Encontros Acarte ’90: Showdown (Part Two)
You can read more about André Lepecki and his poetics as a writer on the following link: http://www.sarma.be/nieuw/critics/lepecki.htm
CREDITS
Editor Sarma: Myriam Van Imschoot
Editor Portugal: Monica Guerreiro
Research in Lisbon: Jeroen Peeters
Coördination: Steven De Belder, Jeroen Peeters, Charlotte Vandevyver, Myriam Van Imschoot
Translator: Clive Thoms
Financial Support: Portuguese Institute for the Arts
Thank you to: André Lepecki for the contribution to this anthology, BLITZ for giving consent to republish the texts on www.sarma.be, Diana Teixeira (typiste)
In the final week of the Encontros Acarte, the Portuguese audience learned to boo. They like it! We’re all Europeans now.
4. Jean-Claude Gallotta
France is the country of excess, of the bigger and more colourful the better. Faced with a choice between Man and Nature, the French prefer the monumental. Over-rationalization of everything is also part of their attitude to life, probably a hand-down from René Descartes. It was Descartes who made a clear separation between mind and body, in a sort of rational-schizophrenic delirium. Since then the French have never understood the subtle unity of bodies and have energetically set about creating aesthetic monstrosities (please forgive the redundancy): they seize on the most philosophical and ponderous discourse with one hand, and then sex bombs and animal passions with the other, tie up the pineal gland and there you go! How else can you explain Moons in the Gutter and pyramids at the Louvre? In the fatherland of structuralism, surface is very important. There’s nothing French about Bauhaus.
Is it worth going into all of this to talk about Gallotta’s show Les Mystères de Subal presented in the Main Auditorium of the Gulbenkian Foundation on 11 and 12 September? I think so, because this is the only way I can find of understanding why Gallotta is regarded as one of the geniuses of contemporary French dance.
The show derives its strength from technology employed with good taste – clean, bright and shiny. The lighting by Manuel Bernard is faultless, the stage effects remarkable, the sets definitively chic, the music, although horribly banal, is clean and perkily irreverent to perfection (Gallotta is Young). But in structural terms the choreography derives strength from nothing at all. Gallotta has gone in for a collage of “moments”, each with its own unity, but in a show lasting an hour and half, the 22 constitutive moments really need to hang together with some sort of structural cohesion. In the absence of any organic or logical sense, the coherence of the piece can only be guessed at (unless it be the terrorist logic of the unexplained dead body, which is clearly not the case) and the result is a total vacuum.
I wouldn’t say that Gallotta is completely without talent and creative capacity (he has the huge intellectual advantage of being able to laugh at himself). But the show he brought over is weak and the few good moments seem to be more the fruit of statistical probability rather than the outcome of any aesthetic quest. And there are two good passages: the solo by the decadent faun, surrounded by delicious nymphs, an all-macho dream and nightmare, and the idea of having one of the dancers play some rock music from time to time (in this case only the idea, please note. The music was a disaster). The dancers are quite good and the bearded gentleman (the faun) was the best of them.
The result is a technological hybrid, with some erotic (or what passes for erotic in France) phantoms mixed in, and lots of post-modern messages.
5. DV8 Physical Theatre
A single performance on the 13th, in the Main Auditorium, of this interesting show by the English company created (the show and the company) by Lloyd Newson. This is the antithesis of Gallotta and Saporta: intelligent and measured exploration of resources, and whilst the sets are vast, they are simple, functional and make sense for the choreography as a whole. The latter is structured around exploration of childhood memories, through immersion in the dancers’ memories.
The piece starts with a woman lying in the middle of a circle of white light, the rest of the stage in complete darkness. She moves slowly for a few moments, followed by a black-out, and then the lights come up slowly to reveal other elements of this fantastical universe which recalls Max Ernst and de Chirico. Everything will turn on the exploration of this surreal universe. The free association of ideas is combined in an exploration of childhood memories. The use of ropes on which the dancers hang in the air, together with the dancer stage left obsessively building sandcastles, the games, fights, jealousy and cruelty are typical of this infernal state of childhood combine intelligently to produce the intended dreamlike atmosphere.
Then comes the disappointment. In trying to explain the story better, Lloyd Newson has ended up by ruining the coherence and magic of the piece. He has got wrapped up in levels of discourse and then not managed to undo the knot. The dancers change into conventional black and white clothing, to say they have reached adulthood, and begin to dance comme il faut. On the other hand, in order to resolve the problem of the dream world which had existed up to this point, there are a series of moments which are confusingly designed to show the confrontation between the feminine person (the one who appears alone at the beginning) with the world beyond her dreams. It is ugly and banal: doors which open, and show “The Light” and she is caught in a kind of hypnotic trance, not knowing whether to go or to stay, and she ends up staying. In this context, the idea of using a mirror-like image and choreographic formalism as metaphors of order and symmetry, contrasting with the dreamlike chaos of the child’s universe makes sense but gets lost because of its duration.
