It takes someone of the sensibility and maturity of choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker to make a suite of dances from the Rosary Sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber. I had never heard them before seeing De Keersmaeker’s Mystery Sonatas/For Rosa at Sadler’s Wells, but they have since become essential listening. It is as if dance, in making music visible, allows it to enter the brain at double strength.
The Rosary Sonatas are a rigorous series of 15 short sonatas for violin and continuo Biber composed around 1676 to accompany the devotional rosary procession. Their performative structure is divided into three groups: five joyful, five sorrowful and five glorious sonatas, and they are crowned with a final passacaglia for solo violin, played in this performance in a recording by De Keersmaeker’s long-time collaborator, Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti. The sonatas’ spiritual purpose is co-mingled by Biber with bravura scordatura playing for the solo violin — Biber was a virtuoso of the instrument — that gives them an equally powerful physical and emotional dimension. By entering Biber’s sonatas through choreographic pathways, De Keersmaeker updates and refreshes his devotional music with subtle layers of cultural references that through the dancing body place it firmly within a humanistic tradition: a meditation on the strength and frailty of our senses, of our environment, of our being.
What makes theses sonatas a natural fit for choreographic treatment is that Biber wrote into them such popular dance forms as the gigue, allemande and courante. De Keersmaeker evidently finds in the fluent mathematical and musical elaboration of Baroque music the space in which to weave her own dance phrases; by the same token, Biber’s music possesses an inherent choreographic promise, which De Keersmaeker allows us to sense by playing one of the sonatas in full while the dancers lie still on stage. She is also confident enough to play a musical joke on Biber by interpolating a recording of Lynn Anderson singing, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden in an explosion of rose light, a bold yet subtle resonance that shocks while keeping on message.
At the very beginning, two dancers stand at the front of the stage, one whispering to the other a secret whose significance is marked by Minna Tiikainen’s flash of lightning. What follows is their secret that we view through the frame of the stage and through the bodies of the dancers: the essential nature of resistance along the spiritual path of exaltation, suffering and sublimation. As the brief program note states, ‘The dancing body, as an individual or a community, becomes an act of resistance, while Biber’s music, rich in virtuosity and narrative, opens a door to it.’ De Keersmaeker underlines the theme by dedicating the work ‘to women of resistance — Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Parks, Rosa Vergaelen and Rosa, the 15-year-old climate activist who died in the Belgian floodings of 2021.’ As a corollary, one of the sonatas is a solo for Rafa Galdino costumed in the colours of Ukraine.
Tiikainen’s lighting dreams up a space that removes the theatre’s frame. Before the performance starts we can discern a strip of metal hanging in the darkness like the silver cowling of a jet engine. When light is reflected against this subtly turning or twisting Möbius-like strip, it creates a universe of light and shade that evokes, along with its atmospheric haze, the ethereal mysteries of a religious ritual. Fauve Ryckebusch’s costumes merge into Tiikainen’s light, softening the edges of the dancers with transparent material, and add to it by picking out colour highlights that give the stage the appearance of a borderless, pastel moving image.
The dancing is not virtuosic in technical terms, but it is superbly musical; this is the element that unites the performance. Instead of us watching the dancers moving, De Keersmaeker allows the music and the choreography to move us through the dancers. In a reverential gesture of reciprocity, De Keersmaeker in Mystery Sonatas/For Rosa opens a door to Biber’s music but turns it into the tide of her parallel conception of resistance. Throughout this extended meditation lies a reality beyond what we can see; a discursive dance traced in rose petal patterns that is at the same time a reminder of those mysteries that inform our humanity in the midst of a global existential crisis. Mystery Sonatas/For Rose is profoundly attuned to our time.
Dark field analysis is an alternative medical procedure using high-resolution dark field microscopy to observe live blood.
Two naked men sit casually on a green baize carpet as if caught in a moment of silence in the course of their conversation. Roger Sala Reyner is deep in thought with eyes closed but Juan Pablo Cámara’s eyes have a piercing fixity that borders on the non-human. Through the effect of cyborg lenses choreographer Jefta van Dinther already hints at the synthetic within the nonchalantly organic and familiar. The baize carpet sits on a larger dark grey rectangle of material that fills the space marked by the four sides of the seated audience; above the performance area hangs a low ceiling whose perimeter is defined by a slim strip of white LED light. Cristina Nyffeler’s scenography and Minna Tiikkainen’s lighting close down the space to a muffled intensity that gives the impression we are observers in a theatre within a theatre. Both men have wireless microphones through which sound designer David Kiers not only amplifies their voices but at times enhances them, effectively releasing them from the speaking bodies to fulfil an integral but autonomous part of the choreographic process.
As soon as the audience is seated around them, the two men do not so much start as continue their conversation. Cámara asks, “What is your earliest memory?” Reyner remembers his love of spinning, the sensation of speed and dizziness that resulted in a fall. “Did you cry?”, asks Cámara coldly, his intense stare seeing the accident behind his eyes. “No.” “Did you bleed?” The pulsating rhythm of the soundtrack begins to merge with the words that Cámara expels from his body with a muscular tension that results in a gestural exploration of the air around him. Lying back and looking around at the audience with a similar air of detachment Reyner recalls the red stain on his white clothing. “Have you ever penetrated someone else?” asks Cámara. “I mean literally getting under the skin of another being?” It is at this point that the performance itself takes us below the surface and carries us down with Reyner and Cámara through their nakedness into and under our own skin. If the subject of Dark Field Analysis is blood, as choreographer Jefta van Dinther states in the program, it ‘serves as an analogy for looking inwards and outwards: into and beyond ourselves’. Blood stands for ancestral lineage but also for evolutionary connections with animals; it is the shared exchange between predator and prey, but also the pulsating fluid of life and by extension the energy fueling robotics.
Dark Field Analysis is a sculptural piece whose volumes are defined by the masterful interaction of light and sound. Tiikainen effectively transforms the stage from the light of the opening conversation into a dark chamber in which we delve into the gestural vocabulary of human, animal and artificial agents through her own assimilation of technological or animal night vision; the certainty of focus and clarity is replaced by the unsettling disquiet of the unfamiliar. Kiers extrapolates this sensation through his ability to manipulate the human voice into the snarl of a predator or the mechanical rasp of a destructive robot unraveling the baize floor in the low red light. On another two occasions it is Reyner’s powerful voice that sings above the action as a reminder of the very human, emotional nature of the work. In the confluence of sound, light and action we effectively become part of an engrossing sensory exploration of the inner and outer worlds we inhabit.
In fully integrating the intellectual content of the work into the choreographic language of the body, van Dinther creates a visceral, immersive experience that is eminently contemporary. Whilst he is not alone in engaging with topics such as the relationship of humans to the ecosystem and the Anthropocene, as in Alexandra Waierstall’s And here we meet, or the definition of the self in relation to a biological makeup, as in Wayne McGregor’s Autobiography, van Dinther’s quest into a re-definition of subjectivity that encompasses organic and artificial agents is not only current but expressed through the very concept that defines such reassessment: affect. As a result, the concept does not encumber the performance but is a perceived feature whose intellectual resonance emerges as one of its volumes and remains long after the performance has ended. Appropriately it is Reyner and Cámara who pull the plug on their own conversation by climbing up, one on the shoulders of the other, to reach an imaginary switch that plunges us into darkness.
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