NDT1 at Sadler’s Wells

Nederlands Dans Theater (NDT1) at Sadler’s Wells, April 20

Gabriela Carrizo / Jiří Kylián / Crystal Pite and Simon McBurney

Nederlands Dans Theater has a rich association with choreographer Jiří Kylián, whose 100^th work* for the company, Gods and Dogs, is a welcome addition to the Sadler’s Wells program. Created in 2008 for NDT2, the choreography, with lighting by Kees Tjebbes, décor by Kylián, costumes by Joke Visser and brought to life by NDT’s superb dancers, shines like a polished hallmark of the company brand. For all the time Kylián has choreographed work for NDT, his prolific output has come to define that elusive (for some) crossover between classical technique and contemporary aesthetics. He matured as a dancer and choreographer in Stuttgart under the guidance of his mentor, John Cranko, who, as artistic director and choreographer, turned the Stuttgart Ballet from a provincial institution into an internationally renowned company. Kylián was thus a progeny of a fertile artistic turbulence that encouraged his own creative talents while he learned the craft of dancing (William Forsythe was another who benefitted from Cranko’s vision). For the 25 years Kylián was artistic director of Nederlands Dans Theater (1975-1999) he created the company not in his own image but, like Cranko at Stuttgart, in the image of his choreography. Whether it’s the hundredth or the ninety-fourth work he created for the company, Gods and Dogs is as fresh and confident in its use of language as ever. Kylián has the ability to imbue his choreography with a sense of thought that is endlessly intriguing, like a communication from an unknown land. Perhaps this is why Kylián considers Gods and Dogs an unfinished work, a glimpse of a world far away yet tantalisingly close.

What makes for an intriguing introduction to the evening is Gabriela Carrizo’s La Ruta (The Road), a crossover genre of mime, theatre and dance (Carrizo is the co-founder of Peeping Tom) that has the visual appeal of an Edward Hopper painting come to hallucinatory life. There is a connection between Gods and Dogs and La Ruta in the rubber-legged virtuosity of the choreography — and the rubber-legged virtuosity of the dancers — but where Kylián incorporates it as an extension of his fluid style, Carrizo makes it into a theatrical image of spectacular unease and humour (sitting in on an audition for La Ruta would have been a long gasp of amazement). La Ruta is the stuff of dreams and nightmares, of murky associations and the inexplicable sequence of events. It is beautifully designed by Amber Vandenhoeck, lit by Tom Visser with a score of original music and musical fragments by Raphaëlle Latini.  

In another, perhaps subliminal link to Kylián, the choreographer’s own words — part of an apologia for creating his website — could have introduced Crystal Pite’s collaboration with Simon McBurney: ‘…And yes, I am also painfully aware of the fact that whatever we do or make is doomed to disappearance, and that our “Planet Earth” will be burnt to ashes and then frozen to death and finally it will become a totally insignificant dwarf within the universe…’ Yet Kylián’s pessimistic expression contrasts to the rather saccharine ‘journey into climate emergency’ that characterises Figures in Extinction [1.0]. McBurney provides as a structure a recorded list of extinct species and geological phenomena — with text excerpts from John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? read by himself with interpolations from his six-year-old daughter Marnie — which Pite illustrates with some beautifully crafted animal cameos costumed by Nancy Bryant with Jochen Lange’s puppets under Toby Sedgwick’s direction. But lists are more the domain of lecture demonstrations, not of choreography. Left to her own devices (with her close artistic associate Jay Gower Taylor, playwright Jonathon Young and lighting designer Tom Visser), Pite has created memorable choreography based on a play (Revisor), spoken text (The Statement) and a scenario of personal trauma (Betroffenheit); she has also transformed the atmosphere in the Royal Opera House with a full evening work (Light of Passage) on the subject of existence. But with Figures in Extinction [1.0] she seems constrained by McBurney’s didactic structure. There is a spark of her feisty spirit in the creation of the climate change denier (a verbatim dance to words recorded by Max Cassella), a delicious and caustic cameo that flails against the evidence of destruction. Pite is a choreographer who, like Kylián, delves deep into the human psyche to create her works; in Figures in Extinction [1.0] McBurney seems to have appropriated that power but, in so doing, diminished its value.

* On his own website, Kylián lists Gods and Dogs as his 94^th work.

