Toneelhuis/FC Bergman, 300 el x 50 el x 30 el

Toneelhuis/FC Bergman, 300 el x 50 el x 30 el, Barbican, January 31

Paul Kuijer in 300 el x 50 el x 30 el (photo: Kurt van der Elst)

In the book of Genesis the dimensions of Noah’s Ark are given as 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high, but Toneelhuis/FC Bergman’s 300 el x 50 el x 30 el, presented as part of the 2018 London International Mime Festival, has left biblical history to the imagination and focuses instead on the current environmental and political crises facing Western society. Not that there is any sense of impending doom in the opening scene of a fisherman by a pond in sedentary contemplation and endless cigarette smoke. On any one of three screens, however, we see an old man (Paul Kuijer) lying in bed in a small wooden hut, an incarnation perhaps of Noah himself. As the black scrim rises to reveal a community of six ramshackle huts tottering around the perimeter of a leaf-covered clearing, we watch Kuijer unstick the monitors on his chest, pick up a hammer and plod outside into the clearing where cinematic space and theatrical space merge for the first time. Kuijer disappears into the pine forest to build his ark — we hear his hammer blows — while a camera and crew travel continuously around the community staring into the back of each hut long enough at each pass to reveal, with mordant exaggeration, successive tableaux vivants of unfolding domestic dramas. Lingering on the surreal, these portraits of ‘ordinary madness’ are a reflection — and there is no shortage of reflection in this allegory of the Ark — of such contemporary malaises as insatiability, depression, sexual dysfunction, escapism and estrangement. The seamlessly integrated live screening makes members of the audience voyeurs in a community that is, like the show itself, a product of our own making; we are peering ineluctably into our own lives.

So entrenched is the sense of habit and gnawing oppression that the only way out is an act of rebellion. We learn the secret of the young woman at the piano who sneaks across the clearing to play war games with her lover. They plan their escape using the map on his hut wall and attempt to leave with their suitcases commando-like across the clearing. The small community, however, is sensitive to any danger to its hermetic boundaries and emerges into the clearing to close ranks around the lovers, punishing the young man by forcing him back to his hut and nailing it shut. The accompaniment of Vivaldi’s Winter from The Four Seasons adds an additional chill to the staging and yet there is a certain comfort in the music, a recognition of a familiar composition that exists only for the ears of the audience watching from a distance. But how far away are we and where does Toneelhuis/FC Bergman place us in relation to the unfolding narrative?

If the story of Noah’s Ark alluded to in the title can be used as a clue for interpretation, one can read 300 el x 50 el x 30 el in light of current European political events (even though it was created well before Brexit, in 2011). The small insular community becomes a metaphor for tightening border controls while the mood of suspicion and isolation reflects a right-wing xenophobic mentality brooding with violence. Over the course of the performance the voyeurism of the camera subtly turns to vigilance and surveillance as the rhythm of filming matches the unfolding moral tale. The event that brings the community together is the death of the young man, who blows himself up with his stash of gunpowder fuses. The fisherman, moving off his seat for the first time, initiates an act of penitence by immersing his head repeatedly in the pond; other characters emerge slowly from their huts with buckets of water and join in the ritual. Nina Simone’s Sinner Man provides the mood and rhythm of a simple, redemptive dance in which the entire community participates.

Of course the flood is still on its way; these are intimations of disaster, not the disaster itself and penitence is the beginning not the end. Toneelhuis/FC Bergman suggests that if redemption is at all possible in the sense of a desire to heal society’s current ills it cannot be achieved through such rituals of seclusion, but rather by the opposite, by opening hearts and minds to ‘others’, to the establishment of a common humanity. The last-minute emergence into the clearing of an entire village of ‘outsiders’, let in by one of the young women, suggests such a change to the social and political equilibrium. Today’s hope, in other words, is an ethic of inclusion.

