Alain Platel says it is important to show suffering in order to intensify the commiseration and compassion. Compassion is a tainted word often associated with condescension. Usually taken in its negative form, as a passive feeling which does not lead directly to a change, compassion entails a more operative role in change if we realise that we all 'have one thing in common, namely that we are mortal, with everything that implies in terms of sickness and loss'. If we realise that nobody is better off than us in this, then this can affect the way we think and act.
Com-passion, with passion, will become the same as loving thy neighbour.
Love others as you love yourself is more the essence of a morality than a religion, it entails a form of leaving among others. In Christ's Passion, on which Bach's Mathew Passion is based, we learn 'an essential fact of human existence, that we are here to die'. The emphasis is on suffering, physical suffering and suffering through the other. It is about the individual's ultimate sacrifice: himself.
Pitié!, the new production of les ballets C de B, by director Alain Platel and composer Fabrizio Cassel (who created VSPRS, 2006) is based on Bach's Mathew Passion. Not simply adapting Bach's sublime music, Cassol creates a new story, beyond Mathew the Evangelist's tale and the poetic version of Bach's librettist, a story foccused on the mother's pain (a non-existent part in the original Mathew Passion), while the central figure, Christ, is divided in two twin souls with a common destiny (Jesus and Mary Magdalene). The desmultiplication into three central figures not only have biblical resonances but it actually entails a counter-biblical understanding of its characters, namely the role of Mary Magdalene and Jesus as twin souls, one not excluding the other, as one male/female soul in the cross, Christ.
The dancers themselves become this trinity, becoming in their own time, their own personal jesus, their own personal Christ. And then the question becomes real and tangible through compassion: 'What do you feel inside?
The 'bastard' dance that Platel has developed seeks exactly this, the physical translation of over-intense emotions in the transcendence of the individual. The contemporary 'shiver and shake dance' is here combined with grand écarts, in a hybridised form of dance that seems an 'inexhaustible source of inspiration: passing on movement material until it becomes distorted and changed so that it no longer expresses the particular identity of one thing or the other.' Movements get distorted, transformed and irrecognizable through the reinterpretation of different bodies doing identical movements, never being the same again. They become private, not following the structure of public movements, but actually materializing the deep structure of the soul inside the body, screaming for the other. A form of turning the world inside out, of finding the other within ourselves.
Regarding the religious feeling as a very private matter (an extreme intimacy know as communion), the performance traces this moments of absolute intimacy, when we show more openly the need of the other, of the flesh of the other body, our own flesh.
Intimacy is intensified in the unfolding of the Passion, not following a narrative structured development, but being constrained by the experience of an emotional crescendo through the body. Skin and flesh become more and more present in the unfolding of the emotions, revealing the incredible need to feel 'the other'. It is about the passion, in all its sexuality, reproduction and viscerality, as the mother when speaking of their children, says 'flesh of my flesh'.
When the mother holds the son devoid of life in her arms, we are not looking at the 'mother murderess' (that without condemnation, reflects the deepest conviction of Alain Platel), we are testimoning the real mother that did not step in and take her child's place, suffering through the other that already suffered. This redoubling of suffering is the actual Pitié! The actual image that we take from this experience, is that change does not come from the understanding of the mening of compassion, real change comes from the actuality of the feeling of compassion: I love thy neighbour!
[ images video: Pitié!, les ballets C de la B, directed by Alain Platel, music by Fabrizio Cassol based on Mathew Passion by J.S. Bach, peformed by Aka Moon ]
Labels: alain platel, bach, dance, fabrizio cassol, les ballets C de la B
Ashes is a metaphor with biblical and mythical resonances, for something you can't hold on to. Like a phoenix that burns in order to rise again, this apparent negative perspective can hold a positive reverse in which disappearence realises a renewed appearence.
Ashes, the new creation of Les Ballets C de la B coreographed by Koen Augustijnen, is 'about the things people do, or indeed don't do, in order not to loose what they have'; it is 'about the constant duality in everyone's lives, between holding on to something and the necessity or difficulty of letting go'. It is around these tensions that our own body, at a microscale, survives and, at a macro and social scale, our relationships with others and ourselves evolve.
Performed to the sound of Wim Selles' arrangements of the music of the Baroque master Handel and against a grey urban environment conceived by visual artist Jean Bernard Koeman, Ashes survives theatrically through the energy and openness of the melody, in the rythm and harmony of the music (of the baroque instruments involved with the sounds of the more intimate and carnal sound of the marimba and the acordeon). Against the pale shades of grey tones and the cold atmosphere of the street lamp, the dancers leave strokes of colour, with their vivid clothes, the blue of the sky shaking inside a body, the fire of the soul, flaming through the voice off a soprano that invades the room.
