Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B, Sadler’s Wells

Compagnie Maguy Marin, May B, Sadler’s Wells, May 22, 2024

Maguy Marin’s May B, presented at Sadler’s Wells on May 21 and 22, is divided into three contrasting sections, each influenced by the works of Samuel Beckett. One doesn’t necessarily think of Beckett and dance in the same breath, but as Sue Jones explains in her article published by Dance Research, ‘Beckett’s Brush with Ballet’, the playwright became fascinated with the mimetic aspect of dance after seeing Léonide Massine as the puppet in Petrouchka in 1934. Beckett was later to work with the dancer Deryk Mendel, for whom he wrote the one act mime play Act Without Words in 1956. Other actors with whom he worked have described his directorial insistence on the rhythm and timing of gestures as ‘choreography’, so it is perhaps not so surprising that when Marin wrote to Beckett for permission to use his plays as a basis for her new work, she was not only invited to meet with him but received Beckett’s wholehearted endorsement for her project.

Marin’s May B borrows from Beckett’s stagecraft the almost claustrophobic enclosed space of the stage — similar to Petrouchka’s cell — and imbues it with elements of Beckett’s choreography as in the rhythmical, shuffling steps of the dancers in the opening section. The ten dancers move sometimes as one, each with their individuality but dependent on the group; squabbling, testiness and greed coexist with moments of friendship, love and lust. There is the bitter humour of the oppressed, the sense of the absurdity of life, and of endless entrances and departures. The stage design, the lighting (by Albin Chavignon), the costumes (by Louise Marin) and the exaggerated makeup are all integral to the choreography, and Marin’s use of music by Franz Schubert, the raunchy street music of Gilles de Binche and, in the third section, Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Love Never Failed Me Yet contributes to the layering of the work’s emotional power.

May B was first performed in 1981. Looking back at a filmed version from that year, it is apparent that the integrity of the work has not suffered over time and that the current performers have the maturity and sensibility to maintain the qualities of the original. What has changed, perhaps, is the context of the work in relation to the present time. May B is bleak in rendering the despair of helplessness and powerlessness, emotions that are currently evident in our environment, at home and abroad, but which are either sanitised by the media or muted to the point of silence by political deviance. The theatre is one of the few places where the perilous state of humanity can be depicted, albeit in notional form, but such a theatrical work has to meet its audience head on to provoke a response. There was a perceptible sense at Sadler’s Wells that the work was appreciated on a superficial level but that its understated savagery failed to break through the expectations of current commercial theatre.

Marin was brought up in a politically active family, and her political vision has always co-existed with her stage practice. At Sadler’s Wells this political activism came up against a cultural obstacle. Following recent performances in Europe of May B, Marin has read her statement on the aggression on Gaza by the State of Israel; she has done so without hindrance from the venues, but the director of Sadler’s Wells, Sir Alistair Spalding, prohibited her from reading it, saying an artist’s message should be expressed in the work and citing neutrality and audience concerns. According to Maguy Marin company president, Antoine Manologlou, Marin’s message included a specific reference to one of Sadler’s Wells’ sponsors, Barclays Bank, that among its investments supports the purchase of arms in Israel. When Marin and members of her company defiantly handed out her statement on printed flyers to the audience as they left the theatre on May 22, security staff intervened aggressively to prevent the action.

The irony is that the imagery of May B — the discarded shoes, the suitcases, the hunger, the despair — implicitly refers to the deprivations of refugees as well as victims of holocaust. There is no shortage of explicit support for the victims of the Jewish Holocaust in museums, works of art, films and public memorials, but solidarity with other victims of oppression and genocide are less openly encouraged. One might argue, as Spalding evidently did, that the work should speak for itself, but that is to hide, in this particular instance, the complicity of the presenter. Marin’s activism extended logically from the work to bring its implicit message into the realm of contemporary politics. Her defiance came from the integrity of the artist, and its attempted repression represents the perversity of cultural authority.

