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Jun 28 2008
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dance, ethics, journalism, media, reviews, starred, travel, Venice Biennale, Wayne McGregor

Biennale di Venezia: 6. Festival Internazionale di Danza Moderna

 
 
A slightly different version of this text has appeared on vibewire.net.
 
 

Wayne McGregor / Random Dance Company. Photo: Ravi Deepres.

1. dance in is the air

It is impossible to adequately explain the artichoke-like nature of Venice, with its layers beneath layers: paths for American tourists, paths for Italian tourists, paths for cultural tourists, paths for temporary residents, paths for real Venetians (those rare creatures). The path to Biennale is hardly close to the heart of this strange city: ensconced in Arsenale, the gigantic medieval shipyard in Castello, the poor and least picturesque of the six sestieri, where most inhabitants live oblivious to the two-week clamour of the cultural elite attending the dances. Going through the maze of makeshift laneways within this enormous industrial emptiness framed with the tall Arsenale walls, one cannot help noticing that highbrow culture today is a restricted-access good, just like the wealth within this phenomenally important shipyard once was. Walled away from this city, Biennale della Danza Contemporanea is a curiously generic, place-unspecific, mid-Italian / pan-European event, its audience all high heels, expensive clothes, melange of accents. Despite the tentative Choreographic Collison, a workshop with young local choreographers, now in its second year, it feels very much like the local people have nothing to do at this Biennale. Coming out into the bleak calle [street] outside, containing nothing but a single, generic, Bangladeshi-run bar serving pasta and mediocre coffee, one could be in an industrial anywhere in Europe.

The theme to this year’s Biennale, directed by Ismael Ivo, is Beauty, understood in the least cynical, least sardonic way. “Today beauty is used to promote the trade, the commercialization of the image”, says Ivo, adding: “It is thus not an expression of an interior virtue, but a purely external manifestation.” His is a provocation to rethink aesthetic pleasure, taking into consideration our emotive, energetic responses to beauty.

2. francesca harper

The dangers of the theme are best exemplified by Francesca Harper’s Fragile Stone Theory 2K8 / Interactive Feast, a compilation piece created specially for Biennale, on the theme of the relationship of a person to beauty, freedom and anxiety that a female artist feels in relation, again, to beauty. A mixed-media piece, Fragile Stone would have worked infinitely better if there was more dancing, and less of everything else. Harper’s dancers are a beautiful group, svelte, strong and precise, and the second act, exclusively danced, was a pleasure to behold. Not enough, however, to shake us awake after the endless first act, which was a burlesque of a kind, a headless melange of live signing, video performance, short bursts of dancing interrupted by conceptualising fluff. Too much of the time was filled with inspirational songs, snippets of autobiographical cocooning, and well-meaning messages, to realise the concentrated energy that a dance work needs.


Francesca Harper Project. Photo credits: La Biennale di Venezia.

Fragile Stone Theory was an attempt at fusing two very different kinds of energy: the liberated, empowering r’n’b of a strong-minded African-American woman, and contemporary dance that works its magic best when restricted, when struggling to find the way out, when in pain. The combination is always forced, and Fragile Stone Theory ended up resembling a rock concert way too much (a similar mistake was made by Robert Wilson in The Temptations of St Anthony, also filled with simplistic messages). When not achingly literal, when aiming to be an aesthetic knock-out, contemporary dance is fundamentally an art of condensed abstraction, and there is nothing evasive, nothing in any way indirect in the kind of music that Harper performs. While the monochrome, feminine strength of Duet, Trio and Solo, complete with bondage-like costumes, led towards a strong-minded exploration of the concept of beauty, the overall effect was deflated by the literalness of the large part of the performance.

3. wayne mcgregor

I first encountered Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance Company in 2003, when they performed Nemesis at the Dance Week Festival in Zagreb. A bit of a geek choreographer, in the widely anticipated Entity McGregor has teamed up with neuroscientists and cognitive scientists to explore the relationship between the brain and the moving body. The piece developed from the idea of an artificial intelligence that assumes the choreographing role, a software that generates movement through independent thought.

There are visible preoccupations in the piece with the random, accidental nature of movement, yet defined and born by naturally occurring mathematical equilibrium and order. The performance opens and closes with a Muybridge-like video of a running greyhound, a strange and beautiful perpetuum mobile, enchanting in its rhythmic repetitiveness. Mathematical formulas and laws are referenced in the sparse video projected onto the three wings of Patrick Burnier's construction enclosing the set, reminiscent of Leonardo’s machines. Two music choices, a modern classical piece by Joby Talbot, performed by the Navarra Quartet (sadly, not live in this performance), and the electronic clubscape of Jon Hopkins, are both products of creative processes fuelled by the appreciation of randomness as much as the alignment with strict mathematical rules. Burnier's costumes are decorated with their own DNA codes.


