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Dance Writing: Critical thoughts

SURPRISE AND ART

Yesterday one of the choreographers about whose piece I had written expressed surprise at the style of my reviews. She felt that there was not as much analysis of the idea behind the show as she would like. She also felt that my reviews give too much information to the audience.

My goal with my dance writing is to provide a clear description of what actually took place on stage.

Art totally dependent on surprise is the weakest form of art. Surprise and suspense are the frame on which cheap novels and second-rate films are hung. The Greeks when they went to theatre knew exactly what is going to take place. They already knew the story. Much as when a modern audience goes to Romeo and Juliet or to Hamlet or to King Lear. The pleasure and the catharsis is in the how and not the what.

Thus a quality piece will lose nothing and perhaps gain through the participation of an informed audience.

THEORETICAL WORK AND A WIDER AUDIENCE

There is far too much analytical work being written. The theatre, the show gets lost in the ideas and the words of the critic.

I would like to help people to see what they cannot, due to time and distance and opportunity. If somebody is going to travel to another city and to pay high prices for tickets, I believe that spectator has the right to know exactly why it is they are setting out on this expensive adventure. To encourage them when possible and save them disappointment when inevitable.

Some modern dance shows have reason to fear a too-thorough unveiling. There is nothing except the idea or the concept. There is no worthwhile concession made to the spectator. Often, there is little preparation of either theatre or artist. In passing, I should say the piece of the choreographer who posed me question had nothing to fear in this respect.

For those who are trafficking in the Emperor's new clothes, I have no hesitancy to expose the vacant nakedness of their creations. Let them work to prove otherwise. Let them argue at length about the rigour of their proposition, the severity of their work. Spokesmen and women they have aplenty. I will not be one.

I will always take the part of the audience, before that of the critic, and certainly that of the theorist. Theatre is not theoretical. Theatre is tactile. Anybody who says otherwise would like to see theaters empty. In the last thirty years, sadly this faction has made great strides.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT AND VIDEO

I would like someone to be able to return to my reviews historically in fifty, one hundred or more years and say, a-ha, that was what it was like to be in a theatre in 2005 and see Ultima Vez or Rosas through eyes of the time. To offer an informed perception of that work. In many ways, the ubiquity of video makes written impressions less important. But for the moment, video is still a very transient medium. How much of it will be preserved or successfully preserved is an open question. Particularly stage documentation.

Nor will video be able to replicate the point-of-view of the contemporary audience.

THE WIDER AUDIENCE, EXPANDING HORIZONS

By rejecting the theoretical, there are many that would argue that I preclude myself from being a part of the informed audience.

The tiny coterie for whom much of this modern dance is made, cannot sustain any vital art form. We must as a group work harder to make our work more relevant and accessible to a wider audience.

That includes forceful and appealing advertising campaigns. In many ways, Impulstanz itself is the ideal proselytising effort. There were full motion ads projected on both Museumsquartier and Burgtheater (both central historical buildings with enormous summer pedestrian circulation). There were special pull-out sections in both Der Standard and Falter. There are a number of high-profile shows from the Opera de Paris, through Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker and Wim Wandekeybus. Tickets are carefully kept in short supply (exactly as many shows as Vienna can handle, never more).

A genuine feeling of excitement for the art of dance is generated at Impulstanz. Like nothing else I have ever seen before in the Western world (the Russians' passion for grand ballet is tremendous).

In the same spirit, I offer these dance reviews - as a doorway into a new art for the uninitiated. And also a chance to warn the innocent of what lately calls itself dance but has no more relation to dance than to astronomy.

STYLE IN DANCE WRITING

My first entrance to art was poetry. The poetry of words, of language. Theatre followed. Only much later did I discover dance. For me, dance was a grand revelation. Poetry of the body, of movement.

In the best of my dance writing, I aspire to find a parallel language to mirror the action on the stage. This is very difficult - each piece seen requires a separate vocabulary and style.

GOOD WORK AND LONG REVIEWS

On the intense daily schedule of Impulstanz, I have learned that it is much easier to write about a piece that one does not particularly like. Serious review of work that has touched one strongly requires an intense concentration of thought and energy.

Thus to date there is an unrepresentative concentration of negative reviews here. Impulstanz has been great. There are many absolutely fabulous shows for which I have notes but have not finished the reviews including Les Porteuses de Mauvaises Nouvelle, Raga for the Rainy Season, Isabelle's Room and La Vision du Lapin.

It would be easier to just give an opinion. Perhaps my choreographer friend is right.

Impulstanz: We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR - Erna Ómarsdottir/Emil Hrvatin

Madness before the show. Akademietheater is packed to the rooftops. The lobby a mob-scene of the Vienna and Impulstanz dance worlds. It seems the Icelandic Dance Company's We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR is the most waited for show.

We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR chorus

The curtain is wide open and the action underway when the doors open. The theatre had been stripped to the bare walls.

A drum set in the middle back of the stage. A couple wrestling on the back right corner of the stage. A woman walking upside down on her hands at the left of the stage. Two provocatively dressed women pace back and forth at the front of the stage examining spectators with penetrating eyes.

A man crosses the stage in woman's shoe. He climbs a ladder to the balcony.

A rousing dance and singing number. The two front women urge the whole audience to follow suit. Double clap. Push both arms over your head twice. A hip thrust. Repeat. Over ninety percent of the audience participate.

A light-skinned black chap (Peter Anderson) with a British accent starts to talk about the posting of American soldiers to Iceland. The Icelanders didn't like their daughters mixing or exchanging gifts with the American soldiers. He explained how the daughter of one of them - named Cynthia Wood - appeared in Apocalypse Now as a Bunny Girl.

