by Michaela Preiner | Jul 13, 2022 | ImPulsTanz
“Full Moon. A Play by Pina Bausch”
Unterferent they could not have been – but also not more complementary. “Full Moon” – shown on the big stage of the Burgtheater, performed by the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch – came up with a lot of “theatre magic”. The piece, which premiered 16 years ago, requires a total of 12 dancers, stage equipment that can make it rain and also has the possibility of flooding part of the stage floor. Bausch starts with a sultry summer night atmosphere in which young men and women interact with each other in a constant succession of short scenes. In the process, one or two sentences are dropped in the direction of the audience, usually spiced with a fine pinch of humour.
“Full Moon” (Photo: © yako.one)
The choreography, like the costumes, is gender-dualistic. While the men, predominantly in long trousers and with bare upper bodies, demonstrate their strength in a dance-like to acrobatic way, the typical Bausch repertoire of movements can be seen in the women with hip-length hair and softly flowing dresses. Oscillating between gestures of the desired establishment of contact and those in which the withdrawal into one’s own inner self is always clearly recognisable, alternate here. The visualisation of emotional states occurs much more frequently with female dancers than with their male colleagues. Intersexual encounters are often marked by moments of tension. Loving and hating each other, not being able to let go of each other and punishing the other with contempt are visualised just as much as moments in which the women dominate the men. Right up to instructions on how a woman’s bra must be unclasped as quickly as possible so as not to disturb the tingling moment of erotic anticipation.
“Full Moon” (Photo: © yako.one)
Despite an intense choreographic work that demands extremes from the ensemble, there is, however, another silent and motionless actor on stage who equally captures the audience’s attention. This is a mighty boulder that is undercut by a body of water. Particularly in the second part after the intermission, the water streams down on the stage almost incessantly like a continuous rain and at one point even becomes the unrestricted stage star. Scooped up in buckets by the men in piecework, it is hurled by them in powerful blasts from all sides against the boulder. The optical stimulus that results can well be described as “water fireworks” without opening up a contradiction. For the explosive cascades of water visually resemble those of rockets which, once exploded, pelt towards the earth in a fine rain of fire. This visually powerful scene has addictive character and burns itself into the memory just as much as the soaking wet costumes of the dancers and together they form an indelible pair of recognition.
“Dances for an actress”
While Bausch worked with an extremely high technical effort in her piece, “Dances for an actress” gets by with the power consumption of a hoover running for 1 hour. At least that is how the Belgian actress Jolente De Keersmaeker, sister of the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, who is also a frequent guest in Vienna with her choreographies, told it. Jolente was persuaded by Jérôme Bel to create a dance piece. It should be clear to anyone who has seen Bel’s work that this is no ordinary piece. Perfection and beautiful appearances – all that Bel does not demand from his artists. On the contrary, he demands a great deal of courage for imperfection and for revealing both their skills and their failures to the audience. The French choreographer is something of a pioneer in his guild. He rethinks what moves society in a way that is suitable for the stage and, in doing so, questions what socio-politically relevant themes could mean for performance practice.
“Dances for an actress” (Photo: Herman Sorgeloos)
A current example is the widespread refusal to print programme booklets. For ecological reasons, these are currently being saved at performances around the globe, see also “Wiener Festwochen” – Bel found her own method of nevertheless giving the audience a little insight into the events in advance. Through an oral introduction by Jolante herself, who told the audience what was normally printed, including the list of sponsors and partners. Inevitably, this was accompanied by a huge dash of humour, a hallmark, but also a subtle hint that this practice popping up at the moment is probably not really the last word in wisdom for Bel either.
After this prologue, triggered by the general ecological disaster we cannot escape at the moment, the dancing actress presented a longer scene in which she gave samples of her classical ballet repertoire. She drew on a body of movement she had developed during her ballet classes between the ages of 6 and 14. That this time must not have been fun for her is still apparent today. The individual dance steps are executed with great concentration, jumps are only performed in such a way that there is no risk of injury and a body control that makes dancing not fun but rather an agonising experience – all this can be taken as proof why Jolante did not take up the profession of a dancer.
