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.