Her own daughter now appears before us, introduces herself as Rala (co-choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir):

I like soldier and they like me.
I like uniforms but I don't like fighting
and I don't like violence.

Out strides a guy in his late twenties with a mop of pale blond hair and enormous white fur jacket (Flemish dancer Diederik Peeters).

Imagine that there is no heaven.
Imagine that there are no deadlines, no more time pressure, no more aging.
Timeless existence, all the people living for today.
Just imagine.

While he speaks the others dance pressed up against the back wall.

Now Erna Ómarsdóttir sits in the middle of the stage and begins to kiss herself vociferously with obscene mouth. She begins to perform head on her own hand, moving on to fist fuck her own face and then rolls all over the stage kissing it all. Ómarsdóttir and another dancer start to move around the stage in full splits bouncing up and down. It looks all the world like they are having sex with the floor.

A guitarist and a bassist join the drummer on stage and begin to play a hard rock song. The powerful musical score comes from Belgian musical phenomenon PONI. Former Rosas star Alix Eynaudi in a white chiffon skirt and a shiny top brings out three microphones, behind which she, French dancer Alexandra Gilbert and Ómarsdóttir line up.

Alexandra Gilbert (foreground), Erna Ómarsdóttir

Alexandra Gilbert is particularly striking with her long black hair and pale white skin in black clothes. She looks like a sexy vampire straight from the coffin.

After the song, Gilbert and Peeters in his white fur coat begin a dialogue on the cost of sexual services. It gets explicit. He wants to know the prices in heels, in boots, with two, with three girls, with head and without, and Gilbert is happy to oblige with details. In a Comme des Garcons dress an extra 300 euros plus the cost of the dress. Legs behind the head are an extra 129 euros.

Why so much?, he asks.

It took me seven years to learn how to do it, Gilbert ripostes.

Alix Eynaudi sings a song with the chorus "I am laughing" while the Ten Rules for Conduct for Blue Helmets roll slowly up the back wall of the theater.

1. Dress, think, talk, act and behave in a manner befitting the dignity of a disciplined, caring, considerate, mature, respected and trusted soldier, displaying the highest integrity and impartiality. Have pride in your position as a peace-keeper and do not abuse or misuse your authority.
2. Respect the law of the land of the host country, their local culture, traditions, customs and practices.
3. Treat the inhabitants of the host country with respect, courtesy and consideration. You are there as a guest to help them and in so doing will be welcomed with admiration. Neither solicit or accept any material reward, honor or gift.
4. Do not indulge in immoral acts of sexual, physical or psychological abuse or exploitation of the local population or United Nations staff, especially women and children.
5. Respect and regard the human rights of all. Support and aid the infirm, sick and weak. Do not act in revenge or with malice, in particular when dealing with prisoners, detainees or people in your custody.
6. Properly care for and account for all United Nations money, vehicles, equipment and property assigned to you and do not trade or barter with them to seek personal benefits.
7. Show military courtesy and pay appropriate compliments to all members of the mission, including other United Nations contingents regardless of their creed, gender, rank or origin.
8. Show respect for and promote the environment, including the flora and fauna, of the host country.
9. Do not engage in excessive consumption of alcohol or traffic in drugs.
10. Exercise the utmost discretion in handling confidential information and matters of official business which can put lives into danger or soil the image of the United Nations.

While this is going on one of the men sits down in front of a television and begins to play a very violent first person shooter video game. Ironically, the character blowing up cars, houses and other soldiers is wearing a blue helmet. The soundtrack of explosions and shooting is played very loud.

This is perhaps the clearest indictment of modern civilisation in We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR.

Another revue dance number featuring all the women and a couple of the men. "Thank you Vienna. You are the best audience we've ever had." A very strange and banal phrase in the context of all this death and destruction.

A white curtain is pulled across the front of the stage and we have our visit from the platinum blonde man in the fur coat. He proposes us a world with "no countries, no Christians, no Muslims, no Jews, no more military camps, no more Americans, no more, Full Metal Jacket, no more Platoon, no more Hiroshima, no more Cold War, no more Hot War."

There are problems here. First Peeters is heckled by another of the men who mocks him from the darkness at the edge of the stage. Second, his character also manages to come across as delusional and off-balance.

The curtain parts. An incredible loud music set animates three sets of fighting pairs, rolling on the ground and tearing away at one another's eyes. The fighting groups break up and the male performer pastes money onto all the women's forehead as Erna Ómarsdóttir begins to do the blow-job on her hand routine again, followed by the poking of her own eyes out. Soldiers are projected on the back screen marching. Now all three women are doing blow-jobs on their own index and second finger stuck together. They are hopping across the stage in the splits in a gruesome emulation of violent sex.

Erna Ómarsdóttir

Another powerful live music set. Combat belts made up high heels. Peter Anderson and Alex Eynaudi in a vicious combat. Katrín Ingvadóttir rolls out a huge roll of paper towel from the back of the right side of the stage. She then comes back and drops ten huge hunks of raw meat onto the roll evenly spaced.

Alexandra Gilbert returns in her gothic black and high heels. She pours dark red jam down her leg which looks all the world like blood. She starts to lick it off. When she is done, she slowly puts both legs behind her head, as suggested by the earlier conversation about prostitution.

Erna Ómarsdóttir returns with her mouth full of huge metal screws, at least thirty of them which she slowly spits out. A vivid and horrible image.

At the same time Alex Eynaudi sings some kind of love ballad "he had one of those faces..."

At this point, one feels in the middle of a David Lynch film. Very Blue Velvet. I wonder if this is self-conscious or accidental for a moment.

The gentleman in the fur coat returns. "Why did you come here?," he demands.

