Michelangelo Drawing Blood

Michelangelo Drawing Blood

Sound Affairs

RNCM Theatre, 26 April 2013

Michelangelo Drawing Blood. Photo by Bruce Denny

This meteoric work sheds thunderous sparks of fire, enlightening the art and life of the great Renaissance artist.

Michelangelo and his muse, a young man who looks like he has just stepped off the pages of Physique Pictorial never mind the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, engage in a struggle at once sacred, resolute and erotic.  Their dance, the drama of their collaboration, brings to mind Michelangelo’s dictum about the heart being an organ of perception.

In Charlie Barber’s original score, played on Renaissance instruments (including the wondrous theorbo), the dance finds its perfect accompaniment.  But the sometime singing seemed out of place with Michelangelo’s art: altogether too baroque sounding.

He altered and expanded our understanding of the human heart just as much as Shakespeare did, this Michelangelo fellow, though granted his sonnets aren’t quite as accomplished.  Expect Michelangelo Drawing Blood to enhance and perhaps alter your appreciation of his genius.  Expect male nudity here as well, there being no Daniele da Volterra around to cover up the naughty bits.

Michelangelo Drawing Blood is currently touring throughout the UK, further details are here.

Richard Alston Dance Company

Richard Alston Dance Company

The Lowry, 19 March 2013

Jonathan Goddard and Ino Riga in Shimmer. Photo by Chris Nash.

A splendid evening of dance: gorgeous choreography, impeccably executed.

The company performed three pieces from their current repertoire, The Devil in the Detail, Shimmer and Madcap, with the first of these mixing ragtime music and ballet moves to astonishing effect.  You were wary of it working, but of course you needn’t have worried.

As for Shimmer, it was decadent and dreamlike, an exotic escapade.

There was an abrupt, discordant flavour to Martin Lawrance’s Madcap, a narrative centring on a love triangle or maybe a remembered liaison.  It held one rapt.

Le Sacre du printemps by Pina Bausch

Le Sacre du printemps

Music by Igor Stravinsky

Choreography by Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, 2012

ISBN: 9782851817747

Just the half an hour or so, that’s all it lasts, but it rapidly becomes unbearably involving even so.

It’s due to the intensity of the drama, the way you’re drawn into the urgency for renewal, how it unremittingly builds and builds.  You feel it in the pulse of your blood.  And for renewal to come about a chosen one, a sacrifice/scapegoat, is needed.  Who will wear the red dress, and dance unto death?

It is the tenderness that scares the others off, those who decline the dress.  A hand reaching out to caress, let’s say.  Or it may be what they read in the man’s face: desire, need, hunger.  Death wants only the very brave.

This last dance is, as well as being thrilling and climactic and incredibly moving, simply an incredible performance.  For how do you attain in dance an absolute abandonment (one culminating in the loss of life itself) while retaining always at least a crumb of control?  Death may no longer be a taboo; but dying is.

There is an elemental quality to the staging, in keeping with the nature of the ballet and Stravinsky’s disconcerting score: the men in black trousers, the women in white ethereal dresses (a nod to Café Muller perhaps), looking for all the world like two antagonistic packs, hunting each other.  The earth lies strewn at their feet.  A red garment is the stark battle line between them.  In Bausch’s choreography, whose subtle geometry is here apparent, their movements reach for the fluidity of ballet but anxiety always fractures the harmony of the moment.  Dance constantly morphs into drama and violence.

This performance was filmed in Wuppertal in 1978, three years after its premiere there, and it still feels dangerous and edgy even now.  There is an accompanying booklet with the DVD, which includes black and white stills from the film and a first-hand account by Jo Ann Endicott, one of Bausch’s dancers, of being involved in those first productions.  And Cocteau writes about the first responses to Le Sacre du printemps in Paris in May 1913, and of his friendship with Stravinsky and Diaghilev.  The booklet is in French, German and English.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Paco Pena

Paco Pena

The Lowry, 21 November 2012

You got shimmering movement, a kaleidoscopic explosion of limbs, spectacular dance.

The music was all Spanish guitars and African drums.  This kind of Flamenco dance, serpentine and seductive though it is, has also a martial (or maybe a matador) quality.

It is as though the dancers are on a battlefield or are otherwise imperiled.  Glancing from side to side, moving speedily all about, advancing suddenly forward: it is a fierce spectacle and very exciting to watch.  And the bodily rotation serves as well to sculpt the dancer in the landscape – for you see them from all angles – creating a Piero effect.

A fantastic show.

Freedom by Jasmin Vardimon

Freedom

Jasmin Vardimon Company

The Lowry, 16 October 2012

It is paradoxical, perhaps, for a show with an abstract noun as its name to be so packed with colourful incident.