Peeping Tom, Mother (Moeder)

Peeping Tom, Mother (Moeder), Barbican Theatre, January 24

Hun-Mok Jun and Charlotte Clemens in Peeping Tom’s Mother (Moeder). Photo: Oleg Degtiarov

Peeping Tom’s Mother (Moeder), directed by Gabriela Carrizo and presented as part of this year’s London International Mime Festival, is set in a family-run museum where everything is linked by a creative umbilical cord to the literal, symbolic and surreal notions of motherhood. At the back we see through a glass window into a cubicle that suggests both the clean, aseptic delivery room of a hospital and, on the opposite end of existence, a morgue. It is here, in the opening scene, that a mother (Eurudike De Beul) breathes her last while her family and friends gather in the darkness of the space outside to mourn. The daughter (Marie Gyselbrecht) breaks down on the floor; her tears become a puddle of water in which she splashes but there is no water on the stage. Borrowing from the cinema, Carrizo matches Gyselbrecht’s every gesture with the amplified sounds of Maria Carolina Vieira’s hands splashing in a bowl of water inside the cubicle that has become, in the absence of the corpse, a Foley studio.

Thus begins a series of associative details within dream-like tableaux that exploit the inseparable link between the aesthetics and the affect of the uncanny as a physical language that intensifies the theatrical experience. We are in the hands of magicians of the unconscious who work in time (marked by birthdays and the closing hours of the museum) and a unity of space like a classical setting warped by the Eros and Thanatos of Freudian theory. Water is the substance of tears but also the substance of amniotic fluid in the womb; death and life are never far apart in Moeder, and are even at times superimposed. In a room off the main gallery art imitates life in an exhibit of a coffin with a naked man (Hun-Mok Jung) poised on all fours above it (see photo). It is called One Foot In The Grave, and the cleaner (Charlotte Clamens) clearly has a delightfully erotic attachment to it. As the museum closes for the day the attendant (Brandon Lagaert) covers it in a plastic sheet. Only then does Jung climb down, but he gets caught in the voluminous plastic and thrashes around to get free. “Fucking job”, he says as he gets up. “You were great today”, responds Lagaert. Life is a performance, or so it seems.

Of course theatre is an illusion, but Peeping Tom is adept at making the visceral illusion so convincing that it hurtles against our understanding with all the force of an uncomfortable reality. The treatment of Moeder is not a compassionate look at motherhood but a fractured, fragmented assault on our relationship to it and therein lies its force. The physical vocabulary of disintegration and dislocation as states of mind is phantasmagorical with an anchor resting on the very deep bed of the unconscious. Carrizo is aware of this and sprinkles accents of humour here and there to soften the blow, and watching her performers is to marvel at their abandoned energy and hyperflexibility as much as to flinch at the emotions they are expressing. The duet of Lagaert and Vieria that evinces their despair at the pathological condition of their daughter while De Beul plays damning chords on the organ is literally and emotionally staggering. Music is also a palliative, especially in De Beul’s rich, mellifluous voice singing Erbame dich from Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion or in the powerfully pitch-perfect association of Vieria’s final scream of giving birth in the Foley-studio-turned-birthing room with her gravelly rendering of Janis Joplin’s Cry Baby.

Moeder wades powerfully into a question that relates to the purpose of theatre; it weaves a path between making the shock of its revelations entertaining and clothing its entertainment in shocking imagery. When Gyselbrecht reaches into a still life on the wall she delivers the damp, resisting head of Jung; a drawing of a heart bleeds and the coffee machine is a much loved female called ‘baby’ with whom Gyselbrecht has a torrid affair (to the Sinatra song, I’m a Fool to Want You) that leads to a deadly electric climax. Perhaps because of the richness of creativity in Moeder there is also a danger that the humour extends to self-congratulation — after Gyselbrecht’s tears, the water becomes a Foley exhibit in itself — and in a cast of such extraordinary performers that their abilities become independent extrusions from the physical narrative. But as in the duet of Lagaert and Vieira or when Vieira amplifies the idea of distracting her crying baby by repeatedly somersaulting on to her back, the shock and the entertainment are seamlessly integrated.

Simon Versnel as the father and widowed husband, and Yi-Chun Liu as the pregnant mid-wife complete an extraordinary cast, and those are only the people we see on stage. Moeder is clearly an exceptional collaboration between Carrizo and her team that creates a flow of haunting images about motherhood from which there is no way out but on a gurney of contrasting emotions.