"Imagine," he asks us again, "a world without fear, no more movies, no more David Lynch, no more dogma movies, no more modern dance, contemporary dance, dance theatre, physical theatre, Mozart, no more imagination, soap operas, breaking news, soccer hooligans."

The piece ends with a rousing rock version of "Life is life". Erna Ómarsdóttir wanders the stage with a huge knife sticking out of her bare chest, bleeding to death while we are treated to projections of a Polish marching band and girl revolutionary.

Lights down. The house goes wild.

---

Strangely, in his final speech the man of peace's propositions are made to seem overtly unattractive. Without the inherent human aggression which sees its most pure manifestation in war, the suggestion is that both the creative and sexual urges would be gone too.

Would we rather live in a world with lots of sex and entertainment and have to put up with a little bit of war or would we rather live in a harmless world devoid of conflict - but bland, dull and passionless.

Initially I felt that this was a strong and imagistic anti-war revue. But now I am not so sure. It seems more to make war inevitable and a necessary part of human nature to be celebrated and appreciated. Certainly a world with Erna Ómarsdóttir and Katrín Ingvadóttir and Alexandra Gilbert in high heels and lust and greed in their eyes, is inevitably more appealing than sitting in darkened huts with a raving albino man in a fur coat for company.

Such a choice is very disturbing. Especially in an explicitly propagandistic piece. It becomes a justification for the roadmap for perpetual war through which we are living.

The overall impression We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR leaves is very adolescent. Blood, soldiers, marching, prostitutes, vampire girls, high heels, heavy rock. On the other hand the issues are real.

Some dramatic concerns. We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR might benefit from a few more low-key moments to appreciate the crescendos. It is a bit like the conversation of a coke-head. It never stops to take a breath. Even Diederik Peeters's just imagine moments are loud and over the top. One is never given enough peace to fully feel the peaks.

The dramaturgy is somewhat fragmented. Who cares about the American soldiers billeted on Iceland in times of peace and this bunny daughter?

As a show, though, We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR, is fantastic.

Live music, crazy sexy girls, shocking images, thematic grandeur.

A huge and welcome change from all the minimalist work on show since the beginning of the festival. It's good to see ambitious if slightly off-balance work.

PRODUCTION NOTES

We are all Marlene Dietrich FOR is a Europe funded initiative part of the Cultural 2000 Programme of the European Commission, with the main partners being Slovenia and Iceland. Dancers from France and Belgium complete the multinational cast.

Photos by Marc Andrea. Many more photos.

Impulstanz: Hey dude...i have talent...i'm just waiting for god - Vera Mantero & Robyn Orlin

As we enter the theatre, we see a woman sprawled up against the wall, looking miserable. There are some wires around her so we think she might be one of the artists. She is looking at all the spectators as they come in, not shying away from eye contact.

The theatre at Schauspielhause is yet again a black box.

No dancer comes at the appointed time. Instead we face a tripartite image. From left to right: a panel written over English, the image of the artist pressed up against the wall, a panel written over in German:

The initial message is this:

hey dude i have
talent, i'm just here
waiting for god

The artist bends over to each panel to change the writing gradually. Finally the message is that she wishes Robyn would finish her costume so she could start the show.

After about seven minutes, she finally rises and comes into the darkened theatre via the spectator entrance. The centre screen is a projection of her face and carnations she is carrying from the camera in her own hands. The left and right screens show one feet as she walks, there is a technician carrying each little web camera on both sides of her. Mantero is lit by a yellow projector from the wings. The music is some kind of rising electronic fugue.

At this point, our prospects for the evening look good. Multimedia projection, live performance. Funny cryptic scrawlings. A suggestion of playful irony...

New stand-up comedian Vera Mantero

Halfway down the stairs, Vera Mantero breaks character and shouts out, "Put the houselights up." The houselights finally come up. And there she is in some strange black wool dress with an enormous collar. There are still knitting needles at the bottom to indicate its unfinished status.

She continues, I can't do this really I can't do this. It's no good. I'm really sorry I don't understand what I'm doing, I'm having a lot of trouble with my body. When I don't know what I'm doing, I can't really do it.

Fine. Apparently Vera Mantero wanted to do something political about homeless people and Robyn Orlin wanted to do something about Portugal. But for Vera Mantero this doesn't work:

I'm not into nationality, I'm into people.

At this point we are lost. The dance show is over. A comic monologue has begun.

She takes her carnations and sticks them in the mouths of three spectatators in the front row. Each specator's image is projected by one of the webcams. She makes the carnations line up in their mouths. Apparently this was part of the Portugal theme.

Very long carnations, very short revolution.

Vera Mantero has mixed feelings about flowers. In Portugal there are all these Indian guys wandering around at night. They target couples, usually men. Why do people need flowers as an affirmation of affection?

The flowers are put away. Vera Mantero asks for cigarettes and receives them from the balcony. She leaves the theatre for ten minutes at a time and we can only hear her monologue.

Mantero's constant stream-of-consciousness rambling in her New York accent comes across as a female Woody Allen persona. This happens two or three times. The whole performance becomes a blur of words, stand-up comedy for Vera Mantero junkies.

The dress somehow manages to become green and yellow before being shed altogether. There is a very short dance sequence at the end as Mantero dances her way out of the dress with a pink lit reindeer hat on her head.

The topless Mantero leaves the theatre.

End of the show.

This wasn't dance. Not even sure it was theatre. It was stand-up comedy built-up on personality. If Vera Mantero was not a very strong performer, the piece would have been a total and utter failure. Painlful.

Thanks to her rather skillful delivery, it more or less works for what it is. But it has absolutely nothing to do with dance.

