MC 14/22 (Ceci est mon corps) and Crystal Pite's Emergence

                                    

Review by Stephanie Green

A well-matched double-bill, both about crowd mentality, but contrasting in mood, one dark, one bright: the first exploring masculinity, the other the ‘swarm intelligence’ of bees.

Angelin Preljoçaj’s work is known for its darkness and MC 14/22 (Ceci est mon corps) (‘This is my body’) [★★★] is no exception. The title is a reference to the Last Supper but this piece concentrates more on the male body: an ambivalent paean to masculinity. Glistening torsos are well-lit, the rest of their bodies disappearing in shadow, the males grapple, or slap each other’s bodies on steel tables reminiscent of the morgue. No heroes, they turn on each other, just like the Apostles. There is little individuality as they move in delayed synchronicity, bordering on monotony. If this is dance pushing the boundaries, of the dancers’ exhaustion and the audience’s tolerance, this is a close run thing.

There are only brief references to the Bible: a tender moment of foot becomes body washing and striking tableaux reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Christ’s humiliation is suggested: a man sings a haunting hymn whilst tormented, another attempting to dance whilst his limbs are taped, but these incidents verge on silliness. A splendid scene where dancers dive from a height to be caught would have been a splendid ending, but unfortunately the piece has no climax – it just stops.

Emergence [★★★★★] choreographed by Crystal Pite is a triumph. Abstract dance is balanced with insectoid hints: elbows raised like wings, jerks of the head. The ‘swam intelligence’ of bees is brilliantly matched to the regimentation of a ballet company. Set and lighting were dramatic: black streaks suggesting a ‘nest’ and the lit tunnel from which the dancers can emerge or dance inside in shadow-play. The highlights are a brilliant sequence when the ballerinas advance en pointe to be pushed back by the males and the entire company massed at the end, counting (humming?).

http://eif.co.uk

Published in The Skinny Magazine online.

Seven: Ballet am Rhein

Seven: Ballet am Rhein @ Edinburgh Playhouse, 20 Aug

Germany's Ballett am Rhein team up with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra to perform Martin Schläpfer’s response to Mahler’s Seventh Symphony

★★★

Review by Stephanie Green | 28 Aug 2015

Published in The Skinny Magazine.

Pointe ballet shoes, bare feet and boots sum up this contemporary ballet inspired by Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, superbly played by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Wen-Pin Chien. Interrupted fragments of folk music, martial, or lyrical passages are echoed by the choreography: a collage of disconnected vignettes, Balanchine-inspired neoclassicism or tanztheater, in a  nocturnal dream world we cannot quite grasp.

Love duets become casually dismissive. Ugly contortions and drumming boots express abusive relationships: a male drags a female on stage with her head under his arm; others are dragged by the hair or lifted into the air with legs akimbo revealing too much crotch, albeit clothed in functional gym knickers. The males suffer too but there is something unpleasantly misogynistic in this piece, though occasionally the females fight back, usually en pointe and with hair in a bun.

Just as Mahler inserts cow horns, Schläpfer’s depressing view of humanity is undercut with silliness – dancers imitating a train or the girl underneath a tiny table (why?) but despite these moments, and extraordinary athletic dancers performing difficult choreography, its fragmentary nature is unsatisfactory and does not do justice to Mahler’s subtlety.

Only in the more cheerful Rondo is there a strong change of mood, when neoclassical dance is underpinned by the whole company in boots and long coats rushing round chairs in a circle, reminiscent of a children’s game where someone will be ‘out’. A reminder of the Holocaust, or of any outsiders in society. Finally, rather late, this stunning scene gives the whole piece depth.

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Seven: Ballett am Rhein, Edinburgh Playhouse, run ended

http://eif.co.uk/seven

The Encounter - Simon McBurney of Complicite

The Encounter @ EICC, 16 Aug

An astounding, immersive show, The Encounter is performed and directed by Simon McBurney of Complicite

★★★★

Review by Stephanie Green | 20 Aug 2015

Published in The Skinny.

