatrical illusion — but a naked body, a figure of Christ arising from his tomb. It is as if he is joining the dots between the achievements of his own country’s cultural heritage and the development of Western culture via Mantegna, Botticelli, Rembrandt and the NASA space program. Within this excavation of historical time as the great tamer, the decision to incorporate fragments of Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz (famously used in Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey) into Kostas Michopoulos’s sound design may also be referencing Sigmund Freud’s work on the excavation of memory in Vienna. In this game of free association, Walter Benjamin’s use in Berlin Chronicle of the same metaphor of digging uncovers one of many possible clues in understanding the intricate layering of The Great Tamer: ‘Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.’