My companion for the show - an excellent modern dancer in her own right and a generous spirit - felt that Vera Mantero's ramblings and her difficulty in some direct way touched the homeless issue. Homeless people are confused and talk non-stop, she suggested, as Vera Mantero's character does.

Maybe.

But for the moment homeless people don't do a lot with webcams.

Meta-theatre in all its tedium. Next time Vera Mantero has trouble pulling her show together I hope she and her creative partners find a more original trope than a monologue on the impossibility of creating the show. Or they could just cancel the show until inspiration comes.

Impulstanz: Liquid Loft - Chris Haring

A huge empty workshop at the Arsenal. An enormous set of windows letting natural light stream in from overhead. One hundred foot ceilings.

A crowd of one hundred and fifty spectators gathered around the dance floor. Most sitting on the ground. Some on chairs. More standing.

Ulrika Kinn Svennson

From the back left corner a pretty girl with striking red hair in a white dress wanders in.

Very tall, with striking facial features, Ulrika Kinn Svennson, is an alluring and mysterious stage presence. A native of Sweden she works in Le Ballets C de la B.

She reaches centre stage and pulls up her dress to reveal that she is in fact in diapers. She finds a ball microphone.

"I had it all..." she intones into her microphone, the tones of her voice being modulated through a very sophisticated soundbank of mixing boards, keyboard and three computers behind the spectators. Behind the boards is a very intense Andreas Berger.

"You can never understand me." Her voice begins in the female register before being dropped into the male register. Somewhere near the province of transvestite acts with a confusion of gender.

Svennson is followed by a young man who walks out with a very awkward droid like step. He introduces himself as Johnny. Johnny Schoofs is a Dutch-based dancer, graduate of the Rotterdam Danceacademy.

Johnny Schoofs

Schoofs does an "I am/I am not" dance to the sounds of his own voice.

"Not really"
"Could be nice:
"Nope"
"No"
"Ye.e.s"

are some of the interjections coming in quicker and faster and higher and lower tonalities from the sound system as Schoofs jerks around.

The technology of dance and voice is complicated and interesting but the skit carries on about twice as long as necessary. A nice touch is Schoofs's exit through the crowd mingling with them on his way.

The third dancer to come out of the back corner is a long-legged young woma in skirt and t-shirt with a short pony tail pulled back. She delivers a long speech about celebrity and beauty and money. Nothing profound. The zeitgeist of contemporary North American culture.

Stephanie Cumming

Dancer Stephanie Cumming is a British Columbia native who studied dance at the University of Calgary in Canada. Since 2001, she has been dancing in Vienna with Chris Haring and others.

Cumming's dance is an elaborate strip game. There are three layers of cotton under skirt and shirt which she pulls up and down. At one point she has all the tops up and we see both her stomach and a bra which she appears poised to pull off before she instead pulls her panties down around her ankles.

No worries. She has another two pairs of panties hidden. This is not to be a naked show.

The accompanying movement track of soundbites is one of conceit and insecurity. "I am so beautiful. You want to see me, don't you."

There isn't much warmth in Cumming's strip performance - it is strangely cold. The absence of charm may be intentional but the piece would be more engaging with some element of sensuality in the movement.

The final chapter of this experimental movement and sound piece is a trio with Cumming's character controlling Johnny and Ulrike with commands like "Smell Johnny's breath. But don't come too close."

Schoofs & Cumming dance | Svennson sings

Ulrike takes a pose on top of a box. Her hidden white skirts go all the way down to the ground making her seem like an impossibly tall monster, something out of the 5th element. Ulrike lipsyncs a song, which Cumming sings made up of very strange sounds strongly manipulated, as if a lizard could sing".

Cumming follows this strange song with a virtuouso performance in three characters. A conversation between Ulrike, Johnny and herself. She switches quickly between voices and personalities without the slightest hesitation.

Much live manipulation of the sounds as we go. Impressive.

One phrase stood out: The space is so vast and generous.

Liquid Loft was perhaps overlong. As is often the case with artistic director Chris Haring's work, the innovation often risked seeming technology for technology's sake.

Sound wizard Andreas Berger at his flight deck

But in the case of Liquid Loft it didn't matter. The manipulation of sound by Andreas Berger was virtuoso-level. Ulrike Svennson's movement performance was perfect. Cumming's voicework was wonderful. Schoof had a goofy sort of charm.

A lot of work and thought went into the creation of this new organism of sound and movement. All involved deserved the very warm and extended applause to which the audience treated them. New roads were opened to us.

Additional creative credits: Story, Thomas Jelinek. Text, Katherina Zakravsky.

All photographs by Alec Kinnear. Do not reuse without permission.

Impulstanz: Blindspot - Jan Ritsema and Sandy Williams

A darkened room. Illuminated in the middle. Raw wooden tables in a a grand oval. The audience seated in two rows, around the ring, the second row on a raised platform. Silence. Waiting.

As if in a court. As in Shakespeare's Globe Theater. As in a forum. As around a gladiator pit.

Many powerful associations with this ready circle for drama.

Gathered around this pool of light were almost entirely choreographers, curators and dancers. An exclusive audience of the highest professional calibre.

We were waiting for Sandy Williams and Jan Ritsema to present Blindspot at the Arsenal, home to most of the Impulstanz workshops.

This was perhaps the most heightened moment of anticipation of the festival. Simplicity and elegance in staging. Great concept.

Finally the two men arrived, taking out a leaf of the round table to enter into the closed arena they had prepared themselves.

Both were dressed down. Williams was in Addidas Stan Smith white tennis shoes, grey Levis jeans, a Benetton sweatshirt and Calvin Klein underwear. Ritsema wore dirty jeans, a pale blue t--shirt with a pair of eyeglasses stenciled into the front of the t-shirt.

