‘You forget that all the feelings of the world, the rains, the sounds, the cities, the birds, the people, and everything… is you,’ says Derevo’s announcement of their inspirational new ensemble work, Mephisto Waltz. Know that we are intrinsically part of everything, and that everything – good or bad – is part of us, is the message. Light and dark, life and death, sanity and madness, summer and winter, Heaven and Hell. You can’t have one without the other.
The show is a kind of history of the whole world and all it contains, with loose reference to Goethe’s Faust, and in particular the less-well-known Faust – Part II, with its story of Faust’s time in the wilderness, and the birth of Euphorion the savage bird-man who (like Icarus) flies too high and is burnt to death. Human folly has a light shone upon it, and the excesses of capitalism, religion, war, and the plundering of the natural environment are all commented upon wordlessly. Sound has a big part to play (in particular, Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes, and Holst’s The Planets suite).
Many and various are the extraordinary images that move across the stage, conjuring up illusion and allusion: here, a Nosferatu in a long black gown, with a curved nose and an enormous shadow double looming over him; there, a stage-full of whirling dervishes and waltzing women. Now a bower of flowers, and now a shower of pretty butterflies that turns into an ominous flutter of suicidal moths hitting the light (I’ve never seen butterflies as menacing creatures until this moment). A carrot-nosed snowman melts before our eyes, and a flock of egg-heads in nest-twig collars invade the stage. There’s a living scarecrow clanking cans at the birds around him, and a savage soldier tearing apart a globe to reveal its juicy (watermelon) centre – chewing on a cigar, he walks downstage muttering in a crazed no-man’s-language, to stand just inches from us, grinning insanely. (Both of these figures, and many others, are played by Derevo’s director and guiding light, Anton Adasinsky.)
Now he’s a blind scythe-bearer in a pink skirt hacking at the air, and now an old man lying on a couch, layer after layer of plastic masks stripped from his face until he remains ‘maskless’: exposed, raw, open to the realities of the world he has created.
Described by the company as ‘a gospel of dance, a personal journey and a declaration of love’, Mephisto Waltz is Derevo returning to what they do best: a strong five-person ensemble with breathtaking physical presence. It is at times impenetrable, but it is always fascinating – with moments of dark humour to throw some light into the Faustian darkness.