Author Archives: Thomas JM Wilson

About Thomas JM Wilson

Thomas JM Wilson has been writing for Total Theatre since 2001. His own performance work lies at the borders of dance and theatre, with a particular interest in solo performance. He is an Associate Artist of Gandini Juggling, working as Archivist and Publications Author. He also currently teaches on Rose Bruford's BA European Theatre Arts, and is a co-editor of the Training Grounds section of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training.

Compagnie 111: What’s Become of You? (Questcequetudeviens?)

What’s Become of You? is the seventh of Compagnie 111’s works to be presented at LIMF, and is, as artistic director Aurelian Bory notes, something of a departure from his usual work. Bory describes this as a portrait of flamenco dancer Stéphanie Fuster, and herein lies the key difference between C111’s usual work and this new piece.

Previously Bory’s works have been visual and kinetic sculptural landscapes, carefully constructed in form and content to reach out and fill space. So in the striking Plus Ou Moins L’infini acrobatic figures traversed the mise en scene in elegant poses, and in the arresting human and robot dance of Sans Objet the set was dismantled and reconfigured into new architectural forms. But with this portrait of Fuster, Bory has shifted his concerns from external, physical space into interior, emotional spaces. Thus Questcequetudeviens? is a piece about subterranean depth, rather than a landscape’s horizontality.

The work opens though on the surface of Fuster’s world. She emerges in classical flamenco dress, the bold red illuminated in the context of a stark set. As she slowly walks, skimming the surface of the stage, the dress detaches. In usual Bory style though it is not discarded, and instead, retaining its shape, finds its own life as a surface for Fuster to move with. It shrinks and grows, and submerges her. Finally it transforms into a majestic hat – a crown of rich fabric on top of the stocking-clad Fuster – before returning to its previous life as a dress and exiting of its own accord, leaving Fuster alone and exposed.

The second phase of the piece delves a little deeper, this time into the graft of flamenco training. Fuster, inside what looks like a steel shipping container with a glass wall, strikes poses and pounds the floor with a rising intensity. As she does so the glass begins to mist and her body appears to slowly dissolve. There are echoes of a caterpillar’s transmogrification, as Fuster’s driving energy and grey clothing begin to disappear behind the opaque surface. Alongside this José Sanchez’s deft guitar playing provides sporadic punctuations of rhythm and Alberto Garcia’s rich singing drifts melodically around Fuster’s form. Here is the play of different levels of being inside. Fuster is physically bound inside both the container and flamenco’s form, suggesting the ways in which both dancing and immersion in another culture can begin to mould and shape someone.

The final phase of the portrait sees Fuster emerge into the external world, this time clad in a black dress, to take her place on the same surface as she began. As she stands the surface begins to fill with water, as if the steam and heat of her training now find themselves condensing. This water then becomes the third surface of the piece. Though, rather than becoming a surface that obscures and hides Fuster, it is one that is fractured and punctured by her dancing. This time her steps are wider and slower in rhythm, though not less in intensity. As she slams her feet into the water-covered floor, the droplets of water arcing upwards and coating her inclined body, Fuster breaks her own reflection. In this the transformation is complete – Fuster has reached a kind of earthy transcendence of her previous superficial form. Now she moves, strengthened and refined internally and externally. In a final, if rather obvious, capitulation Fuster ends prone in the water, arms sporadically washing the water away from her body. Like a dying butterfly, partially unaware of her own demise.

Where before Bory’s work has always felt majestically airy, rising upwards, in merging the earthy and the numinous Bory has found a new register and grounded quality to his work. And though the last ten minutes of Questcequetudeviens? lack the same drive as the preceding 50 minutes, there is something transcendent in his fusion of the two poles of the vertical.

Man Drake: Anatomica Publica

This taut trio from Catalan company Man Drake is tightly wound around the central physical motif of the staccato repetition of simple human action. A woman sits reading, her gaze gliding back and forth across the pages of a newspaper. A man stands, his head turning back and forth, his shoulders briefly engaging in the rotation. Each repeated gesture, each repeated action, is barely completed, the performers stuck in each fragment. Her face twitches back and forth towards a smile; the rotations of his head edge toward facing us. Inch by inch the movement advances, and as it does so the company generate a rising emotional tension. He reaches towards her, his hands appear to move to strangle her. Her head lifts as if to kiss or scream. The vibrating, oscillating movement makes the images hover between one meaning and another, between humour and despair. His hands caress her shoulders. She sinks into his grasp. The figures appear trapped between the drive to execute an action and a resistance to that impulse; this tension makes even the simplest of actions feel like pathetic attempts to fulfil the characters’ desires.