Eadweard Muybridge: Woman with a Bucket

However, Random also dance a terrific dance: it is possible to be blissfully unaware of these intellectual preoccupations and still enjoy the performance. McGregor’s signature vocabulary has not changed since 2003: it is still a dance concentrated firmly in the hips, shoulders, ankles and wrists. It has by now been consolidated into a system, paradoxically not dissimilar from the classical vocabulary. Trios are prevalent over duets, quartets and loose group movement abound. 60 minutes of this diptych are filled to the brim, and the space absolutely activated, with rapid movement, dense arrangement of limbs into most exquisitely unexpected combinations, bodies arching, contorting, kicking, curling, coiling, closely conversing with the music.

In the phenomenal first half, lithe, androgynous bodies seem to bounce back and forth from the thoughtless, inhumane particles into feeling, touching creatures seeking comfort of another human being in a series of groping, tender, desexualised duets. The second part is more legible, but less engaging. Bodies, sexualised back by the stripping of their unisex singlets into black underwear, undergo a series of transformations: from brainless, unconscious blubber into individualised bodies, connecting with one another on an instinctive level, gaining apparent consciousness and re-connecting with genuine emotion, separating to finally achieve intelligence. Entity closes as the monophonic, glorious frenzy of our data-streamed, hyperactive present. The final images of these re-humanized bodies, dancing each one to its own logic connected the chaos of brainless matter to the chaos of a thousand souls, yet the overall effect was somewhat flat, somewhat tiring, no doubt also due to the monotone electronic white noise.

Where McGregor excels is the minute choreographic detail: the exquisite duets, both asexual and emotionally needy (there is no more sexual tension in his male/female duets than there is in the fine-grained interaction he creates between two male bodies); and the complex relationships between the dancers on stage. One moment, a motionless duet in the background of a solo: man lying down, his head in her lap; in another, the power balance of two dancers disrupted by the third, merely standing on the stage. The all-female group seems to perform a rapid, randomized shuffle of movement, every so often settling into one classical feminine pose, as if directed by an accelerating, virus-infected computer; and finally, a rapt, frantic duet is paused for a mere second, and a soft kiss exchanged.


Wayne McGregor / Random Dance Company. Photo: John Ross.

This is Beauty with capital B, for sure. It is, also, a spectacle. However brutal, the slick and shiny surface of Entity is never broken by anything as disruptive as a mistake, a question. From beginning to the end, it is a harsh, yet unfliching statement on human relationships.

4. the beast within

There is no more uncertainty in McGregor’s worldview filled with smooth, young androids than there is in Francesca Harper’s comforting song-and-dance. What Biennale Danza presents with these two pieces is a set of clinically precise pictures of what we may find beautiful, asking us to feel more widely, perhaps, but certainly to suspend judgement. Gliding along the canals of this beautiful city, among other beautiful, stylish theatre-goers, it is easy to do so, and yet flatter ourselves to be doing something courageous, something daring. We are shielded not only from the multiple quotidian problems Venice faces, not only from the social reality of this troubled country, but from the entire remaining world. Kicking the mounds of rubbish piling up along the sides of the Venetian street as I walk home, it strikes me all as somewhat indulgent.

6. Festival Internazionale di Danza Contemporanea. Venice, 14-29 June 2008. www.labiennale.org.

Fragile Stone Theory 2K8 / Interactive Feast. Artistic project, direction and choreography: Francesca Harper. Video: Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty. Music: Wynne Bennett and Francesca Harper. Performers: Francesca Harper, Hattie Mae Williams, Josh Johnson, Julius Hollingsworth, Clement Mensah, Dominique Rosales, Giulia Fedeli. Dramaturgy: Julius Hollingsworth. Costumes: David Grevengoed, Gabi Mai, Carmen Wren. The Francesca Harper Project, June 19-20; Teatro Piccolo Arsenale;

Entity. Concept/ Direction: Wayne McGregor. Choreography: Wayne McGregor in collaboration with the dancers: Neil Fleming Brown, Catarina Carvalho, Agnès López Rio, Paolo Mangiola, Angel Martinez Hernandez, Anh Ngoc Nguyen, Anna Nowak, Maxime Thomas, Antoine Vereecken, Jessica M Wright. Original Music 1: Joby Talbot, performed by Navarra Quartet. Original Music 2: Jon Hopkins, performed by Jon Hopkins. Lighting Design: Lucy Carter. Digital Video Design: Ravi Deepres. Set / costumes: Patrick Burnier. June 20-22; Teatro alle tese – Arsenale; 6. Festival Internazionale di Danza Contemporanea, Venice.