From these first impressions, she spans a wide range of different improvisations by various choreographic and dance greats of the 20th century. She begins with a Chopin Prelude, originally choreographed and danced by Isadora Duncan. Using this example, she also demonstrates one of the methods dancers use to memorise movement sequences. The verbalisation of movement sequences is still a common means of remembering step and movement sequences today.
“Dances for an actress” (Photo: Herman Sorgeloos)
The change to a Pina Bausch improvisation, based on her work “Café Müller” from 1978, is initiated by her silently taking off her clothes. The immersion in that fragile figure, dancing naked in front of the audience to the sounds of Henry Purcell’s “Didos lament”, is one of the most impressive moments of the entire performance. The way the fragility of the human body and its soul become visible and tangible at the same time unfolds an incredible emotional magic. What a big difference to the pompous “Full Moon” piece by the same choreographer. If one wanted to vividly explain that technical commitment does not have to correlate with the emotional movement of the audience – these two pieces would be textbook examples of this.
What a great, great idea to replace this Bausch choreography with Rihanna’s song “Diamond”. Equipped with a pulsating rhythm and a life-affirming drive, the music alone sweeps the audience away in just a few moments. The still naked body now has absolutely nothing of fragility about it, but radiates pure life energy, unbridled joie de vivre and pure dance power. So much so that one would like to dance along.
After an intensive study of mimicry, dedicated to the Butho grandmaster Ono Kazuo, in which the performer can show her enormously strong mimic expressiveness, she ends up in contemporary dance performance. For this, sitting on stage with a laptop on her lap, she describes a YouTube video, the content of which she only reproduces verbatim. However, “Dances for an actress” would not be a production by Jérôme Bel if he did not himself respond with much humour to the purely verbally-reflective dance rendition with the upcoming “John Travolta number”. The way Jolente De Keersmaeker slowly begins to dance along with the famous “Saturday Night Fever scene” during her description, steadily getting into it, is simply stunningly funny.
The fact that she adds a self-designed choreography to Renaissance music with a strong, repetitive rhythm and southern flair rounds off the performance in a successful and once again highly intelligent way. How strong is the contrast that Keersmaeker expresses with her classical ballet rehearsal at the beginning and her own powerful and lustful choreography at the end of “Dances for an actress”! With this own choreography, she has visibly reached a point where you can believe that dancing is something that she also enjoys, and that it even seems to be in her blood. Through its ingenious protagonist Jolente De Keersmaeker, Bel’s piece reveals what is actually a profoundly simple insight: dancing is a human means of expression that everyone is allowed and encouraged to shape according to their own needs. Whether you want to reproduce a given choreography exactly, dance an improvisation on it or implement your own ideas – everything is possible, everything is desired, nothing is forbidden. What a wonderful insight even for people who have been working with this medium for decades. Merci Jolente and chapeau Jérôme.
This article has been automatically translated with deepl.com
by Elisabeth Ritonja | Jun 7, 2022 | 2021, Tanz, Wiener Festwochen
Bouchra Ouizguen has been part of the touring schedule of cooperation partners in contemporary dance for several years. France and Belgium play a prominent role in this; but the idea of supporting productions across countries is also becoming more and more popular, especially in the festival business in this country.
Although she has now staged her seventh production, she is still a border crosser in contemporary dance. In interviews, she repeatedly says that neither she nor her dancers have had any training in this field. What distinguishes her work, or rather the beginning of her work on this project, is the tracking down of people who still master traditional song and dance forms.
In “Elephant”, Ouizguen has set herself the goal of bringing Moroccan dance and music onto the stage in order to snatch them from oblivion and disappearance. As a metaphor, she has chosen the elephant, which is an endangered species and may already be extinct in the coming century.
Together with three other protagonists – one younger and two older women who have already worked with Ouizguen – she presented the result of her musical and dance search for clues in the programme of the Wiener Festwochen at the Odeon. She intuitively and creatively processes the material she finds into a one-hour piece. A piece that not only reveals the traditional, but also wraps this traditional in a new cloak.
Before her spectacle begins, however, the stage floor is cleaned by two women with large floor rubbing cloths. Then they come on stage – no longer dressed like cleaning ladies, but in festive robes – with two other dancers to clean the space with the help of incense. Here it becomes clear that what will be shown is partly taking place in the ritual realm. And indeed, a dancing creature appears with a colourful headdress, trimmed all around with bright bast strings. Soon it is whirling across the room.
