Anyone walking into the venue where choreographer/visual artist Piet Rogie's performance 'Stardust' is due to take place is immediately astonished. In the vacant exhibition hall of the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, ropes are stretched, it is teeming with seemingly carelessly scattered props and four cement mixers stand along the side like implacable sentinels. The whole space radiates that things are getting exciting. And the viewer is not disappointed with that.
About halfway through the performance, a dancer and a dancer sit at a small table. It seems somewhat formal at first, until they start communicating with their hands on the tabletop. The hands pass each other at first, but the lines of movement become increasingly intertwined. Two more dancers join in and four girls from a children's choir sing in canon a summary of all the stages of human life, from baby to old age. This small, intimate scene, with its special interaction with the large, uninviting concrete space, is characteristic of the show. Stardust is a great stream of small stories about encounters, confrontations, disappointments and lonely moments. The people are nothing more than a swarm of dust particles making their way in the immeasurable space.
All of life from birth to death is summed up in the performance. People of all age stages participate: singing young girls, vital dancers at the peak of their physical ability and two dancers of advanced age. It can easily become excessive, especially as a singer with accordion and guitar, film footage and stories are also added to the dance and music. But Rogie succeeds excellently in making it a catchy whole with a nice tension build-up. 'Stardust' is an inviting universe in which anyone can wander along. Not surprisingly, the audience has every freedom to walk around the performance.
The young dancers create beautifully vital movements, with a very personal power. Whether there is fighting or love being expressed, there is something driven about it, making it seem as if they want to conquer the whole room with their little story. The older dancers' duets connect beautifully with this. They have the same desires, the same venom and the same confrontational reactions as the younger generation, but in the vulnerable variety. Vulnerability runs like a thread through the performance. The large space and mechanical movements in which the dancers hide at the beginning already suggest this, but the cold, report-like texts about hospital admissions make the vulnerability even more obvious. Muscular, supreme dance and fierce emotional expressions, placed alongside broken bones, a risky childbirth and a heart that signals that it may soon no longer want to participate: no matter how large the space, these contradictions in human life are so close together.
In the last years of Pete Rogie's long career, his work was at times in danger of becoming somewhat introspective. With 'Stardust', his versatile talent seems to be blossoming all over again.
Piet Rogie: 'Stardust'. Seen: 12 September, NAi Rotterdam. Still to be seen there: 13 and 14 September, 7pm; 15 September, 4.30pm
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