I mention the brands as Williams was covered in brands down to the underwear and none were apparent on Ritsema. Williams is a young man around thirty with a full head of hair and in the prime of a man's life. Ritsema is a neat-looking man in his fifties with a smooth bald pate and a ring of white hair around the sides. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and looks something like a university professor. While in reasonably trim shape for his age, there is nothing in his form or figure to give away a dance background.

Ritsema and Williams began with a somewhat incoherent dialectic where Ritsema mainly spoke about politics and Williams about an imagined love life which owed much to Leonard Cohen's novel The Favorite Game.

Here is a taste of their discourse from the opening:

Jan: Dear Leonard Should we fill the space with politics and counter it with dance?
The greatest dancer to democracy will come from an angry army of the unemployed led by millionaires, preaching the sermon on the mount. George W.

Orwell.

George W. Bush.
11/9 I need some wine
11/8 I need some weight
11/7 I need some heaven
11/6 show some pics
11/5 I need a wife
11/4 will do a whore?
11/3 it is only me
11/2 and you
11/1

First lesson: A system is complex if a great many independent agents are interacting with one another in a great many ways.....

Sandy: I had hopes for all this. I used to be thin. I though I might live in one place and know one woman. I walked through....this morning. I made my way through...to... I had on my red apron and I had the woman I loved.....I am not talking about politics. I am talking about your bodies. the ones stretched out on the beach, the ones you've just smeared with sun-tan oil. Some of you are overweight and some are too thin, and some are very proud. You all know your bodies. You know your tits, your dick. You know what they look like. You have looked at them in mirrors, you have waited to hear them complimented, or touched with love.

This oblique conversation went on for about twenty minutes, more or less without dance. They do occasionally move and take poses. They do not look at one another but sometimes look at the audience, particularly Williams.

Of the two men, Williams was much the better speaker. His voice is clear and strong. While his stage persona was not particularly likeable, he projects a personality through his voice: a personality both insecure and conceited at the same time. Enchanted with his own prowess, dismayed at his inability to hang onto the object of his affections.

On the other hand, Ritsema has a weak voice and an unclear diction. It was very difficult to engage with his abstruse reasoning. Spoken abstract reasoning requires an absolutely clear idea of what one is saying at all times. As an English-speaking actor, one learns how to work with abstract thought through the direly complicated and imagistic monologues of Shakespeare's plays. The audience must follow the thought process or it just becomes disconnected bombastic words - which go on for a long time. For the audience to follow the words, the actor must be perfectly clear in both his mind and his diction. It can take days to work successfully through one of these monologues, comma by comma. Ritsema did not manage this at all.

One does not expect dancers to be capable of this kind of rhetorical delivery - but then why ask them to attempt it? I have seen more shows fall down this year by expecting an actor's verbal performance from a dancer than I can count. Tanz, Graz's Metamorphosen springs to mind as the most striking example where Beate Arndt had to carry an entire evening work on a voice ready for short dramatic interjections but wholly unprepared for extended narration in English. A steady and convincing actor's voice in this role would added infinitely to Metamorphosen.

Ritsema and Williams seem to have taken what is worst in Leonard Cohen's poetry - incoherent politics and prose ramblings on quotidien breakdowns of relationships - but to have lost the exultant compact lyricism of his best poems.

At first hearing, one might think the dialogue more improvised than it is. Blindspot the performance is accompanied by a booklet called Blindspot: Text and Commentary. In this booklet one finds the full extant text of the dialogue, an informal essay from Sandy Williams "A Dress Rehearsal for an Even Darker Future or He Who Falls Becomes", "A Possible Introduction" from Jan Ritsema and some extensive extracts from Brian Massumi's seminal book The Politics of Everyday Fear. There is even a bibliography of Works not Cited, including (of course) Michel Foucault and (unsurprisingly) Martin Heidegger. The bibliography proper includes Leonard Cohen, Brian Massumi, Jacques Rancière and Cary Wolfe.

I mention in the booklet in detail as it is far more engaging than the performance itself. It ought to be required reading for coming to the performance. Which sets up an interesting dance model. Dance as lecture with required reading for the show. Not sure it will gain much traction with audiences but it does have its merit if the choreographer/creator would like the audience to see the abstract ideas which are being reflected physically.

Very abruptly the dialogue comes to an end when Ritsema pushes the button on an adroitly hidden CD player lodged under one of the tables. Johann Sebastian Bach. Partitas and Sonats, recording of Izthak Perlman. Very loud. This seems a tendency in modern dance. For the performers to control the music themselves. We also saw it in Philipp Gehmacher's incubator.

The dance itself began with much walking around. Williams was the first to do some prancing, which degenerated into a stiff one-legged walk. Williams hands are large and very expressive and he knows how to use them like a magician.

Both seemed moved at the sort of half-speed one sees in workshops, teaching exercises, early rehearsals. Ritsema in particular seemed to be showing us the steps rather than taking them.

Watching Ritsema dance besides Williams, one becomes aware of how manifestly silly older people look when they dance. An older person lacks the suppleness and speed of youth. Perhaps a profound visual commentary on time here.

The relationship between the two dances was not clear. On the other hand, the relationship between the two monologues was not clear either.

Williams was self-conscious, jerky, sexual, grandiose, absolute and contorted. Ritsema was intellectual, abstract, hesitant and nuanced.

Gradually the elite audience fell to sleep. I counted at least six people fast asleep. Bach can do this to you, if the dance is not transfixing.

Towards the end, Williams worked through an energetic frenzy of I am/I am not movement with hard floor drops and rolls and painful twists which brought the audience out of their drowsing. Ritsema answered with some half-hearted jétés around the space.

Choreographically, the two men did not have enough material to cover the fifty-two minutes of music they had chosen.