The audience is equipped with head phones, where sound is relayed from a totem-like binaural ‘head’, so that we too are dropped into the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil. Based on Petru Popescu’s Amazon Beaming about Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer captured by the Mayoruna (Cat people) and the recordings of McBurney’s own trip, we too experience a destabilizing encounter.

What is real? What is the nature of time? McBurney plays with our perception of reality with real-time performance and recordings jumping back and forth in time. He is the only person on stage but he performs many characters who inhabit our imagination while a mosquito whines at our ear, or a jaguar coughs. Sound effects are created on stage – pouring a plastic bottle to create the river, or screwed-up video tape for walking through jungle undergrowth. The voices of McIntyre and the Amazonians are intercut with McBurney’s own young son back home asking unanswerable questions, as children do, and those of scientists, philosophers and activists on how for the índios, contact with ‘whites’ often means death.

We share McIntyre's experiences; how he loses his trainers, his watch, his camera... everything that makes a 20th century person; how he enters a new sense of consciousness and learns to speak the ‘old language’, communicating through silence with the head-man; how he undergoes terrifying drug-induced hallucinations to reach another reality, the pulsing rhythm of time, and we too emerge shaken.

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The Encounter, EICC, 'til 23 Aug, 7:30pm (2:30pm), £32

http://www.eif.co.uk

Antigone

Antigone @ King's Theatre

★★

Review by Stephanie Green | 13 Aug 2015

Published in The Skinny.

Can a famous film star automatically perform successfully on the stage? In the case of Juliette Binoche in Sophocles’ Antigone, sadly not. Despite the renowned Ivo van Hove's direction, and being an iconic play of enormous power, this modern dress production is hugely disappointing.

Antigone must bury her brother Polyneikes while Kreon, the king, has decreed that as a traitor, he must be left to the birds and dogs: obedience to the state or to humane values, a moral conflict that resonates to this day. It needs exceptional actors. Binoche lacks gravitas. Her voice is thin. She gabbles or is inaudible. Later she shouts, mistakenly thinking that conveys emotion. The only time she expresses pathos is when she silently washes her brother’s corpse.

The low-key tone counterbalances the gruesome plot, and allows some pleasing comedy from Obi Abili, but too often makes for impassive acting. The text translated by US poet Anne Carson is banal (‘Why are you so nasty?’). Thank goodness for Patrick O’Kane who is a credible, cynical Kreon, though often inaudible. Only Finbar Lynch as Teiresias is superb and other parts are strong: Kathryn Pogson as Eurydike and Kirsty Bushell as Ismene.

The simplicity of Jan Versweyveld’s bare set dominated by a vast sun is perfect for such a stark play but the light is so glaring it casts the actors’ faces into shade. Projections on the back wall of deserts are effective but others are distracting or kitsch. And why the soundtrack? It’s irritating, and the track at the end ludicrous.

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Antigone, Kings Theatre, 'til 22 Aug 7.30pm (except Mondays)

Sat 15 and 22 Aug 2.30pm Prices vary.

Antigone, Kings Theatre, 'til 22 Aug 7.30pm (except Mondays) Sat 15 and 22nd Aug 2.30pm Prices vary. http://eif.co.uk/antigone

Sylvie Guillem: Life in Progress

Sylvie Guillem: Life in Progress @ Festival Theatre

★★★★★

Review by Stephanie Green | 11 Aug 2015

Published in The Skinny magazine.

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Sylvie Guillem: Life in Progress, EIF

Subtle, intelligent, playful and moving, Life in Progress exemplifies Sylvie Guillem’s attitude through the 39 years of her dance career: balancing fun and risk, continuing to search for new possibilities, melding early classical training and moving to contemporary dance. The choreographers and co-dancers chosen here have all been important in her life and exemplify this approach. In fact, each piece feels as if we are experiencing the process of it being made.

