Composer Wolfgang Rihm and choreographer Sasha Waltz, two familiar faces at the Holland Festival and big names in European performing arts, jointly released a performance in 2008 that could not be missing from a Holland festival programme this year. In addition to focusing on some great contemporary composers (Xenakis, Rihm), the festival is also quite active in the field of interdisciplinary and otherwise inter-cultural performances.
Where, for example, the Woostergroup, Schlingensief, Xenakis or Abou Lagraa provided outstanding examples of border-crossing projects - all build on certain traditions within theatre and music, but know how to rapidly reduce them to ancillary - remains Jagden und Formen (Zustand 2008) miraculously stick and the dance seems engaged in a battle with the sublime violence of the composer Rihm: next to it, underneath it or above it?
Rihm sets high with a beautifully toned Ensemble Modern, more brass and woodwinds than strings and a battery of percussion, producing a multitude of notes and tempos. Clouds and stacks build up and break apart, always driving rhythms keep a high note at the ready. What else will dancers do there?
The dancing ensemble is fourteen, but does not immediately show itself at full strength. The opening is austere. Restrained, almost restricted, the dancers stipulate not only measure and order, but also physical intervals. The movements are not spectacular as such. It is relating to the music, taking in impulses and releasing them, that counts. Very strong is the implied, mental space thus created, between dance and music.
The Ensemble Modern is on stage left and two of them, violinists, open the evening with four dancers, in a virtuoso exchange of gestures on the still empty playing floor all around. But where Rihm effectively stacks and builds with details and breaks and clusters big lines, the dancers remain very formal in their performance. They indicate and do, but the duets, trios and other small groups remain as balls floating on a relentless stream of music. Their presence is unruly, devoid of cheap lyricism or quick effects, but the physicality of the music, the violence of the tempos, the unearthly tone, finds no opposition in the physicality of the dance, as a point that is avoided.
There are directions, there is weight, there is manoeuvring, there is letting go - as if the dance keeps making new proposals to listen and watch. But in the meantime, Rihm traverses multiple hunting grounds and leaves tsunamis behind. This curious role reversal does work as a prelude, a turn or a questioning if need be, but the failure to materialise the counter-force, the counter-question is tiresome.
As the piece progresses, the choreography allows itself a little more freedom. It is not just classical gestures like a sudden swishing leg or a lyrical arm that lingers for a moment that break through the drifting nervousness of the music. When the group as a whole spreads through the room, a certain mass emerges that lends weight and creates new starting points. Most impressive in this respect are still the miraculous physical forms that emerge when dancers take energy and form from each other and find a new composite body or explore its limits. This creates physical moments that have their own logic and provide counterpoint to the music.
But in the end, it is the theatrical gestures par excellence that impress and give a real sense of proportion: a single dancer on stage standing still on his head, torquing a body above him that moves only in the capillaries; the alto oboeist being carried around by the dancers overhead, going horizontal while playing and then being left frozen in a pose, while the music goes on. Or the moment when the entire ensemble of dancers and musicians lie together with their instruments on the floor, except for the conductor, the pianist and the harpist: minimal momentum from both sides, with maximum effect.
When at the very end, the play suddenly devolves into a dramatic scene, with protagonists and beautifully agitating groups - there are even deaths - it is over for some and some people leave the hall. Many applaud enthusiastically afterwards and a few boo. After having set up and deployed so many physical building blocks and gestures separately, it remains a pressing question that Waltz raises with Jagden und Formen about dance and the fullness of omnipotent music: should you want to infuse that music with humanity and drama or, on the contrary, seek it in the directness of limited bodily experience, detached from symbolism and precooked drama?
http://www.ensemble-modern.com/
http://www.composers21.com/compdocs/rihmw.htm
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