Contemporary dance is at a nasty crossroads where it dreams of addressing issues of justice and peace and war and ecology. Abstract and political ideas. But such is not the natural province of dance. Feeling is dance's own domain. Especially love. One feels that these creators are trying to use a hammer to do a wrench's job. Simply not the right tool. So all of this adding of talk and video just takes us away from our natural strengths.

It can sometimes work - Isabella's Room from Jan Lauwers is a brilliant tour-de-force of dance and theatre. But Lauwers begins with a core of theatre and adds the dance in as an accent (as classical opera often does). Moreover, Isabella's Room is strung on a very strong chronological narrative line, just like a novel. In Isabella's Room, the principal speaker is a brilliant actress Viviane De Muynck.

Ritsema is not able to perform a similar role for Blindspot. He has neither the natural gifts nor the training of the grand actor.

One could argue that a creator must always be free to fail. Fail they did.

Starting with the brightest, whitest piece of paper with which one could start and the best dance audience in the world.

If Blindspot prompts the audience of professionals at Impulstanz to take heed of the dangers of polluting dance with an excess of abstract ideas, it will have been a salutary exercise. If Blindspot only inspires more of the same, Williams and Ritsema's bold experment will only have been a siren for further dance shipwreck.

Unfortunately no photos are available for this show.

Impulstanz: Fuga-ce - Tanz Company Gervasi/Catherine Guerin

Fuga-Ce original cast at Volksopera:
from front Tomoko Nishino, Leonie Wahl,
Tae Hee Kim, Esther Koller

I first saw Fuga-Ce or at least the core of it two years ago in the Vienna Volksopera. It was an impressive piece of dance. There were works by four of the best of independent dance in Vienna that night (Tanztheater Homunculus, Tanz Hotel and x.IDA were the others). To my mind the Tanz Company Gervasi piece was the stand out.

His dancers were so fast and musical. The interweaving dance that Elio Gervasi had wrought for them left not a moment of idleness to the mind. It was like watching shooting stars. If one were to blink one would miss so much.

What is at Impulstanz this year is a revision of Fuga-ce with the collaboration of Catherine Guerin, a choreographer well-known in Austria for her collaboration with the Graz Opera and Tanz, Graz ballet director Darrel Toulon.

Fuga-Ce is the second Guerin-Gervasi collaboration. Earlier this year, Darrel Toulon brought them together in Graz to create Metamorphosen in Graz. In Graz, there were three choreographers to work on Metamorphosen (Iva Rohlik was the third). Unlike shared choreographic programs, Metamorphosen was not divided into distinct sections for each choreographer but was a single show. All choreographers had full input at all times in the creation of the final composition.

I had the privilege of seeing that experiment in group authorship earlier this spring and could see some of Elio Gervasi's phrasing in the composition but do not know the work of Catherine Guerin or Iva Rohlik well enough to distinguish their contributions. While there were some fine moments in Metamorphosen, as a whole I found it not entirely coherent choreographically, made up of mismatched fragments. I laud Darrel Toulon's audacity to always find a new way to approach the choreographic art, whether by retreating cinematic stories in dance, turning the grand classics on their head with his small company or in this case attempting multiple authorship. As with many grand experiments, success is not always assured but there is something to learn from the process.

That is to say, it is extremely interesting that Elio Gervasi and Catherine Guerin have chosen to continue the experiment of creation by multiple choreographic hands of their own free will. No longer is it the idea of the artistic director hiring them.

The version of Fuga-Ce at Impulstanz is much longer as it is now a full evening piece as opposed to one of four small pieces. The aesthetic is much looser. There is a comparatively elaborate set with three metal panels at the back of the stage and dozens of wooden blocks with metal rods sticking out of them. The costumes are no longer monochromatic grey but a variety of sombre browns and reds and blues.

Fuga-Ce original costumes: Tae Hee Kim

There are six dancers instead of four. When there were four they were almost all close to the same height and proportions. Most disconcerting about the additional dancers is that one is much taller than the others and one is much smaller. The symmetry of the earlier production of Fuga-Ce is gone.

What was improved this year was the addition of live music to the performance with the Keller Quartet at the Akademietheater performance. Sadly in the showing at Arsenal there was no live music.

The lighting from Markus Schwarz was excellent. Studio One at Arsenal is the same empty space in which Philipp Gehmacher's incubator took place with all the atmosphere of an empty aircraft hangar. For Fugua-Ce, Schwarz had managed to put in a full lighting rig.

When we entered the hall it was almost dark and we had to find our places carefully. He finally brought the house lights down and then brought small pools of light up all over the stage, nine in all revealing the strange forest of metal sticks in wooden blocks.

The dancers moved to one pool to another. Sometimes dancing whirling solos, sometimes dancing fantastic and energetic duets. With the size differential some of the dancers seemed to take on a male role and a female role this year.

All the dancers, as is wont with the Tanz Gervasi Company, were very good. Elio Gervasi's choreography is very quick and demanding of the dancers. Leonie Wahl showed extreme speed and vigour and perhaps more precision than at the Volksopera. Tae Hee Kim was exceptionally smooth and strong throughout the piece. Esther Kollers danced with characteristic grace and lightness of touch.

Of the new dancers, the tall one seemed somewhat out of place. While very athletic, she lacked the precision and softness characteristic of Gervasi dancers. The new blonde dancer seemed a little bit cold and to think her way too hard through the piece. The final new dancer - while too short for the company - revealed herself to be fluid and passionate in her movements. The fire in her movement was a welcome addition to the rather cerebral emotions of Fuga-Ce.