Dance Umbrella 2017: Tordre

Dance Umbrella 2017, Rachid Ouramdane, Tordre, artsdepot, October 17

Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer in Rachid Ouramdane’s Tordre (photo: Patrick Imbert)

The first sensation on walking into the auditorium at artsdepot is one of harmony. Sylvain Giraudeau’s set for Rachid Ouramdane’s Tordre, presented as part of Dance Umbrella’s 2017 festival, is like the contour of a shell, a gently curving light grey wall at the back of the stage that is evenly lit by Stéphane Graillot. Two metal pipes of different lengths descend like abstract sprinklers each with a lateral arm parallel to the floor. ‘Tordre’ (literally, to twist) comes from the same family of words as torsion or torque, and while there is an expectation of circular movement in Giraudeau’s set, the only immediate indication is a small electric fan at the foot of the rear wall that turns back and forth on its axis. Just as you’re getting used to this soothing conception, the music starts and two dancers, Annie Hanauer and Lora Juodkaite, make a flourishing entrance from opposite sides of the stage. The recorded soundtrack from the musical Funny Girl gets stuck in a groove, so Hanauer and Juodkaite repeat their entrances again and again. If you didn’t already know her, you can’t help noticing Hanauer has a prosthetic lower left arm — but that’s the point; this is a gently provocative opening gambit in which attention is deliberately drawn to Hanauer because of her perceived disability. Yet by the time the two dancers have made five or six entrances, we have come to accept it and are drawn instead into the comic absurdity of their repeating groove and their subtly different dynamics in entering and departing.

Having introduced them with a broad smile, Ouramdane begins to delve down into their individual strengths, presenting first Juodkaite and then Hanauer in separate solos to his own music that reveal their unique approaches to dance. We see Juodkaite initially turning very slowly and evenly like a clockwork dancer on a stand before she melts into luxuriant postures like spirals within spirals, belying her strength in her effortless flexion. Ouramdane pays no more attention to Hanauer’s prosthetic arm but creates for her a mesmerizing, extended solo that takes her movement beyond a virtuosic level to an emotional plane where he leaves us to distill our perceptions. Later in a choreographed, eloquent response to Nina Simone’s song, Feelings, Hanauer enters unerringly into the phrasing with its lyricism, its hesitations, and its questioning. The two solos mark a progression from a literal, physical notion of Hanauer’s disability to a more abstract and emotional understanding of how disability can itself engender ability and, with resilient determination, emerge as artistry. Hanauer expresses herself as the dancer she is without settling for a physical absence that might somehow diminish her.

Juodkaite doesn’t appear to have any disability but rather a unique ability to spin endlessly without losing balance or presence. And yet this ability did not arise out of nowhere; she has been practicing spinning, or movement gyration, every day since she was a small child as a form of psychological strengthening. To see her spinning is, like seeing Hanauer at first, to notice the exception before the exception becomes, in its artistic transformation, a heightened emotional experience. TS Eliot, referring to time in his poem, Burnt Norton, wrote of ‘the still point of the turning world’ where ‘past and future are gathered’:

‘Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.’

Juodkaite, in spatial terms, has made her dance the turning (gyroscopic) point where she finds her equilibrium in the turning world. And turn she does, with variations of speed and a rich articulation of her arms that are reflected in the turning, horizontal metal arms above her. She spins around the stage with perfect composure in ever decreasing circles, setting up a hypnotic moving image that, like Hanauer, removes us beyond the virtuosity. In one of the few interactions in this section of solos, Hanauer intercepts Juodkaite, gently receiving her into her open arms before releasing her once again; the dynamics seem effortless and timeless.

Tordre is both a dance performance and a documentary in movement, for as soon as there is talk of obstacles there is a response in biography. In her final spinning solo, Juodkaite relates anecdotes about her early life with her sister as if the spinning is in itself a form of remembering. But Ouramdane is careful to balance biographic attention with his meditation on difference and artistic ability. He reveals in both Juodkaite and Hanauer a way of moving that is generated by the obstacles and is not simply a result of them. This notion goes to the very heart of dis/ability and thus in its abstract treatment, Tordre is more powerful and far-reaching than the presentation of two remarkable artists on stage. Another connotation of ‘twist’ is to change perceptions; Ouramdane, Juodkaite and Hanauer together show how this can be done.

