Postmodernism must be the key motif of this year’s autumn dance season in London, because almost everything there is to see at the moment abides by the uncertain rules of that much-debated artistic movement.
Postmodernism must be the key motif of this year’s autumn dance season in London, because almost everything there is to see at the moment abides by the uncertain rules of that much-debated artistic movement. There is no such thing as a standard aesthetic when it comes to the postmodern dance genre. While vintage American, early-1960s choreography is celebrated by both Dance Umbrella’s retrospective on Trisha Brown and the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition Move: Choreographing You at Sadler’s Wells, the spotlight is on Middle-European postmodernism.
The Song is the title of the latest creation that Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, together with Ann Veronica Janssens and Michel François, masterminded for Rosas. Indeed, some singing is delivered throughout this whopping, interval-free one-hour-and-45-minute-long performance. Yet the sporadic and rhapsodic bouts of garbling and the few guitar strums one gets are but random punctuations in a choreographic text that develops mostly around other types of man- and props-made sounds. The stage is bare and empty, bar a confining dance floor, the greyness of which contrasts with the smoky blackness of theatre walls and floor.
It all starts with men running, as if they were a pack of wild horses. Indeed, their behaviour could be described as animalistic, underscored by those often-unexplainable rituals that both men and animals share in the everyday. Out of the general movement develops a number of solos, based, mostly, on individual bravura and, in some instances, a frequently competitive interaction with a female performer, who produces sounds with, for example, tapping shoes, wetted fingers on the dance floor’s surface, plastic bags, etc.
The predominant absence of music, and the rhapsodic development of the action, which comes across as plotless despite several thematic threads, is both captivating and challenging. As in other works by the same performance-maker, there is a distinctive combination of the pedestrianism of the early-1960s American postmodernist, and the more cerebral, soul- and mind-wrenching theatre modes of the Middle-European Tanztheater or dance theatre — more of which will be seen this week at Sadler’s Wells in Pina Bausch’s Iphigenie auf Tauris. Such a combination, possibly a postmodern pastiche, is not exactly a novelty any more, but still works splendidly well — providing this is the kind of theatrical experience you are after. Given that I was born and brought up amid it all — in those days it was called avant-garde — I have some sympathy for this kind of dance. Like others, I am happy to sit through such interminable challenges to my senses, as I know that the reward is to be treated to a unique display of movement ideas that transcend the boundaries of the ‘visually nice’ and stimulate some serious thinking on the body, its possibilities and its/their meanings.
After a while, those willing to accept de Keersmaeker’s challenge feel a sort of affectionate camaraderie with the multitalented and exceptional members of her company. The nervous short laughs that indicate the initial puzzlement of many are replaced, later on, by an audibly friendlier and more attuned participation on the part of the viewer. The numerous displays of individual bravura that punctuate the whole action gradually break the ice and familiarise the public with the artistic identity of each performer. By the end, it is as if we are watching a group of people we know well and admire. Resistance, an essential quality of the postmodern theatregoer, does pay off, after all.
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