DANSOX Summer School, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford

Dansox Inaugural Summer School, St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, July 6-8

The inaugural DANSOX Summer School, curated by Professor Sue Jones over a three-day weekend at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford, brought together scholars, authors, critics and practitioners to share their knowledge of dance as a language on a multitude of levels. Alastair Macaulay, former chief dance critic of the New York Times, anchored each daily session with a talk about a major influence on our dance heritage — Marius Petipa, George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham respectively — illustrated with extensive video footage. As a dance critic of long standing, Macaulay approached each body of work with a perspective that was rich in historical detail and, in the case of Cunningham, personal association. His interpretations were the fruit of repeated viewings and reflection, while he filled out the lives of their creators and interpreters with a propensity for vibrant and often amusing anecdotes. The broad canvas he painted each morning set the tone for the sessions that followed. 

After Macaulay’s lecture on Petipa, historian Moira Goff gave a talk on and a demonstration of baroque dance. While classical ballet steps (and their terms) derive from the French court, Goff displayed the form and dynamics of those steps from Feuillet’s notation, and how they developed from France to the English Restoration stage. She not only gave clues to the form of a performance from this era but showed how these origins of classical ballet technique lead us inexorably to Petipa’s vocabulary in the late nineteenth century. 

Researcher and author Julia Bührle provided more historical detail in her talk on two important dancing masters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, John Weaver in England and Jean-Georges Noverre in France. Each wrote a treatise that legitimized ballet d’action in terms of literary sources and Bührle cites Weaver’s 1717 spectacle, The Loves of Mars and Venus, and Noverre’s 1763 Medée et Jason as the forerunners of narrative ballet. 

Bringing us into the twentieth century, filmmaker Lynne Wake introduced her documentary, Queen and Béjart: Ballet For Life. Béjart took his choreographic inspiration from the music of Queen to celebrate the lives of those like Jorge Donn and Freddie Mercury who had died young as a result of AIDS. The documentary combines rehearsals by Béjart Ballet Lausanne (an outstanding cast directed by Gil Roman) with outtakes from 1997 footage by David Mallett of the first performance of Ballet For Life in Paris. Wake’s documentary is moving in both its filming and its editing (by Christopher Bird), and shows how the lineage of classical ballet has evolved from the confines of a royal court to a vast public arena.

Each day followed a similar pattern of synaptic sparks tying all the talks and demonstrations together. After Macaulay’s lecture on Balanchine, musicologist and dance researcher Renata Bräuninger gave an incisive talk on Balanchine’s musicality followed by Gabriela Minden’s exploration of Tamara Karsarvina’s experiment in gestural choreography (harking back to Weaver and Noverre) for J.M. Barrie’s 1920 play The Truth about the Russian Dancers, and by Maggie Watson’s paper on aspects of the pastoral in Sir Frederick Ashton’s Daphnis and Chloe. 

While each talk revealed how much historical and theoretical research on dance is still waiting in the wings, Susie Crow offered a practical approach to the history and theory of the ballet class with the help of pianist Jonathan Still and dancers Ben Warbis and Ellie Ferguson of Yorke Dance Project. This vital focus on balletic training is linked to current teaching practice, which in turn drives the future direction of classical ballet. Keeping on the subject of practice, Jennifer Jackson and composer Tom Armstrong organised a workshop with dancers Courtney Reading and Gabrielle Orr on Sleeping Beauty, showing how their contemporary approach to both classical choreography and its musical score can generate a fresh interest in such iconic works. 

Following two talks by Fiona Macintosh and Tom Sapsford that linked dance and the classics, the final day continued with Macaulay’s lecture on Cunningham, and Sir Richard Alston’s demonstration, with dancer Elly Braund, of his relationship to Cunningham’s choreography throughout his dance career and in subsequent dances he created on his own company. The notion of classicism in dance was a theme throughout the DANSOX summer school and it concluded where it began with that most ‘classical’ of choreographers, Petipa. On hand was author and former dance critic, Nadine Meisner, to celebrate the launch of her Marius Petipa, The Emperor’s Ballet Master, ‘the first biography in English of this monumental figure of ballet history’, published appropriately by Oxford University Press.