If we accept the premises of the choreography, we can deal with the duration of an hour or so without any trouble. The dancers are very good, sure-footed, daring and intelligent in their performances. The sets are effective and coherent and it’s only a shame that the lighting design is rather dull, although it works well enough. The music is useless, but in this the show follows what seems to be the rule for this year’s Encontros Acarte.
6. The big showdown: the great Jan Fabre
Jan Fabre is a visual artist. He is also, and secondly, a choreographer. The piece presented in the Main Auditorium of the Gulbenkian Foundation is one of the most intelligent deconstructions of what dance with a capital D was and can be.
At the start, we are confronted with an empty stage, beautiful pure blue, but not that electric blue we had so far seen in the many pieces presented in the festival, the hygienic and aseptic blue of the video age. This was a very ancient, dirty blue, heavy, laden with intention and presence. Intensely present.
At the edges of the stage two men wearing armour are sitting. Just sitting. They don’t look at us, they’re not doing that business of showing that “they” are up there and “we” are in the audience. Not a bit. They are beings who live in that world and there they are. Sitting.
High up in the middle, over a small niche, the picture (because this is in fact a picture) and the symmetry are completed by a naked woman with her back to the wall. The axis of symmetry which divides but structures the scene is the same as that which unites and supports her body (any body): the line dividing her buttocks, the back bone. This is where the beauty of Fabre’s poetic exploration of the nature of dance and the nature of art begins: at the root of both lies our body as the seat and fountain of all the ghosts, of all the symbols. You shiver. You sense something extraordinary is about to happen. And it does.
From each side of the stage four women appear in perfect symmetry, again wearing armour. They move in unison, each half the mirror image of the other. The movement is precise and strict, and will be repeated until the end of the piece. Only the degree to which the bodies are exposed will vary; they remove more clothes at the start of each main cycle. First they present themselves facing the audience, then with their backs to us, in order to say that if on one axis our body is redundant (one half is the image of the other), on another axis it is unsuspected and unknown even to ourselves: we can only get to know it through mediation.
Jan Fabre plays with time and in time. The exhaustive (and I mean exhaustive) exploration of the same movement or phrase during a performance lasting almost an hour might look like minimalism. But that would be to miss the point. The idea is to try to communicate something very old and essential in dance: a kind of hypnosis, a trance-like state. But instead of an excess of stimuli and rhythmic frenzy, he plays with the calm and precision of a Shinto ritual. The figure is that of an ascetic. In Vertigo, during the first part of the film, Hitchcock uses a similar process to create a universe which is fantastic without being fantastical and hypnotic without entering a trance. If you watch carefully, when James Stewart chases Kim Novak through the streets of San Francisco, in the first part of the film, the streets are not only deserted, but they are always the same streets. I only realized this the third time I saw the film, just as I only understood nearly at the end of Fabre’s piece that the dancers’ movements are always the same. Just like Hitchcock in his film, Fabre makes slight scenic variations to punctuate the same-ness: the light increases slightly and then goes back to what it was, someone comes on stage slightly disrupting the symmetry (the hair washing scene with its associated imponderability is a good example), the scissors (with all the inherent symbolism) which descend from the heavens, the snow flakes and the stunning, breathtaking final flight of the owl (yes, a real one) over the empty stage. Amazing.
7. Olga Roriz: going wrong.
The Portuguese dancer and choreographer Olga Roriz was given the task of closing the Encontros Acarte with a forty minute solo, entitled In-Fracções (In-Fractions). As we walked to the open-air amphitheatre, and during the opening minutes of the performance, nothing would lead you to suppose that the fractioning of the choreography which the title suggested would actually mean completely dismembering the choreographic discourse. From the outset we are immersed in the setting. Japanese music plays as we find our places and there, surrounding the island and the ramp where the dancer would move, it became clear that the key concern of Roriz and scenographer Nuno Carinhas is precisely to integrate the various elements of the show.
The Gulbenkian gardens were discreetly lit in green and red, the music rippled around giving a new meaning to a familiar place (and that is one of the functions of art: to renew our way of seeing, to show the familiar in a new light). With Olga Roriz’s entry on stage the coherence grows and the title seems ever more doubtful: the costume is beautiful, the contained movements recall Kabuki theatre, the whole atmosphere is clearly Oriental. But then something happens in the choreography which undoes the web of meaning so skilfully woven by a team which normally and recently (I’m thinking of Idmen B) has worked so well.
Olga Roriz then accumulates a set of movements, more or less grouped together in short moments punctuated by the music (this was the best selection of encounters with John Cage, harmonizing perfectly and surprisingly with Kodo) but without coherence and, what was worse, going in for gimmicks (the clapping, certain arm movements, breathing).
What I think is happening with Olga Roriz at this moment is that she is being transformed into a solitary star in the firmament of Portuguese dance. (It will be no coincidence that this was the first Portuguese show in the entire history of the Encontros Acarte). And from all stars we by definition expect one thing only: that they carry on being just like the audience likes them (or how the audience thinks they are, or should be). Olga Roriz has always achieved a high degree of visual, musical and choreographic coherence in her work. But In-Fracções is a failure. The star system in action?