Here are a few highlights.  There is a surfer who uses his constantly smiling girlfriend as a surfboard; she seems made up about it all.  A ballerina doing point to ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ – oh, and a raucous Led Zeppelin track is in the mix an’ all.  Some fun is also had with balloons and lighted cigarettes: I think this had to do with male virility, but I may be wrong.

Most scenarios are playful and amusing, but there is an edginess at play too, especially when we come to the story of the mermaid who travels inland, following her bliss or fancy.

The dancers are fabulous and do full justice to Jasmin Vardimon‘s wild and free imagination.

In the end, you are left with the curious notion that the purpose of freedom is to facilitate failure, the more spectacular the better.  Not inadvertently but by intent and (naturally) in some style.  For how else can you gain insight into your life?

And along with the wisdom (if such it be) you’re left blessed with many memorable visions of this wonderful show.

Freedom is currently on tour, details can be found here.

Rambert’s Labyrinth of Love Tour 2012/13

Labyrinth of Love Tour 2012/13

Rambert Dance Company

The Lowry, 10 October 2012

Taken from Roses by Paul Taylor. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

An exhilarating evening of modern dance and including, as a prize and privilege to be coveted, the world premiere of the title work.  More about this later.

The second work, Roses by Paul Taylor, featured a series of pas de deux and a cumulative swirl of motion.  They in turn became buds, petals, blossoms, full-bodied wonders, did these dancers.  Their beauty became indistinguishable from their power, their grace and strength were one.  It had a lot of pure ballet moves, this work, and dollops of gorgeous geometry.

Now Itzik Galili’s Sub was an example of a dance that verged on ritual; and Michael Gordon’s rhythmic score also did its best to induce trance.  There were seven male dancers all told, all moving frenetically and assuming myriad formations.  Sometimes there was an individual apart from the group, sometimes at the centre of attention; while at other times the group weaved and warped as one.  The thing that most grabbed you was the continuous, energetic motion: these guys never stopped.  Forever, that is how long they went on for, it seemed like.  Yet it somehow wasn’t enough.

Let us now retrace our steps and return to the Labyrinth of Love, choreography by Marguerite Donlon and music by Michael Daugherty.  It’s probably best described as a narrative work touching on various aspects of love; you might well call it a journey or a quest piece.  Indeed, the love songs as sung by Sarah Gabriel provided much of the backstory: they answered the ’where I’ve been and what I’ve found’ kind of questions.  As a dance it was a mosaic of fragments, exquisite to be sure, rather than a grand, overpowering gresture.  But it was grandly moving by the close.

The Labyrinth of Love Tour 2012/13 is at The Lowry until 12 October, details here.  There’s also a micro-site with full tour dates here.

 

 

Die Klage der Kaiserin

Die Klage der Kaiserin

(The Plaint of the Empress)

By Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, August 2011

ISBN: 9782851817563

This is Pina Bausch’s only genuine film – as distinct from, say, a film recording of a dance that had previously been performed on stage – and it can best be described as a strange and surreal mess.

Dance figures prominently, as you would expect, and there is music throughout; but the action takes place off-stage: in woods and buses, on hills and rooftops…  There are jump cuts, close-ups and other cinematic devices.  A close-up of a woman’s face, wrinkles undisguised, as her younger lover’s fingers walk along it becomes, in Bausch’s hands, a dance in itself.

Some people have suggested that the film is about our connection with the earth and, yes, there is something to that.  Yet it’s also about the female body: how it is controlled and tamed and presented.  It is about both of these (related?) orientations at once.  Take the woodland scene where the tree trunks are numbered, prior to being timbered; and then compare it with the one where the bride severely cinches the belt on her wedding dress, counting on her fingers how many seconds she can keep it that tight without fainting.

Adventures crazy and images weird are everywhere to be seen, most centreing on culling/slaughter or birth/regeneration.  A woman squeezes milk from her own breasts and then slurps it up.  Her sister runs in high heels, lost and crying for her mother, as Billie Holliday sings ‘Strange Fruit’.  One of my favourite scenes sees a shepherdess tending her flock in evening dress and heels, whilst swigging from a bottle and holding a black lamb in her arms.  Later we see her comatose on the ground, her flock milling and spilling around her.  It reminds you of one of Brueghel’s proverb paintings.

In short, it is a poetic film: many images will stay with you, teasing and delighting the mind, but there isn’t a narrative as such, so don’t go looking for one.  Also, when dance does occur – the tango in midsection where we see just see legs and red shoes or the joyous turn that ends the film, a calypso song on the jukebox – it is terrific.

Open the accompanying booklet and you’ll see some black and white film stills, an impressionistic synopsis of the film, plus various photos taken of Pina Bausch as she worked on it.  Furthermore, there is an interview with her which took place in 1990, shortly after the film was released.  She talks mainly about her approach to cinema.