Jun 19 2008
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journalism, reviews, theatre

On horror and criticism: a review of reviews.

My careful reader by now knows that a moment of great opinionatedness is coming right after the word 'Anglo', paired with this or that. However, Anglo theatre criticism has again genuinely disappointed, via Londoners' professional reactions to Relocated by Anthony Nielson.

Giulia Merlo, the future star of London's criticism, offers a swift explanation of why it is so, in a beautiful sequence of appreciation for works of art which, just like Relocated, draw their excellence from a fine, delicate portrayal of a state, an emotion. Relocated, staged in a tiny, dark space, with an immensely ugly set that is all black walls and low ceilings, draws us into the state of mind of a person so frightened as to be way beyond hysterical, a person for whom traumas ooze from every crack in her world. It is almost unbearably scary: I have spent entire three quarters of this play waiting to be let out. And of course this is magnificent. At the end, we know exactly how soul-crushing it would be to be locked up in a basement, what anguish one needs to live with after being unwittingly involved in a murder, and to which extent it never leaves you, never. We know things that cannot be explained in words: we have experienced pure feeling.

And yet, review after review, Londoners are giving dry thumbs up. Commendable, but insufficient. And a theme is emerging: I’m not sure if that is what Anthony Neilson had in mind for his latest devised/written-up piece, writes Ian Shuttleworth in Financial Times, adding: I’m not sure about much of its 80 minutes. I’m not sure if I’d claim that there was a theme to Anthony Neilson’s work, continues London Theatre Goer. Karen Fricker judges for Variety: More time was required to sort out what comes across as an egregiously provocative conceit. The jewel in this crown is probably Michael Billington’s one-out-of-five-stars’ review:

…I kept asking myself to what end we were being scared other than to give us a morbidly indecent thrill and to tickle our jaded theatrical appetites. …if Neilson's play offers any general thesis, it is that, confronted by cases of the maltreatment of children, society resorts to facile condemnation without examining the causes. Coming from a writer who has played on our own voyeuristic curiosity, that strikes me as a bit rich.

Of course the production, designed by Miriam Buether and sepulchrally lit by Chahine Yavroyan, is effectively staged. But that is beside the point. In the end, the evening appeals to the same debased instinct that leads tourists to stand outside Josef Fritzl's Austrian home and take photographs. I emerged both shaken and spiritually diminished.

With due respect, what theatrical sensibility (ie, the ability to enjoy a piece of theatre for being a piece of theatre) Michael Billington may possess is a mystery to me. To be fair, other reviewers generally praise Neilson’s oeuvre with purposeful conviction. Caroline McGinn, in TimeOut, concedes: What this play does most effectively is grab you by the pulse and keep you there, quaking, for every one of its 80 minutes. Sam Marlowe, in Times Online, praises: This is work that disturbingly demands its audience's complicity, and leaves an indelible stain on the memory. And the most felt response probably comes from Paul Taylor in The Independent, who concludes his review stating: As well as offering a weird perspective on the idea of loyalty and fatherly protectiveness, this brilliantly directed piece takes us to a place that's inaccessible to news reports and editorials. Once seen, never forgotten.

But still, commendable, yet inadequate. For here we have all the usual ails: the need to assess as good or bad, the need to decipher the theme, the meaning, the purpose of the exercise, and an idea of art as a polemic, rather than what Susan Sontag called a thing in the world, something to sensually experience, appreciate for its own sake.

Giulia rightly points out the piece that Anthony Nielson wrote for The Guardian Theatre blog over a year ago, which pre-empts Billington’s review:

“Many critics still believe theatre has a quasi-educational/political role; that a play posits an argument that the playwright then proves or disproves. It is in a critic's interest to propagate this idea because it makes criticism easier; one can agree or disagree with what they perceive to be the author's conclusion. It is not that a play cannot be quasi-educational, or even overtly political – just that debate should organically arise out of narrative. But this reductive notion persists and has infected playwriting root and branch.”

Instead of further discussing Anthony Nielson or Relocated (bare with me for now when I say only that it magnificently filed and polished the production to take full advantage of the cast, the space, the time and the audience: it was theatre at its most realised), I would like to jump to a piece Andrew Haydon wrote in his blog, Postcards from the Gods, on the discussion he had with some Western theatre critics.