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Elephant (Foto: © Beniamin Boar)
Unlike at the very beginning, the music is not coming from the tape now. Now it is the women themselves who sing live on stage. Polyphonic litanies form the main volume of the musical events. Starting with a female singer, they are echoed by the others and at the same time rhythmised by them with the help of djenbes, small bongo drums. This musical setting remains the same throughout the performance, but the individual danced scenes change. One witnesses a solo performance by the youngest woman, who collapses in exhaustion, whipped up by the music, which gets faster and faster. But the women also perform an impressive group choreography.
It forms the artistic climax of the performance. Designed as a contact improvisation, it is, however, anything but improvised. After pieces of clothing have been pulled offstage – which can be understood as a haunting metaphor of human demise – and the women have intoned a litany of lamentations, the three dancers group themselves into a single organism. They move it through the hall in ever new combinations with the help of lifting techniques. The impression is that they hold each other in their grief and pain and never let each other fall. This is a highly emotional and meaningful scene. It shows people in an exceptional situation that they can only overcome through mutual cohesion. How they connect with each other, let themselves fall into the others, are pulled or pushed by them, how they nevertheless do not go down in their loudly articulated pain, but support and hold each other over and over again, can also be read metaphorically to the highest degree.
The mixture of traditional music and new choreography does not seem artificial at this moment, but quite natural. It enables the audience to think far beyond the dance. The fact that Bouchra Ouizguen’s work almost automatically finds itself in a larger, cultural-historical context also makes her work interesting for other disciplines such as musicology, cultural anthropology or sociology.
This article has been automatically translated with deepl.com.
by Michaela Preiner | May 17, 2022 | 2021, Tanz, Wiener Festwochen
It is a whirring and a buzzing, a humming, a singing and a swinging. It is a celebration and a mourning, a pausing and a running. It is yesterday and today, dream and reality. It is feminine and masculine and everything in between, summer and winter, inside and outside.
All this is TUMULUS – an artistic collaboration between choreographer, dancer and author François Chaignaud and conductor Geoffroy Jourdain. The Vienna Festival 2022 started with this cross-genre project in the Museumsquartier, which poses a special challenge for the ensemble, since the dancers are also singers. The singers are used to using their bodies under extreme conditions in stage productions, for example when they have to sing at dizzying heights or in unusual body positions. In the French production, however, singing and dancing are equally important and equally demanding.
The stage is dominated by a tumulus, a burial mound with two small entrances in the centre. (Stage Matthieu Lorry Dupuy) This mound architecture is conquered now and then with verve and on the run, but also thoughtfully in ceremonial lockstep. From it, people slide down with relish, as children do when they roll off slopes in the open air. But the bodies also roll off the hill as if they were lifeless, only to land motionless on the stage floor.
The scenes are not only differentiated by different choreographies and different pieces of music. Except for Claude Vivier’s “Music for the End” from 1971, Geoffroy Jourdain uses Renaissance music by Jean Richafort and William Byrd, as well as a Dies Irae by Antonio Lotti and music by Josquin Desprez, both cleverly adapted by Jourdain for the dance piece. The selected sacred music in itself creates a meditative underlying tone, but this reaches a sensual climax with Claude Vivier. In his piece, the ensemble sits facing the audience in a row along the front edge of the stage. Gradually, a chorus of delicate voices with repetitive text develops. The microtonality used and the repetitive text passages evoke a floating state of experience. There is a feeling of a loss of time, a swinging between yesterday, today and an unknown tomorrow. The rhythmic accompaniment is provided by stamping and clapping, by snapping fingers or clicking tongues, but also by strongly audible breathing noises. In this way, the need for orchestral accompaniment never arises. What is produced live on stage by the ensemble contains everything it needs for a satisfying musical experience.
“Tumulus” Wiener Festwochen (Foto: © Les Cris de Paris/Mandorle productions)
“Tumulus” Wiener Festwochen (Foto: © Christophe Raynaud de Lage)
“Tumulus” Wiener Festwochen (Foto: © Christophe Raynaud de Lage)
The sense that the action cannot be placed in any particular time, indeed has a timeless validity, is also supported by the costumes. Romain Brau uses current fashions such as quilted coats and capes as well as simply draped, archaic-looking tops or leg laces. A procession parading over the hill is characterised by original headdresses and the poses shown oscillate between Asian temple dancers, Egyptian representations of funeral rites as known from the pyramids and a contemporary dance movement repertoire. The last performance, in which the upper bodies are presented bare, makes the vulnerability of the people tangible. Being at the mercy of one’s surroundings, but also one’s fate, which always ends lethally, evokes feelings of vulnerability and empathy.