This approach to the movement, which is sustained almost throughout the whole piece, creates some beautifully compelling moments; even in the mundane puffing on a cigarette, for example. Similarly, as the woman and one man kiss in reconciliation, a second man is stuck in the moment of recoiling against (or is it escaping from?) a wall. The intense repetition of these fragments dilates each moment, drawing out the action and relationships for closer scrutiny. Like a continual loop of a two second video clip, the action allows the eye to trace the detail of human interaction. The deliberate ambiguity of each moment, say of kissing or screaming, perfectly illuminates the tension in these interactions, our desire to maintain the surface of our relationships in spite of internal turbulence.

The jolts of movement are perpetually underscored by a thrumming soundtrack of spinning and pulsing machines. This echoes the way in which industrial processes contort raw materials into useful products, creating a world that teeters on the edge of breakdown. This all makes for a striking experience, the intensity of this rhythm and the performers’ form exposing the irresistible biological drives underlying human behaviour.

Anatomia Publica opens, though, in a very different vein, but one that sets the context for the action precisely and pointedly. Company dramaturg, Véronique Petit, emerges from the darkness to outline the biographical source of the work: a soldier returns from war to find his wife living with another man, accepts the situation and joins the two to make three. This woman? The choreographer’s grandmother. This framing ostensibly provides a grounding context for the stylised form, not completely necessary, but a welcome one that lightens the load of the ceaseless oscillations.

Over the course of 55 minutes director Tomeo Vergés crafts a multi-layered imagining of the interior worlds of the trio, fleeting glimpses of jealousy, ecstasy, frustration and boredom are etched out on stage. Momentary relief is provided by brief passages of uninterrupted movement and a rather incongruous discotheque section, but these only serve to exacerbate the tension of the rest of the piece. But, in spite of the intensity of the sustained tension throughout, the piece never reaches a point of satisfying closure, and the last few minutes peter out. Strangely though this doesn’t matter. The physical memory of the tension is enough to take home, leaving a tangible sense of our own unresolved emotional frustrations.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch: Two Cigarettes in the Dark

Two Cigarettes in the Dark opens on a stage that is anything but dark. Instead a brilliant white high-walled ballroom occupies the space, framed on three sides by room-sized glass-fronted vivariums – verdant tropical foliage in one, a mini desert and cactus in another, and a giant ﬁsh tank in the third. These decidedly artiﬁcial landscapes bring a jet of colour to an otherwise near-sterile environment and it is this interplay between muted and brighter/sharper tones that permeates this piece from 1986, showing at Sadler’s Wells as part of a double-bill with Vollmond. Typical of Bausch, it is a concoction of fragments featuring snippets of dance phrases, grotesque and ironic personae, and the expected social savagery. Two Cigarettes is not as rich as 1980, nor as redolent as Cafe Müller but it is interesting to see this lesser-known work and how it develops elements of both.

Although the title is taken taken from Bing Crosby’s song about a lover’s betrayal, Two Cigarettes in the Dark feels ostensibly concerned with display, both social and private, from the bird-inspired vocabulary of the dancers’ arms, to the ironic glances of the dinner-jacketed men and the supercilious smiles of the ball-gowned and be-furred women. The latter are of course regular features of many of Bausch’s works but here the empty, pointless preening of both genders is decidedly foregrounded: men dribble or spit ﬁne champagne over themselves, skate across the ﬂoor adorned only in sunglasses and towelling shorts and slippers, women pull handstands to let their dresses fall over their heads, and our ‘hostess’ greats us with weighted pronouncements.

The ﬁrst half is lighter and shorter, whilst the second is longer, darker, and richer in objects and colour. But the additional length and trappings don’t quite have the same power as the sparse brutality of the ﬁrst half; and whilst there are some whimsical motifs that emerge throughout the work the brutality and futility of the action is the stronger thread, in spite of some sections of the audience’s response to the contrary. These stronger moments though are rarely the main vocabulary and instead they are the momentary glances or small actions that betray obscured emotional territories, only later to erupt into frenzied action or full-bodied hysteria. Here, then, is where Two Cigarettes is at its most evocative and psychological – articulating whole vistas of despair within brief moments. Interestingly, unlike some of Bausch’s earlier work where the group of dancers as a corps is a central presence, here the ﬁgures are rarely united and instead each individual dancer’s persona is more clearly articulated and drawn upon. Throughout this, Bausch’s long-term dancer Dominique Mercy is a celestial presence – whether it is his ﬂirtatious glances to the audience, the beguiling lock-kneed bouncing ‘chef’ or the deadpan diver.

