Radical vulnerability and listening with eyes open - Vanrunxt stages Morton Feldman

Festival Rumor 80, an irregular regular in Utrecht at three different venues each time, will show the new work of choreographer Marc Vanrunxt this Friday at Theater Kikker: Real, So Real. Starting point is Three Voices, a 1982 composition by Morton Feldman. A wonderful Flemish collaboration of Art/Work and ChampdAction.

Dancer Marie De Corte and singer Els Mondelaers shine in Real, So Real. The two women each have a complex task in this very special performance. Feldman stacks voices in Three Voices, in a fragile chorus of recorded and sung live. Choreographer Marc Vanrunxt sets another woman in this tenuous and sometimes icy world, the earthy and unruly dancer Marie De Corte.

In supreme concentration, Els Mondelaers builds a world of deployment and arrest, of sound and time relationships. In the middle of the performance, she is often only voice. De Corte moves right through this. On huge heels or bare feet, she knows how to find her way amidst the insistent and penetrating nature of the music.

Feldman wrote Three Voices as Memento Mori for the poet Frank O'Hara and the painter Philip Guston. The falling apart of structures and the dissolution of form into pure matter is illuminated here and there with almost lyrical moments, with two quotes from an O'Hara poem playing a major role: "Who'd have thought / that snow falls" and "nothing ever fell".

De Corte's gait across the stage seems to describe an almost tidy contemplation of dying. Her movements are restrained and concrete, in an extremely sensitive relationship to the music. Contemplation and self-reflection connect with ever new attempts to surrender to the unimaginable.

Choreographer Marc Vanrunxt, who has worked with Feldman's music many times before, has given the setting something casual, even bright. This makes the seriousness of the composition a little less ominous. The clunkiness of a white sheet reminds us of the concreteness of death, a side that cannot be captured in ethereal sounds. The red light bulb above and the blue line around the playing floor formally delineate the functions of the theatrical installation - recording on, floor starts here - but also recall in their colourfulness the party afterwards, when the dying is done and the remembering can begin. And there is a dress, as always at Vanrunxt.

From the impressive Three Voices speaks a certain immobility. The ferocity of dying seems already done. A deeper, older or perhaps eternal vibration seems to be described. Marie De Corte does not simply blend in or go along with this. Vanrunxt has given her a very human role, powerful and vulnerable. Never does anything triumphant speak from her movements. Rarely have I seen such a lively duet about something as elusive as death.

The poem Wind By Frank O'Hara.

Also in this Rumor episode: Danish multi-instrumentalist Frisk Frugt in ACU and in RASA Fred Frith apprentice Ava Mendoza with band straight out of Brooklyn.

For more information: Rumor, Art/Work, ChampdAction. Tickets via Theatre Frog.