In his beautiful text, Andrew discusses a thoughtful analysis of an abysmal piece of theatre given by a Slovenian critic, which he considered “startingly eloquent”, yet probably more interesting than the piece itself. He gives thought to the schism between Anglo critics, mostly newspaper-, dedicated to hailing a masterpiece or burying a turd at as short a notice as possible, and Western critics, more interested in interpreting and explaining and discussing. Esslin has written on the same before, linking it to different programming logic between these two theatre cultures. However, Haydon poignantly concludes:

“In many ways, partly because of this lack of a serious intellectual culture in British public life, having a more creative, interpretative critical culture wouldn’t make much sense as there simply aren’t that many plays being produced that would benefit from such rigours being applied to them. While say Martin Crimp and Howard Barker might enjoy such a regime change, current critical favourites from Alan Bennett to Roy Williams would find themselves left a bit out in the cold. The fact of the matter is, not much British theatre is actually very arty. It wears its messages and meanings plastered all over its sleeves and generally prefers to offer stories that anyone can readily understand with messages that it would take serious concentration to overlook. I generalise, but not by much. At the same time, this divergence of critical thought does explain why both Crimp and Barker, not to mention Sarah Kane and Mark Ravenhill, receive so much warmer receptions on mainland Europe than in Britain. It also provides the answer as to why so many normally intelligent, thoughtful British critics treat work by some of Europe’s more successful but idiosyncratic directors as if it is something to be debunked and dismissed.”

The ultimate crime is that Billington appears completely unfazed by the sheer terrifying joy and beauty of Relocated, preferring to ignore it for its lack of clear motto, a statement of intent. The fact that Neilson manages to combine interpretable depth with clear sensual pleasure somehow isn’t enough, because , firstly, sensual pleasure is in this case visual, tactile, emotional, and not merely witty dialogue, and Anglos are rather unaccustomed to treat visual stimuli seriously; and second, because muddy semantics lack clarity, that ultimate quality praised in an essay. Or a review, for that matter.

As of myself, I am still trying to talk with the play, rather than about it (oh I know you couldn't tell, not now!; but give me a minute). That, to me, is a respectful response. I am glad to be back in Europe, to have access to different traditions of theatre writing, and to finally escape that Anglo need to justify any intellectual effort in tangible terms: monetary profit, benefit to the reader, informing the audience.

The best thing a European critic does to the audience is teaching it how to see.

Jun 05 2008
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atmospheric, dance, journalism, kitsch, Meryl Tankard, reviews

Meryl Tankard; two stories.

After the untimely death of the brilliant Tanja Liedtke, the just-announced artistic director of the Sydney Dance Company, the company commissioned work from three choreographers, ad hoc, to fill up 2008 while in transition. Meryl Tankard was one. Inuk2 was based on her 1997 Inuk, meaning 'human' in Inuit, a work I haven't seen. By a choreographer I don't know, performed by an ensemble that's just a group of strangers to me.

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Meryl Tankard and Sydney Dance Company in rehearsal. Photo: Steven Siewert

The first is the key to the beauty of dance.

The key to the beauty of dance is half-unlocking for me through the way I always prefer to post photos of a dance moment, rather than video clips. The sheer beauty of the human body, of the movement congealed, arms and legs stuck in time, hanging off the layers of thick air. Can you see what I'm saying here? For the longest time I dreamed of being a theatre photographer. I would smuggle cameras into the auditorium and steal photos like kisses, of curtain calls, of bare feet, of midmotion and endmotion and premotion.

(I was hoping, one day, to take photos of rehearsals. A rehearsal is ontologically the other side of the construction of a shopping mall, or a suburb. Walking through Melbourne Central half-finished, once upon a time, I was observing the retreat of reality, of texture and meaning, in front of polished layers of the Gruen Transfer. A rehersal is a layering of truth, quite the opposite. Hence the opening photo.)

Meryl Tankard's Inuk2 was going to be my final splurge in this godforsaken land, a piece of Australia to take traveling with me. Was it? It was. After a stint at Next Wave (forthcoming) viewing 'indigenous' theatre that, to broadbrush, didn't seem to come from very deep, it felt almost aboriginal, unashamed, in the way it invoked this country, the experience of this country. It was a dance from the stomach, not the mind.