Kathak-trained Akram Khan’s technêis introspective and compelling, involving many ground-based restless contortions superbly responsive to the Indian rhythms of the percussion.

Duo2015 is choreographed by William Forsythe, who strongly influenced Guillem’s development. Performed by Brigel Gjoka and Riley Watts, it is a tongue-in-cheek piece about male competitiveness which becomes increasingly technically demanding.

Russell Maliphant’s Here & After is a sinuous and elegiac duet with Emanuela Montanari (whom Guillem has produced in the past) set to Andy Cowton’s haunting music and impressive lighting by Michael Hulls, which encloses the dancers, patterning the stage with squares from which they dance in and out.

The delightful Bye, choreographed by Mats Ek to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C minor, Op 111, features Guillem in plaits and a cardie – herself as a little girl, perhaps a Pippi Longstocking – dancing awkwardly then flinging off her shoes, free to find herself. An intriguing light effect, a lit door she slips in through and later leaves to join others, is a wonderful symbol of her continual search for new life.

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Sylvie Guillem: A Life in Progress, Festival Theatre, run ended

Sylvie Guillem - A Life in Progress, Festival Theatre, run endedhttp://www.eif.co.uk/guillem

Sweet Mambo - Pina Bausche company

Sweet Mambo @ Edinburgh International Festival

★★★★

Review by Stephanie Green | 03 Sep 2014       

Published in The Skinny magazine.   

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Sweet Mambo @ Edinburgh International Festival

"Don’t forget," say each of the female dancers introducing themselves in turn.

Sweet Mambo, first performed in 2008, is Pina Bausch's penultimate piece, without the dark desolation  or visceral force of her earlier works but still wonderfully life-affirming,  with the imaginative power for which she is famed,  transforming dance choreography into an immersive experience. 

Beautiful, poetic, and humorous, if tempered with ambiguity, there is something mercurial about Sweet Mambo. It is sweet in the best sense, not sugary sweet, but charming, erotic and delicate, laced with humour and an uncomfortable  feeling that not all is well and indeed moments of violence and anguish.  It is about the bitter-sweet game of love, so all-consuming but how easy it is to mistreat or forget past lovers.

There is no narrative.  Sweet Mambo proceeds by a series of emotional vignettes where the eroticism of the first act is largely from a female perspective. The women are in beautiful slinky satin long gowns, designed by Marion Cito. The male dancers, dressed in black,  are mainly merely props but it is also a refreshing reversal of so much male-oriented sexualised objectification of women as the men kiss, no, caress the women’s backs with their lips.  All very delightful until the one-sidedness of this experience becomes worrying especially when the men poke their heads through the women’s arms and are forcibly dragged round. The fawning, abject position of the men turns love into a power game.  The men become increasingly violent in their turn; one pulls a woman by her long hair; another ignores a woman who shouts ‘Talk to me’.  ‘Alright, then,’  she turns away finally: ‘I’ll just talk to myself,’ eliciting laughter from the audience.

This is typical of Bausch’s method  which can change mood from one sequence to another: a deeply emotional piece in a forest-scape is interrupted by a dancer declaring she loves to cartwheel and then proceeding to cartwheel round the stage.  These jump-cuts and other techniques borrowed from film, such as replaying a sequence in a loop, are particularly  effective for creating hysteria. One example is when Julia Shanahan runs across the stage pursued by two male dancers who grab her by the arms and force her to run back to the start, again and again until her growing  anguish becomes unbearable.

The music too is not one piece but extracts from different artists, all creating the mood of mambo, a Cuban dance music. Various soundtracks from Barry Adamson, Portishead, Tom Waits, to Nina Simone and many others, create a super-cool rhythmic background. The set, Peter Pabst’s set of  white curtains are an inspired dreamscape – all the more remarkable to learn that the curtains were left over from the company’s previous Indian tour and re-used for financial reasons – now re-imagined, billowing around the dancers, played with, the dancers appearing in and out of the folds. In an extraordinary scene a dancer crawls and swirls inside a great bubble-like cloud which blows in from the wings  to the sound of Lisa Ekdahl singing Cry Me a River – the highlight of the piece.

