Hubert Essakow: IGNIS

Hubert Essakow, IGNIS, The Print Room, February 11

Lukasz Przytarski, Jordi Calpe Serrats and Sara Kestelman in IGNIS (photo: Zadoc Nara)

Fire is the theme of Print Room Associate Artist and Choreographer Hubert Essakow’s new work, IGNIS, the second in a planned elemental trilogy that began with Flow, based on water. Ignis is a Latin word for fire but here fire is a metaphor for memories that have burned their way into both heart and mind.

The seating at The Print Room is intimate, arranged on three sides of the stage as if around a fireplace and Lee Newby’s polished steel back wall tilting slightly forward reflects the human forms on the shiny black stage as flickering embers. Within this heated landscape Essakow — with the help of dramaturg Laura Farnworth — succeeds in getting his cast to embody in those embers all the longing, desire and regret of a passionate life. It is a tall order, and something that dance alone is only partially equipped to handle but Essakow’s coup is to integrate the expressive power of actor Sara Kestelman (whose training in classical ballet still informs her quality of movement) with his three accomplished dancers (Noora Kela, Jordi Calpe Serrats and Lukasz Przytarski). She plays the older woman reflecting on her younger self (Kela) and her conflicted passions, sometimes watching the sporting of the youthful trio and sometimes participating; she sees everything, she notes everything and, more importantly, we read everything through her. Interestingly she doesn’t dominate the stage but like an alchemist transforms it.

Newby is also something of an alchemist because part of his polished steel wall transforms magically into a transparent screen with the help of Matthew Eagland’s lighting. IGNIS begins with the recumbent figure of Kela in light grey loose-fitting clothes reflected on both the floor and the back wall. Like someone licked by flames, she turns and twists the shimmering line of Jon Opstad’s score until she rises to a sitting position and stands looking at her image in the polished mirror. As she walks towards it Kestelman’s image appears through the screen gazing back at her fondly as if at a photograph. Kestelman fades to return seconds later with two young men at her side. Time dissolves in this mirage, and as Kela retreats from our focus Kestelman materialises on stage on the arms of her two youthful companions. In this way both cast and creative team unite in their evocation of time revisited, of remembered pleasure and pain. The four characters weave memories and past events in contrapuntal choreographic sequences in which the men have one phrase and the women another, followed by unison sections and phrases in canon that suggest the hesitation of selective memory (sitting, getting up, sitting again) and the sudden punctum when Kestelman claps her hands and the flood of memories comes to an abrupt end. “Here it almost ended…” she begins, a sculptural figure eloquently recalling a decisive moment in her life as the three dancers draw their arms slowly across their chests like the stretching of a bow. But the memories continue to play, small accelerating gestures of look and touch and rebuff that Essakow painstakingly builds into an intense physical argument. Kestelman watches raptly until the triangle resolves with the departure of Przytarski. Kela snaps at Serrats in a combative duet that finishes with the lovers lying together on the floor but Kestelman recalls the return of Przytarski and we see the tantalizing pull and push of her heart.

The two boys duel in solos and duets that Kestelman sees in reflection on the wall: reflections on reflections. “I know the scene can never be the same.” Her voice adds a further emotional element to the performance. Dancers are not used to flexing their vocal chords in the same way as the rest of their muscles and Kestelman’s voice has all the power of an athletic body. She also adapted or transposed her own poetry for IGNIS so there is a unity between mind and body whenever her voice emerges.

It is now the turn of the youthful trio to manipulate Kestelman as if she is no longer in control of her past: selective memory, or history re-writing itself. A touch sends a shiver through her; she tells Kela she failed to see the anguish to come. “Now I see him everywhere.” Serrats joins Przytarski in dancing with Kela; she moves from one to the other. Kestelman remains on the sidelines as they switch and battle, watching Kela in particular, but despite the passionate uncertainty of the time — or perhaps because of it — she has no regrets: “Charred and changed”, she affirms, “Burnt out embers flicker into life, a lick of flame, leaping from the ashes, sudden burst of fire, white hot, brilliant, bright, beautiful, alive. I am alive.”

She sits, then lies like Kela at the beginning, dancing with her arms, rolling gently one way then another, and arches her back to sit up. Przytarski lights a fire in a grill along the back of the stage, transforming the stage into line of flame. Bathed in the light, Kestelman conjures up the three youths who dance in response to the heat: her passion in all its complexity. The two boys help her to her feet but Kela remains on the ground looking up at her. There is a transferal of understanding from the one to the other as the fire burns low. Kestelman’s eyes brim with the clarity of memory but the eyes of the others are as if blinded for they cannot see into the future. Kela circles and leaves Kestelman forming a heart with her hands, potent symbol of her journey. As she stands reflected in the wall, the ghostlike trio appears briefly behind it and vanishes.