In the tendency of almost all of the productions at Impulstanz this year, the revised Fuga-Ce could not pass up noises from the dancer. At the end of the extended choreographic meditation on Bach, Leonie Wahl stands on her head. After a moment on her head, as the other dancers slide away into the darkness she begins to occasionally bark. Two minutes later she drops down into a crouch, takes a Russian looking fur hat, pulls it tight on her head and scrabbles away into the dark, some sort of peculiar gollem creature or perhaps a homeless person.

All of these additions of dancers and metal forests and different colours in the costume and barking on one's head did nothing to add to the piece for me. But nor did they deprive a very strong work of its core - smooth and dramatic dancing from a musical and fluent troupe.

A refreshing change from the comedic sketches and experimental theatre under the dance banner this past week.

Impulstanz: The modesty of icebergs - Daniel Leveillé

The Modesty of Icebergs - Photo J. Grenier

Another one of the poster productions of this year's Impulstanz, Daniel Leveillé's new work is graced not only by the strong image of three naked men flying but also by a chillingly poetic title The Modesty of Icebergs (La pudeur des icebergs). I expected the most.

In the splendidly intimate Akademietheater, The Modesty of Icebergs was very slow to start. The dancers did not come into the half-darkened hall until quarter after nine.

Three men strode out from the back right corner (Mathieu Campeau, Stéphane Gladyszewski, Emmanuel Proulx). Totally naked as the poster promised. They promptly set themselves out in a staggered row of three and began to pose. It was like some sort of strange body building contest where they pliéd and puffed-out their chests in strange half squatting positions.

The piece is difficult to describe as there was no particular narrative but rather a cyclical repetition of the same movements with an ensemble comprised mainly of three men but augmented at times to as many as five men and one woman (Ivana Milicevic).

A highlight of the dance for me were the series of leaps the dancers made onto one another's hands. Sometimes the other dancer would push the leaper backwards across the stage in the air, as if he were flying. Other times, the dancer would leap up on top of the walking dancer suspended by their own hands on shoulders and the hands of their carrier directly vertical at the midriff. The dancer would be carried clear across the stage in this dramatic pose. If you've ever seen someone portage a canoe, you will have some idea of the geometry involved.

Others were very moved by a piling on of bodies in which they found some emotional succour in the rather cold show.

One becomes accustomed to the full male frontal nudity in a positive way. All the dancers are fairly ordinary looking men (mid-way through the piece a curly haired man with huge limpid eyes and a lush mouth appears like an overgrown cupid, as the exception to prove the rule). Some with rounder butt cheeks and more robust chests, others with more slender grace, but authentic looking men. The investigation of male form is intrinsically fascinating, as it is so rarely done. In most professional sports like hockey or even baseball, the participants are so attired as to reveal little. This is one of the great attractions of basketball as a very popular spectator sports for women. But event there the motion is repetitive quick and not especially revealing.

Yet a consistent low point in the choreography for me was an insistence on the male sphincter by Daniel Leveillé. There were three poses in which we were obliged to confont our dancers' crack in the most intimate way possible. One in which the dancer turns his back to us, bends his knees halfway and then bends over towards the floor. This was perhaps the most off-putting. Another was when the dancers lowered themselves to the floor in splits and then rolled over on to their backs and finally used their hands to spread their butts. The third was to place the dancers again back to us, but kneeling on the floor, butt directly towards us.

Frankly, I found this emphasis on the anus distracting and worse the revealing poses highly contrived. Unpleasant artifice in off-topic sensationalism. A half-hearted descent into male pornography with no link to the rest of the piece. Apparently these are poses which baboons will make in pre-combat situations. Perhaps Leveillé was trying to recall our primate origins.

The music was repetitive - exclusively fragments of Fédéric Chopin's Préludes op. 28. There were long passages of silence. The silence allowed us to hear the dancers movements on the stage very distinctly which offered another rhythm to the ear.

I found the alternation between silence music very stimulating. On the other hand, Chopin and silence can be a powerful somnificant.

Daniel Léveillé - Photo R. Laporte

Towards the end of the piece the eye contact between dancers becomes ferociously intense, as if they were consumed by hatred or envy of one another. I did not quite understand their sudden emotional intensity.

As an étude on the male body, as an exploration of certain types of movement, Daniel Leveillé's The Modesty of Icebergs does not dissapoint. But somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

An often-heard complaint was one of length. But at one hour and fifteen minutes The Modesty of Icebergs is not particularly long. Simply there was perhaps neither enough choreographic nor emotional content to play for more than forty minutes. The Modesty of Icebergs was slow-moving. But so are icebergs.

A well-written and enthusiastic Montréal review Naked Angels.
A concise quality video extract from The Modesty of Icebergs.

Impulstanz Festival Lounge - Bürgtheater Vestibule

The main late night haunt of the Impulstanz Festival is the Bürgtheater Vestibule, one of the more charming and elegant bars in Vienna, located within the Bürgtheater just to the left of the main entrance.

(More pictures of the splendid Bürgtheater interiors, see previous post.)

The main bar. Waitress passing in background

Waitress dancing by herself:
a bad plan in motion

Normally there are too many people in the bar to take a decent picture, but on this Monday night after one a.m. there was the requisite calm. An excellent trancy music set from the DJ passing through on his way to Zürich.

Good conversation with Leonie Wahl and Markus Schwarz, dancer and light designer from the Elio Gervasi's Tanz Company. We were joined by Ricardo Cosendey, who creates the sets for most of the Gervasi productions. Politics and dance. General consensus, but for another longer article, that there is far too much unpleasant experimental theatre masquerading as dance. Not that any of us have anything against experimental theatre, but it has its own public and by driving dance audiences away from the art, we are all at risk.

Topic inspired by an extremely drab evening of performances at Schauspielhaus, Etienne Guillote's Skéné and Ingrid Reisetbauer's Drängen.

