Senses working overtime

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.