Resolution 2017: Bridget Lappin, Mathieu Geffré & Stephen Quildan

Resolution 2017, January 28: Bridget Lappin, Mathieu Geffré, Stephen Quildan

Marie Astrid Mence in a publicity photo for Not Hard (photo: Jack Thomson)

Bridget Lappin last year toyed with dual notions of exposure and concealment in The Art of Exposure and for this year’s Resolution she explores the dual notions of femininity and animality in Who’s Afraid of a Pussy Cat? Lappin is clearly drawn to paradoxes and she moves between them with her natural gifts of sensuality and strength. Here she takes her fascination with paradox to a sexually provocative level, conflating animality and femininity in a seamless line from forest to go-go bar, from faun to lap dancer. But there is a difference between embodiment and posture; Lappin indicates her inner paradoxes without fully expressing them and because of the sensual nature of dance in general and her performance in particular, she is partially successful. She seems to be aware of this paradox within a paradox for at one point she deliberately invokes Nijinsky’s portrayal of a faun in which, by all accounts, the separation between performer and animal was scandalously fine. Despite her best efforts (but not helped by her utilitarian costume of flowered bra and pants), Lappin’s own femininity maintains a distance from her animality, leaving a regret that the two are not more fully and selflessly integrated.

A recording of Nina Simone’s 1976 performance of Feelings at the Montreux Jazz Festival is the starting point for Mathieu Geffré’s What Songs May Do. The idea is that his two dancers, Angela Boix Duran and Joseba Yerro Izaguirre, are attending the concert in real time and their duet is the affect of Simone’s performance on their relationship. The beginning works beautifully as Duran and Izaguirre seem to arise out of the audience and walk languidly on to the stage to Simone singing Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas. This looks like a preview to a romantic duet but Simone’s Feelings brings out both tenderness and irritation, expectation and rejection in the couple: the feelings start to run amok. While Geffré’s title prepares us for this altercation between the musical and the physical, the latter starts to take on a separate existence; there is a section of locked bodies on the floor and another with dramatic runs and lifts that are effective in themselves (both dancers are totally immersed in what they do), but lose their choreographic relation to the music. Simone’s concert continues, applause and all, while Duran and Izaguirre become embroiled in a Bauschian tangle too reminiscent of Café Mueller. Our attention has been drawn away from what songs may do to the couple to what the couple is doing to the songs.

The final work comes wrapped in Rambert livery with Rambert support. The opening gambit of Stephen Quildan’s Not Hard is a well-constructed conceit that takes the entire piece to unravel. At the opening we watch two immobile, macho figures in bulky leather jackets, baggy pants and hats pulled well down on their heads changing positions and poses in a series of closely controlled, hazy blackouts (great lighting by Joshua Harriette). The first intimation of movement is an entrance by one of them on a BMX bike. The arrival of a ripped Lucy Balfour in red swimsuit and fashion backpack clears the haze but leaves us none the wiser as to where this is all going. The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony may be a clue but it sits incongruously next to a hilarious lip-synched version of Lethal Bizzle’s Pow (Forward) by the trio of Balfour, Vanessa Kang and Kym Sojourna dressed by Quildan himself (who also wrote some of the music). The glossy production values with which Quildan juggles seem inspired by fashion photography — Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin spring to mind — and slick music videos, and he wraps them in the format of a social media event in which the scrolling visual content carries the message. Not Hard finishes with Balfour standing very close to the front row of seats holding a two-litre bottle of water in each outstretched arm until her toned muscle strength fails and one bottle falls after the other. It becomes a metaphor for a work that relies so heavily on its visual strength.