Ricardo Cosendey, Leonie Wahl and Markus Schwarz of Tanz Company Gervasi

Bonus portrait of Leonie Wahl. Elio Gervasi's Company is blessed with some of Vienna's most lovely and precise dancers.

Impulstance 8tension: Drängen - Ingrid Reisetbauer

Woman collapses on stage.

A bleached out video shows on a large plasma screen on the left hand wall of the theatre. It is a high-angle overhead view of somewhere in downtown Vienna in near-winter. People wander by four Mozart concert ticket sellers in capes. The ticket sellers talk mainly to one another as there are few of their habitual prey (foreign tourists) wandering by on the busy morning. A woman passes with her dog every five minutes, reminding us that it is a loop.

The video is important as it sets an urban environment, a bleached-out emotional landscape and a Viennese context.

At some point our collapsed dancer (Ingrid Reisetbauer, the choreographer) starts to emit guttural shouts.

Mainly a lot of sitting on the stage with a bored look on her face and staring at the audience with disinterested disgust. Reisetbauer's character is attired in an ugly green top and ill-fitting trousers. Her hair-do is particularly pernicious, managing to be both up and mussy at the same time.

A lot of painful looking floorwork.

Later while Reisetbauer lies face down on the stage, she begins to pump her hips up and down hard on the floor. As if she were humping a lover. On her face the disgusted and bored look remains. In her emotional voyage, I think we are to understand that this is her sex life. Perfunctory and empty. Her lovers bring no more emotional content into her life than the floor.

In general we are facing an absolute discomfort with body and space.

Fist it should be said that in the tasks Ingrid Reisetbauer sets herself - generating discomfort, disgust, ennui - her success is outstanding.

I disagree with her ends in principle. To my mind, dance is supposed to bring one closer to one's body, not drive one further away from it.

Towards the end of Drängen, Reisetbauer leaps off the stage and lingers a moment in front of the audience as if searching for a victim upon which to hurl herself. Given the extremity of her performance the audience is genuinely discomfited to find her persona among us.

Happily enough she trots up to the back of the auditorium and disappears. An empty stage. Silence. Reisetbauer reappears to sing out loud and discordantly and repeatedly hum.

And thank heavens it is finally over. Twenty-five of the longest minutes of my life.

Another Vienna piece, like the one from Philipp Gehmacher, about boredom and disgust with urban life.

Here we are facing an ugly if clear performance by an artist who makes herself as insupportable as possible. In difference to Gehmacher's incubator, at least Ingrid Reisetbauer moves around - Drängen is legitimately a dance piece. Again, unlike Gehmacher, Reisetbauer is succinct in delivering her dour life statement.

But neither incubator nor Drängen have anything to do with life in Vienna, whether mine or those whom I know. Vienna is a beautiful and lively city, filled with all kinds of delighful and gorgeous people.

Some part of the modern dance crowd seem to have mutually poisoned one another to all light and beauty. I wish they would find themselves a support group instead of inflicting their angst on the public.

The stürm und drang of early French existentialists but without the languid expressiveness of Camus' or Sartre's texts.

Decades of work from Tanztheater Homunculus, Tanz Company Gervasi and Impulstanz itself have gone into building up a modern dance public. My concern is that these tanzextentialists will drive all audiences from dance theatres in this city. And then life will really be bleak. In a worst case scenario, we are facing a self-fulfilling prophecy.

For masochists only.

Impulstanz 8tension: Skéné - Etienne Guilloteau

Bare black stage. A girl stands. A fallen chair. The girl rolls on to her back.

A single overhead light allumes. Girl rises. Dressed in in plain white t-shirt and very blue jeans.

Silence.

She turns on the chair. A vicious attention. Kicks the chair melodically across th e stage.

Intimacy and hatred in an inanimate object.

Strong projection of personality. Not a typical dancer's body, but beautiful, flexible and powerful. Somehow very true.

Claire Croizé in Skéné

Unfortunately these first five minutes were the high point of the show.

The rest of the mercifully short piece (less than one hour) involved a lot of arm twisting to very loud Mozart.

Only the charisma and physical presence of Clara Croizé kept the audience in the theatre. At some point Etienne Guilloteau wandered out himself. He was wearing the same white t-shirt and plain blue jeans as Croizé. He gave himself mainly the same movements as Croizé to execute. This only highlighted the obvious - that he is not nearly the dancer she is.

Guilloteau's pointy little beard and sloppy pony tail only added a focal point to our discontent. His head did not seem to be fully in his performance, at least beside the almost otherworldly concentration of Croizé.

Never did we get as lively an interaction between the human pair, as we saw between Croizé and the chair.

Croizé does get one more peculiar and transfixing solo. She wanders the stage in a circle throwing her arms forward violently and repeatedly to the chords of Symphony No. 25 in G-Minor . Eventually Guilloteau joins her, spoiling a promising moment.

Guilloteau's choreography is simply not at the hauteur of his musical ambitions (Mozart chefs-d'oeuvres).

Nice dancer. Lousy show.

Clare Croizé and Etienne Guilloteau

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Twenty-five year old Croizé is a French born, Belgian-trained (P.A.R.T.S.) dancer who is a choreographer in her own right (Give me something that doesn't die). She has performed for Carlotta Sagna (Public Relation) among others.

Four years Croizé's senior, Guilloteau is also French and a P.A.R.T.S. alumnus who has performed for for Anna Teresa De Keersmaeker (Kassandra), Charlotte Vanden Eynde (Beginning Endings) and Mar Vanrunxt (Deutsche Angst). Skéné appears to be his first professional work as a choreographer. Let's hope for the best.

Photos © Raymond Mallentjer