Ashes is full of this not-yet moments, when everything seems to become right, when things seem to find their own space and time, they vanish, and the moment and the place are lost again. Full of indecisions, of small miscommunications, little obstacles, the performers are alone in the middle of the crowd, and when alone for real, crowded with all this overload of social patterns that withdraw life from actual life.
It is this game enacted by two of the dancers, a kind of matting ritual, where the female switches between the vien (come) and pas (stop), and the male just ends up in the same place, exhausted, lying on the floor, after swtiching incessantlly between going and staying, between what he really wants and the thing that stops him from getting it. A scene that becomes larger then life, when the female performer leaves the exhausted body behind, and faces the audience, starting the same game with the social mass, that does not respond anymore to the calling, and just sits there looking, as it was really a show what they were seeing.
Ashes is full of these beautiful abstract images, sequences, sounds and feelings, which we can easily materialise in our own minds, moments of our own lifes, desires of our own souls. The dancers from different nationalities and cultures and with distinct approaches to dance and to their own bodies, just enlarged the scope and exponentiated the possibility of reception by the audience. What units them all in this unique performance was their lived appearence, the experience of life that their bodies already entail, the mature performance that could not be found on the everlasting energy of a young body, but rests in the loaded quality of the movement of a body, that is struggling to live, that is struggling to stretch out in order to touch something that we can not name properly. It is the body in the end of the day looking for its lost object.
In the end, we lay together, in the same pace, breathing together, waking up at different times, most of the times not realizing that someone else is falling a sleep at that precise moment, not realizing that in some complex space-time framework, there is someone reflecting our own fear of dying, or better, our fear of living.
Ashes is about all this and it is about blablabla, like one of the dancers almost falling away said when energy seemed to void is body in the air.
Labels: dance, Koen Augustijnen, les ballets C de la B, southbank centre
Against the Tide is a Greenwich and Docklands International Festival co-commission of Graeae and Strange Fruit. The production brought together the creative skills of a team of UK and Australian artists jointly led by Jenny Sealey (Graeae) and Sue Broadway (Strange Fruit) and was performed by a group of 'stormers' (friends from the Storm at the Lyric Hammersmith) among other actors from both companies, namely, Chisato Minamimura, Caroline Parker, Daryl Beeton, Daryl Jackson, David Ellington and Milton Lopes. The announced 'outdoor extravaganza on the banks of the Thames' didn't fall short, creating a small beach with four high flexible poles evoking multiple realities and making the audience look up in wonder. Multiple WOWS! paced the aerial performance that fused theatre, dance and circus, super-sizing the overall peformance with sublime moments in the sky of our own dreams.
Labels: dance, graeae theatre, physical theatre, strange fruit, sway poles
The double bill of The Turning World 2009, at the place, announced a binding theme between two rather different works as the inspiration they both had found in the writing of Milan Kundera.
Italian coreographer/performer Simona Bertozzi presented Terrestre, an 'intense and powrdully-performed solo' freely inspired by Milan Kundera's Slowness. Informed by Kundera's dissection of the fragile naturae of and individual's fate, Terrestre is ' a dialogue between an incomplete human body and its becoming emotionally and experientially significant', tracing the body like a 'map of passing time starting from primordial nature, through an anthropomorphic state to reach the completed, already made human being'.
The precariness and instability of the human body fins here a synthesis that aims at the essence of things, the 'cleaniliness of form', through action, and through repetitive action, 'from the inner nature of memory', the body is pulled and pushed towards many changes of shape.
Dot504 presented Holdin' Fast, taking as their starting point Kundera's best-known novel The Unbearable lightness of Being. The work coreographed by Jozef Frucek and Linda Kapetanea, combined contemporary physical dance with theatricla forms and original music, in a 'no-holds barred ballad about sexual dependency. Holdin' Fast immersed the audience (as announced) in sexual fantasy, as three couples search for the physical and psychic possibilities of the human body.
Through an array of situations and impossible positions, these three couples tried to fulfill their desire and changing will/mood/energy, to finally end stating clearly that we actually eat up the other, and with him/er, we ultimate eat ourselves.
[ video: Holdin' Fast, production dot 504 Lenka Ottova, choreography Rootlessroot (Linda Kapetanea and Jozef Frucek), performed by Helena Arenbergerová, Michaela ttová, Lenka Vágnerová, Pavel Masek, Petr Opavsky, Daniel Racek. Video editing done by christodoulos christodoulou ]
Labels: dance, dot 504, physical theatre, simona bertozzi, the place
