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.

Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes at The Place

Léa Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes, The Place, February 12, 2022

Co-commissioned by The Place and presented there for a single night, Léa Tirabasso’s latest work, Starving Dingoes, follows thematically from her 2019 production, The Ephemeral Life Of An Octopus, but with a change of focus and a maturity of expression. Starving Dingoes is an unsparing meditation on the complex biological and physiological processes of life and death imagined through the cultural and emotional responses of the bodies in which they take place. The title comes from the choreographer’s memory of seeing a pack of dingoes on an Australian beach, here transposed to the feral aspect of existence called apoptosis or programmed cellular death — a natural phenomenon in which damaged cells are encouraged by internal processes to commit suicide to avoid impairing healthy cells. In merging cytology with the struggle for survival within the entire organism, Tirabasso has drawn on her collaboration with cancer researchers, Simone Niclou and Aleksandra Gentry-Maharaj. The issue Starving Dingoes raises is how, in an ongoing and cyclical process, the body deals with the presence of unhealthy ‘rogue’ cells that have lost their ability to die, leading to disease. While this meditation is highly personal, it is also timely to consider, by extension, how individuals within a given society co-operate or fight to ensure their own survival and that of the whole group. 

To engage with these questions, Tirabasso sets up a rich choreographic alchemy between the biological and the human, at times with pathos and at times with humour, without fully dissociating the two; it is the humbling humour of Starving Dingoes that makes its unexpected vision of life and death all the more accessible. The program describes the work as ‘a race for five dancers’ — Catarina Barbosa, Lauren Ellen Jenkins (substituting for Laura Patay), Karl Fagerlund Brekke, Alistair Goldsmith and Laura Lorenzi — ‘who explore the vital, albeit brutal, necessity to stay together’. This is the way we see them starting the work (under Nicolas Tremblay’s light) as five anthropomorphic cells inching forward very slowly like beached turtles (on Thomas Bernard’s fine cork-strewn shore) while singing a chorus from Giuseppe Verdi’s nineteenth century opera, La Traviata, in their own protoplasmic language. But it is not long before dis-ease sets in both metaphorically and choreographically; bodies clash, disperse and reform in a constant effort to heal until the rogue cell is identified and killed. It is like a diagnosis through the intrinsic wisdom of sensation rather than through rational observation. What is counterintuitive is that at the heart of this process is compassion: the image of Goldsmith succouring the other four is remarkable for its communal inter-dependency as part of this regenerative cycle. 

In Verdi’s time, a ‘traviata’ was a ‘woman who has gone astray’, so the association of this particular opera to rogue cells in the body is uncannily pertinent. The biological imperative of the science is imbued with the melodramatic impact of the opera in such a way that Tirabasso’s Starving Dingoes creates deep ties between the two and enriches both. Johanna Bramli’s and Ed Chivers’s all-embracing score, which splices into its rumbling bass drone and electrical short-circuits Verdi’s sampled arias and choruses — as if we are hearing the opera from inside the body — adds to the atavistic, emotional resonance of the work. Unlike in the opera, where actions are decided through the volatility of emotions, the performers of Starving Dingoes embody processes that are emotionally blind, but this is where the power of the work’s juxtaposed layers exists. As part of her choreographic path, Tirabasso sought the expertise of Gabrielle Moleta who gave the performers a one-day workshop in animal transformation to train the body beyond familiar habits and traditions (it could go further as there are still traces of self-consciousness in the performance), but the effect on the language of the action is transformative. Seeing the performers wrestle for their communal health against Brekke’s rogue pathology while each sings Violetta’s final aria is to take opera and dance to profoundly cathartic levels.

Tirabasso and her team have done something more than create a show that in our precarious cultural climate may be seen in a handful of venues; I hope it receives much more attention for its performative qualities and the themes it conveys. Having got this far with such conceptual vigour and emotional urgency, Starving Dingoes deserves to have access to a further line of funding so that its full potential can be realised. But even more, the concept appears ripe for large-scale operatic treatment, a production of La Traviata, perhaps, as seen under the microscope that draws down the emotional heights of melodrama into the depths of physical survival. It could even become, if it hasn’t already, an allegory of our 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.