The concept of Tumulus creates a constant balancing between the times, which runs through the music, the dance and also the set. It gives the production its own charm and character. Not to mention the beautiful voices, which are used in a finely tuned voicing and are a concert experience in themselves.
During the applause, the Viennese audience was allowed to applaud all the performers and, through the appearance of François Chaignaud, also got a small impression of how much his personality resonates in Tumulus. His impressive, imaginary hat-waving during his bow – a formerly courtly gesture of obeisance – seemed like the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle, crowning what had gone before in intensive collaborative work.
Dancing and singing on stage were: Simon Bailly, Mario Barrantes, Florence Gengoul, Myriam Jarmache, Evann Loget-Raymond, Marie Picaut, Alan Picol, Antoine Roux-Briffaud, Vivien Simon, Maryfé Singy, Ryan Veillet, Aure Wachter, Daniel Wendler.
The text was translated automatically with deepl.com
by Michaela Preiner | Jul 17, 2018 | Tanz
The Internationale Bühnenwerkstatt opened its annual festival with James Wilton Dance Cie’s “Leviathan based on Moby-Dick”, a performance loaded with testosterone and violence, but also plenty of poetry.
Internationally acclaimed and awarded winning British choreographer James Wilton is no stranger to the audiences in Graz. In 2013, he choreographed “Le sacre du printemps” at the Graz Opera. This year he returned with his troop to the Internationale Bühnenwerkstatt und convinced with a performance that allows for multiple interpretations.
On the surface level, the playbill refers to Captain Ahab, the mad captain who tries to get his revenge on the white sperm whale Moby-Dick for biting off his leg. On a deeper level, Wilton visualises the far more universal story of men attempting to subdue and rule over nature until it turns against them. The duality between male and female is another issue that is raised in this production and conveyed by the choreography itself. In her interpretation of “Leviathan”, Sarah Jane Taylor predominantly stays close to the ground with being in a standing position only for short periods of time. Jane’s physical presence is extremely fascinating and one never gets tired of watching this slim and tall performer sliding, slipping, pushing and spinning. Every bone can be traced underneath her nude top which gives the audience a sense of the physically demanding choreography.
In contrast, James Wilton, who also functions as the male protagonist, uses a completely different vocabulary in his performance. Wilton gives the portrayal of a monomaniacal berserker who dominates all other creatures by sheer physical force and willpower. Thereby he draws on the famous image of human evolution from primate to man that is epitomised by the upright walk. This tableau with the title “The march of progress” was made by American painter with Austrian-Polish roots Rudolf Zallinger.
Wilton dominates the stage from beginning almost to the end. Michael Kelland, Norikazu Aoki, Ihsaan De Banya und Jacob Lang act as animal beings as well as devoted subordinates who follow their leader to the death. Their choreography draws on a variety of influences such as gymnastics, hip-hop, modern dance and martial arts. Powerfully and gripping, the male performers swirl across the dark, empty stage using the forces of push and pull, pressure and counter pressure. They jump and spin, they are tossed, lifted, pulled and pushed to the floor and even perform multiple, horizontal summersaults. Heavy ropes are the only props on stage and in addition to very effective lightning invigorate the mise-en-scene. Light is used to blind the audience for split seconds thus marking a new chapter.
The impressive soundtrack is delivered by Lunatic Soul and is a mixture of singer-songwriter tracks, powerful indie rock and a decent pinch of world music which engulfs the events like a second skin. The floating movements of the legendary leviathan fit to the pristine white trouser suit in which Sarah Jane Taylor dances. The transformation of Ahab’s sailors into similarly beautiful, enigmatic leviathans creates a mesmerising and irresistible flood of images. The demise of the man who believed to be invincible is rendered in an image that mirrors the beginning of the performance. However, this time it is not the peaceful leviathan lying on the ground and producing a massive fountain of water but a defeated Ahab.
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