Later the atmospheric filmic projection of a forest, branches waving in the wind, spreads onto the floor of the stage.  A silent clip of couples at a party from the black and white 1938 film Der Blaufuchs (The Blue Fox) by Viktor Tourjansky and starring Zara Leander plays on the backdrop as a dancer gyrates to climax  on a man’s lap. Later the dancers move round the stage as if they too are at a cocktail party and even raise their glasses to the audience.  The boundaries of art and reality are further crossed as dancers address the audience directly. ‘Tell me your problem’ a dancer bends down to address the front row, ‘and I will scream for you.’ Julia Shanahan sloshes herself in real water from buckets – though it was a disappointment that more was not made of this. 

The overall experience conveys such a celebratory joyousness, this is the must-see performance of the festival.

Run ended

Madame Freedom - Hyo Jim Kin and Hyung Su Kin

Madame Freedom @ King's Theatre

★★★★

Review by Stephanie Green | 19 Sep 2013

Published in The Skinny Magazine.

Tradition and modernity meet head-on in this stunningly beautiful interactive performance of dance, film and innovative computer-generated visuals by a husband and wife team: choreographer and dancer Hyo Jim Kin with artist Hyung Su Kin. The dance re-creates and is performed in front of extracts from the 1950's film Madame Freedom, about a woman who seeks self-expression through work and sexual experiences outside the constraints of marriage, a film which caused a shocking sensation at the time and even today is relevant, not only to Korea but to the west, posing the question: how free is free?

The performance starts with a film of a woman being dressed by servants in Hanbok traditional costume. Below this image, the dancer, dressed all in black - long-sleeved jacket, baggy trousers and black tight slippers -performs Tae Phyung Moo, Peace Dance, a traditional Korean dance similar to Tai Chi based on control of breath and stop/start moves, which then develops into contemporary modern dance, a spell-binding sequence as we see her breaking out of the straitjacket of the past.

Later we see her in a western-style slinky dress and high heels with her dance-teacher and lover, performing latino dances to music and song performed above in the film, referencing a craze for anything American which followed Korea's liberation from Japan. The focus shifts between dancer and film image - sometimes the two combine, when the dancer is superimposed in the film and appears to have climbed inside. Inevitably, pairing the dancers with the film means that the huge, bright image of the singer shimmying in a tasselled dress draws the audience's eye, and the silhouetted figures of the dancers in shadow below are dwarfed, but it appears this might be intentional. However, you can begin to see that the interplay of shadow and light is central to the play of duality, the central theme. In fact, the significance of the woman's first dance, the Tae Phung Moo, becomes clear.

Represented by the Tao symbol, the Korean Taegeuk, which celebrates the balance of opposites - light and shadow, tradition and modernity - this aesthetic infuses the whole performance. Everything is set up as a binary and built in pairs: the central screen is split, so that the image is warped each time; there are two screens, one either side of the stage, playing simultaneously. In one scene a film of the dancer leans in to an open gate-way, and we see her face. On the other side we see her in the identical position, but her back-view. This gateway, to Korean eyes, is significant since it is the gateway to the palace Kyong Bok's servants' quarters. In the same way, Madame Freedom wants to break out of the confinement of the life of a servant to her husband as house-wife.

Later when the dancer merges with the extraordinarily inventive black and white video designs swamping the screens and stage, the interplay of shadow and light, dancer and visuals is most successful, wonderfully expressive of her guilt and despair once her affair is over. This is intensely moving, especially when the white behind the black designs grow larger and brighter, forcing the black shapes to fall as the dancer flings herself to the floor, then rears in agony. While so much of the technology in this year's Edinburgh International Festival's theme of the interface between the arts and technology has hardly illuminated the art work it is paired with, Madame Freedom has been a striking exception.

Run nded

http://www.eif.co.uk/madamefreedom