Since Pina Bausch’s death Tanztheater Wuppertal have opted to restrict their repertoire to her work alone. Only time will tell if this leads the company to becoming an ossiﬁed museum piece, but in this work the presence of dancers who worked with Bausch herself retains the impact of the work. In addition the presence of older performers alongside newer members of the ensemble brings a greater authority and bleakness to the work.

www.pina-bausch.de

Compagnie 111: Plan B

Returning in the tenth anniversary year of its creation, Compagnie 111’s second work Plan B hasn’t quite the striking impression of the company’s later works (most notably the arresting and singular Sans Objet seen at the 2011 Mime Festival). What Plan B does, though, is provide an artful introduction to the principles of Compagnie 111’s work, particularly their playful response to objects large and small. This playfulness, at the heart of so much contemporary performance, is particularly striking in Compagnie 111’s work because of the scale and qualities of the objects they chose to play with, and the lightness with which they do so.

Plan B‘s dominant object is the ‘plane’ of the title, a grey-green surface, angled towards the audience. This plane, moving from a 45 degree incline, to the vertical, before finally falling to the horizontal with a rush of air, serves as the both the origin and the site of the performance. With sections of this plane cut-out and popping out, it becomes an almost alien landscape across which the four besuited performers skim, slide, leap and fall. Throughout the encounters that emerge between them there is an echo of early computer and console games, from Pong, to ‘platform’ games like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros, and this feeling carries into the structure of the work as the characters play through different levels and challenges.

A sound track redolent of cosmonautic activity, such as beeps and snatches of garbled transmissions, quantifies the otherworldly feel of the work, a feeling that mirrors the momentary weightlessness of the performers and the apparent disregard for the laws of physics. At times quietly austere, at others gently competitive, they suggest a distilled humanity – one not quite two-dimensional, but not quite three-dimensional. But they are more than mere pixelated characters and the little variations and accentuations of action serve to retain the ‘liveness’ of their world. Thus, it is this paradoxical quality that presages Compagnie 111’s later work, a quality that blends the inanimate and the animate into an evocative and poetic landscape.

www.cie111.com

Stan’s Cafe: The Cardinals

British stalwarts Stan’s Cafe’s latest work mines a range of familiar comic theatrical tropes: the backstage action revealed, the deconstruction of well-known tales, and amateurs staging a performance. In The Cardinals the company set three red-robed cardinals the task of staging the (hi)story of the Holy Land, from Genesis to modern day Jerusalem. Inside a lo-fi puppet booth complete with wooden scenery, tatty drapes, cheap wigs and rough and ready props, the three cardinals take on the roles of the prophets and faithful. All the while they are (barely) tolerated by their female Muslim stage manager, who reluctantly and patiently keeps the self-absorbed cardinals on track.

There is a gentle, simmering ridiculousness that emerges from the earnest convictions of the cardinals donned in their bright robes which they cover with costumes that appear borrowed from a school play. A raised eyebrow or sotto admonishment punctures the atmosphere of reverence with which the tales of the Old Testament are told, whilst cassette tapes of the great chorales run out into not-quite-so classic pop songs, accentuating the ‘cultural selectiveness’ of the cardinals’ bible.

Despite the absurdity of the work, though, the conviction in the characterisation allows fleeting images to attain a rare numinous and deeply affecting quality – most striking of which is when God’s hand interrupts a ‘tea-towelled’ Abraham as he goes to strike his son Isaac dead with a wooden dagger, and then presents a painted wooden lamb for slaughter in Jacob’s stead. The play of physical tensions in this brief vignette transforms the ridiculous to the sublime, a poignant moment of what could be and what is. The staging of this intervention uncovers the power of these ancient tales and the potential of the personal relationship between God and the faithful. Seen in relief against the robust absurdity of the rest of the work these moments are all the more powerful.

But this work is no proselytisation – and as the piece shifts into its second half the oft-explored inhumanity of organised politicised religion is the subject of the growing pace of the narrative and muted conflict between the characters. This conflict builds into a chaotic finale, the puppet booth’s small stage crammed with the objects and machinery of modern power. This final descent into madness is a bleak and pessimistic one and as the ‘world’ collapses so does the theatrical artifice, leaving a dystopian vision of the cardinals’ failure to take command of, and responsibility for, the real world.