The Pyre: taut, disruptive performance by Gisele Vienne @HollandFestival

Anyone suffering from the misconception that dance is about beauty is mercilessly disabused of the dream by Gisele Vienne. Her pieces are about pain. Sometimes gory and explicit, sometimes sublimated but no less powerful. The Pyre is an overwhelming piece that leaves the audience dizzy.

In a dark set, a tunnel of tubes with LED lights, dancer Anja Röttgerkamp begins her performance: on the floor, hair in front of her face, difficult to see but with an intensity that sucks you in to her twisted movements. Because the stage is so dark, and the tunnel has a mirrored back wall, with all the pulsing LEDs, you soon lose the idea of space. The sense of time is manipulated by stretching movements and the pumping alienating soundscape. This is so unsettling that the audience has no choice but to surrender and join in a black hole.

The performance has three parts: the first is Röttgerkamp's solo performance, in which she, like a psychotic Olivia Newton John, files the "let's get physical" era down to mechanical movements on the dance floor. Costume and lighting allude to club culture, its empty hedonism painfully revealed. In the second part, she meets a young boy, probably her son. An embrace forms the only moment of release, almost of absolution in the whole performance. Not long after, the son kicks against the dancer's lifeless body.

The third part is the most intriguing, by its presence and absence: on each seat is a booklet, a partly autobiographical novella by Dennis Cooper, to be read after the performance. The text explains something, but not everything about the performance. For instance, we can now argue that the boy must indeed be the son and that the mother has died. We can also conclude that the relationship was difficult.

But more importantly, the text makes the viewer think about perception, about what is and cannot be seen.
The Pyre leaves much untold and literally in the dark, but then it is also about that which cannot be said.

Vienne has been working with the same people for quite some time, including writer Dennis Cooper. Together, they create a dark and perverse universe that is hard to escape from. Dance, light, sound and text are developed together and the first three elements are live. The illuminators and KTL, the black metal/computer soundscape duo allow themselves to be guided by Röttgerkamp during the performance so that the performance is rarely tight. The LEDs in the tunnel seem to enhance or influence the dancer's state of mind. At the beginning, they are still simple lights that seem to shoot out of the tunnel, creating an almost vertigo-like effect. Later, it becomes more ferocious, fierce, as does the score. Film associations with 2001: a Space Odyssey, but also Saturday Night Fever intrude, but disturbingly, violently and disorientatingly.

In the accompanying flyer, Gisele Vienne mentions that art should not be comfortable, but deep and heavy. Mission accomplished. Transgressive art fortunately still has a right to exist.