sarma

Four dancers lit ethereally against the darkness, their arms extended elegantly to their sides. Their loincloths and bikini tops contribute to an exotic scene, until a slowly intensifying, merciless light creates a violent counterpoint to their Eastern elegance. Arco Renz offers with Opium a performance as an intoxication of associations. With a weighty text and strong, theatrical atmosphere, he creates a piece that treads between abstract dance and Eastern refinement.

Like its predecessor Dreamlands, Opium is a carefully choreographed total work of art made of light, sound, image, and dance. Renz holds his female dancers in a state of monomaniacal concentration for almost forty minutes, with their outstretched arms half-disappearing in the darkness, or else occupied with an unending circular motion, like the arms of a windmill. Joining the oppressive lighting and repetitive score, a voice describes idyllic places that are at the same time strangely ominous. The formerly attractive feminine forms slowly swell to embody an unspoken violence. Their movement grows more intense until it achieves a terrible perfection: savagely flailing arms that contrast sharply with the motionless lower halves of the dancers' bodies, which are seemingly chained to the ground.

Opium aims to find a union between dance and word. The lengthy spoken monologue includes fragments from Edgar Allen Poe, Borges, and McLuhan. We hear visions of a world until kingdom come, including boundless deserts, a wink of a woman, morning glory and the twilight. Combined with the choreography and projected images, the monologue carries the production on a suggestive, peculiar turn. An opium-induced ecstasy where past and future are indistinguishable, where memory coincides with desire.

Opium is an intriguing production with weirdly beautiful dance sequences and a precisely defined atmosphere. It is dance that shrouds itself in mystery, like a dream voyage on the edge of nightmare.