Mechanical magic

Dance: Transports Exceptionnels, Compagnie Beau Geste, Jubilee Gardens; Cast No Shadow, Sadler’s Wells

Dance-making has come a long way since the days when a duet was the expected climatic bravura piece for principal dancers. Even before modern and post-modern challenges altered the traditional format of the classical pas de deux, 20th-century ballet-makers such as Mikhail Fokine had already revisited the old formulae in ground-breaking works such as Le Spectre de la Rose (1910). Removed from a larger context and left on its own as a complete performance, the duet soon became the favourite discrete artistic expression of many in the dance world. Soon, the once neat male/female division was also challenged, thus broadening narrative and choreographic possibilities, which were also revised in the light of post-modernism and the advent of high-tech ideas on stage. Within the past ten years, I have seen duets between real dancers and film images, holograms and a whole series of allegedly inanimate objects, such as armchairs or even sanitary fittings.

These, however, are still a far cry from the duet between a man, Philippe Priasso, and a mechanical digger proposed by Dominique Boivin, artistic director of the Compagnie Beau Geste, for this year’s Dance Umbrella. Performed last weekend at the foot of the London Eye, in Jubilee Gardens, Transports Exceptionnels might have appeared to the passing strollers to be yet another crowd-pulling stunt conceived by one of the many ingenious street performers that populate the river walk. Indeed, pure entertainment and spectacle seemed to be its main features, for its ingredients were a man cavorting rather dangerously on a moving machine while speakers boomed out the irresistible and immortal voice of the legendary Maria Callas singing two heart-wrenching French arias, and an equally catchy arrangement of melodies from Bellini’s Norma.