And it succeeds and it fails, of course. Just like Australia, it doesn't quite know whether it's gruesome drama or a gentle comedy. The first part, The Freeway, is exquisite: all 1930s or so, gentle, feminine, a pointe, with a beautiful girl dissolving into the ethereal immensity, say, of the road. Lost children, the engulfment of the wilderness. Beautiful lighting design. I thought, this is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on stage. The next moment, as we come through to the other side, suddenly we have feminist gymnastics. The Tribe is the longest, most repetitive and most philosophically dubious part: although it gave me some food for thought over politically engaged art, what if the feminist in me disagrees? What if women will never beat men in physical fight and what if that's not the point? So I suffered through. Perhaps it's my aversion to group sports.

The third part, The Party, after the interval, is another brutalist look at Australia: goddamn, there is something about that billboard of the blue sky. It was wiping the floor with the audience. Dancing, drinking, mating rituals, and a harrowing sequence that will be remembered as the Binge Drinking moment; all under this billboard. The rubbish! The crying! Balkan Beat Box in a dingy discotheque: we are a global tribe after all.

With the unruly and imprecise (not to mention aggressively laid-back), but so is Australia, The End out of the way, all four corners of this country were covered: a brush at sublime, the youthful energy, the unstructured dark night, and the final slapstick song&dance. No wonder one is confused about whether life here is happy or utterly miserable. It seemed so Australian that it almost made fun of my intention to keep Inuk2 in my heart during overseas travels; as if it said, this is how we do things here! When we're unsure of the message or the mood, we attach a lightweight coda.

Inuk2 is patchy, but gutsy. Convinced in ideas, but not in execution. It is very much the product of a company in transition working with a new choreographer. Not everyone comfortable in their roles, not everyone utilised best. The bold and beautiful Sarah-Jayne Howard visibly excels, but is also Tankard's frequent collaborator and not a member of SDC. The random succession of music, moods and styles was deliberate, and if it worked, it worked to the extent to which strong scenes rhythmically broke this mechanical rotation of scenes, this MTV drone. Again the photo quality of dance. Suspension of air and body. But there was a too-muchness: too many superfluous people on stage, too many disagreeing elements. Nina Simone!, Inuit singing!, r'n'b! The water extravaganza at the end was annoying, rather than adorable, and not everyone seemed convinced by their direction.

So, like tourists, we are left with a collection of beautiful images not quite giving us the answers. The lines in the airport tarmac. The blue sky billboard. The drunk woman. The tribal games. The rubbish. Oh the rubbish. And if that didn't remind me of one very early, muggy morning in Portugal, when newspapers and rubbish were rolling everywhere, taking over the streets (something about the street cleaning in Portugal was explained to me), and I felt cold, unhappily in love and disappointed in the state of humanity, and I'm sure many people had the same pangs of recognition in same intervals, I don't know if I would call it successful.

As it ended, though, with the beautiful images hung at regular intervals on the walls of this lunapark ride, it was puzzling and beautiful and rewarding.

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Have a look.

Photo credits: Regis Lansac

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The second is the theatre audience.

Sitting in the foyer of the Arts Centre at these un-indy shows, these big ballet shows with ballet audiences, always full of skinny (skim?) girls with long curled hairs and slight tweenager make-up and semi-high heels, and their mothers with plucked eyebrows and furs, you understand, all black and stylish, I used to feel like I used to feel in front of Europeans (we all have our Europeans, perhaps). I used to feel alone, and short-haired and perplexed in front of this teeming femininity, somehow untaught the rules of being a girl and, by extension, of being civilized: the rules and reasons to hair removal, to make-up, to the tricks of always smelling of expensive perfume, not dry sweat, and the entire cacophony of confusion over what women do in toilets.

The awareness of my grandmother, who may have read the entire Chekhov – reading is a cheap hobby, thank Lord for socialism and libraries – but has never been to ballet. The expensive good seats, the glossy programs with artistic pictures (quite unlike the little gold-coin-donation ones I am used to), it all combines into a feeling of not quite awkwardness, but, rather, of being completely alone.

I am sure there are those who don't like the idea of cheap seats, of matinées, of young immigrants speaking too loudly in their theatres, stepping on their feet or making out in opera. I'm sure there exist those willing to argue of the benefit of rules of conduct, dress codes, conversation etiquette. More so in Europe, or even North America, than in this convict colony. But they exist.

Later, when the show starts, it doesn't matter anymore. The questions of how many good eyebrows are raised over scenes of binge drinking don't even feature. We are all equals in front of art. But outside, in the foyer, I am as alone as in front of death. I am de-tribed.

Does that change our perspective of the play?

by Jana Perkovic

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