Riccardo Buscarini’s The Age of Horror at The Place

Riccardo Buscarini’s The Age of Horror at The Place, September 19

For the UK première of Riccardo Buscarini’s The Age of Horror (L’età dell’ horror), the theatre at The Place is transformed into a square enclosure with seating on four sides. As we take our seats, we are aware of a muted event that has already begun: two men lying interlocked head to toe on the floor, hands clasped, rolling over each other almost imperceptibly along one side. This intimate ritual is accompanied by the calm intricacy of a contrapuntal variation on piano from Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Art of Fugue. The time it takes the audience to fill the seats is the time the two men take to continue their slow, sinuous journey around the square until they disentangle themselves and stand up, their hands still joined, as the lights brighten. 

Dancers Andrew Gardiner and Mathieu Geffré, who collaborated with Buscarini in the work’s development, look around almost sheepishly before continuing their choreographic dialogue to Bach’s fugues from this upright state. They retrace the edges of the stage, always in the same clockwise direction, interpenetrating each other’s space as well as the musical phrases in a constant, muscular entanglement measured in the flow of opposites — forward and back, in and out, under and over, inside and outside, through and around, rough and smooth. There are moments early in the choreography that are uncannily reminiscent of a kind of eighteenth-century court dance familiar to Bach; the ‘horror’ of the title arrives insidiously when harmony gives way to rough jabs of rivalry and aggression. As their articulations and changes in intensity, speed and complexity develop, the two men become more and more estranged from the symmetries and ceremonial display of the court, pitting one against the other in an endless interplay of thrusts and parries, lifts and slides that form a repertoire of physical accretion. Moments of stillness and silence relieve their dwindling reserves of energy and sense of desperation before the onslaught continues, with shifting eye contact accenting the inflections of fear, anger and uncertainty. This harrowing pattern of behaviour tests the emotional and physical limits of the two dancers over the hour-long performance and stems, Buscarini writes, ‘from the instinct to escape the other, and at the same time, the desire to merge with them’.

Clearly, the simple device of holding hands throughout the work can serve as a metaphor on several levels. In interpersonal terms it is the distillation of the manifold variants and departures that mark the development of a relationship, where tenderness and conflict underpin the evolution of being together through varying degrees of intimacy. Towards the end, in the process of peeling each other’s black shirts over their heads with their teeth to reveal their shiny silver linings, the two men momentarily turn into surreal faceless figures enacting a sensual sado-masochistic game where pleasure and pain are equally at play, becoming a feral double-headed creature both distinctly human and cruelly animalistic. 

In the post-show talk Buscarini and Geffré talk of the work’s larger remit, underlining the political significance of the title that openly references our contemporary zeitgeist. Geffré explains the interlocking hands in terms of the ecological and political challenges of our time, how we tenaciously hold on to ideas and affirm beliefs in the face of opposition and the temptation to let go. Buscarini is interested in history and how historical epochs recur in the present with specific variations, teasing a complex web of continuities and differences that the choreography articulates in its constantly evolving cyclical path. Today’s ‘age of horror’ is the toxic product of histories of exploitation, aggression and inequality that underpin the tense geopolitical interdependence of different parts of the globe. In effect, Buscarini’s stage becomes an imaginary ring in which the antagonism between two men epitomises global tensions where one resists the force of the other to whom he is inexorably bound. 

Buscarini’s weaving of variations, like Bach’s The Art of Fugue, could continue endlessly in ever-richer permutations but the work finds its organic ending in stillness. Gardiner and Geffré, visibly exhausted, face each other and slowly separate their hands. It is a poignant moment: but is it capitulation? Psychologically, fear establishes constraints and its opposite is not courage but freedom. In the concluding act of letting go the two men, with whatever misgivings, seem to have chosen to break with the past and to face a future that seeks, in Herman Hesse’s words, ‘to find new light that old ties cannot give’. 

Lighting: Riccardo Buscarini with Maria Virzi
Music advisors: Alexis Delgado and Sebastiano Dessanay
Costumes by Ludi Andrade