All in all, it’s an attractive and worthwhile package.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Verve 2012

Verve 2012

Northern School of Contemporary Dance

The Lowry, 29 June 2012

This stupendous show shimmers with lambent motions and energetic delights.

The centrepiece was Akram Khan’s ‘Vertical Road’, mesmerising to take in in real time and not a little mystical; it even included at one point some dervish whirling.  It seemed to be about the emergence of an individual from a group; that was my interpretation as I watched it anyway.  Xenophobic disdain or absolute adoration being the fate that awaits the one who’s different from the rest.

Jordan Massarella’s ‘For Dear Life’ was athletic as well as aesthetic, physically demanding yet intricate close-to, as delicate as clockwork; Claire Rodemark and Tom Tindall handled this aspect of the dance very well indeed.  At the end you were moved by it.

A male duet, ‘Dark in the Afternoon’ by James Cousins was strenuously performed and had a definite erotic charge.  If you could bring the figures in one of Paul Cadmus’ paintings to life they would move like this.

And Lea Anderson’s ‘Dynamo’ also had a defined erotic edge, along with a certain painterly quality.  There was a phalanx of beautiful young women, all dressed in vintage (‘50s) attire a la Aguilera.  Some were doll-like and puppet-like, while others took it upon themselves to manipulate them.  They (the doll-like dancers) were twirled about, discarded when boredom struck.  As with a lot of Anderson’s work, it was inventive and intriguing but at times disturbing.

All in all, Verve 2012 offered a varied and interesting programme and the dancers – all recent graduates – were superb, easily professional calibre +.

The final tour date of Verve 2012 is 4 July, when it returns to the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds.  Details can be found here.

Café Müller by Pina Bausch

Café Müller

By Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, September 2010

ISBN: 9782851817273

Café Müller was created and first performed in 1978, thirty four years ago: a fair distance in time.  It still lives.

This film of the dance (or the psychodrama, which may be a better description) was made in May 1985 at the Opera house in Wuppertal, then broadcast on German TV in December of that year.  Pina Bausch directed the film and she’s on stage here too, taking the same role that she took in the original production, some seven years before.

It begins with a lone woman dressed in an ethereal gown, edging into a cluttered room.  There is very little space.  Chairs are strewn around and she bumps into them: perhaps she is blind?  To avoid obstacles, to stay safe from pain, she keeps to the wall, clinging to the margins.  The woman is played by Pina Bausch.

Another woman, similarly dressed, enters the room shortly thereafter and goes towards the chairs, which are (most of the time) cleared out of her way by a man.  He watches over and makes a path for her, but he can become impatient with her fumbling. There’s an edge, a possibility of violence or desertion.

You could view the women as two halves of the same whole, or perhaps they represent two choices (to put it starkly, Yes or No) towards life, the world, love, intimacy…

One scene haunts the mind, still.  A man holds a woman in his arms then drops her, whether through tiredness, carelessness or cruelty.  At once she gets up and clings to him.  Again he holds her, lifts her up into his arms but drops her.  And again, after she falls, she stands up and clings to him.  It is cruel, funny, pathetic, indescribably sad – all these at once.  The cycle goes on for so long that eventually you pray for it to end, as all the while Purcell’s mournful aria (‘Remember me, but oh forget my fate!’) drives despairingly on.

Herve Guibert wrote of Café Müller that it leaves you ‘with the heart wounded and bandaged, bathed in an emanation of tears’, which is one way of putting it.  In the same review (it is one of six articles in the booklet that accompanies the DVD) he goes on to explain:

It is not Pina Bausch who wounds the heart; it was already hurt, but the wound had been forgotten, written off as foolish, romantic or narcissistic, and Pina Bausch, through the bodies of her dancers, reminds us of the reality and the vitality of that wound.  (77)

Of course, viewing Café Müller on DVD can never be the same as seeing it live on stage: your eye is curtailed, there are things you cannot see.  Even so, in this form it still has the power to move and one advantage is that there’s time to reflect on its rich meanings.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Danza Contemporanea de Cuba

Danza Contemporanea de Cuba

The Lowry, 9 June 2012

Mambo 3XXI. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

An exhilarating whoosh of electric dance, that’s what happened on stage.  On reflection, it is puzzling that no fuses were blown.

Of the three quality pieces in the programme, the last was George Céspedes’ modern classic, Mambo 3XXI.  Midway, there was a narrative dance, a skewered and abridged Carmen, which had amusing moments but didn’t quite take the breath away.  Also, the punctuation or notation here was wrong: it was not dubious (?!) but rather interesting (!?).

That first dance though, the one that started it all off, was the stunner.  Sambroso by Itzik Galili managed to induce mellow light-headedness and chaotic joy in about equal measure.  They worked, the dancers here, like the parts of a well oiled machine.  Their movements had a salsa vibe – that old judicious two-step – despite or maybe because of the startling incongruous music, a spot of percussion from Steve Reich.