Two choreographers exploring how a dancer and the eye of the audience interact. Dance makers who rattle common ideas about identity and sexuality. Artists who confront us with the dreams of perfection and glamour that advertising and marketing throw at us. The famous Cullberg Ballet made a striking choice by performing choreography by American Trajal Harrell and Hungarian/French Eszter Salamon. Although the dancers dance beautifully, the evening sticks to statements. The aim seems mainly to make the audience think.
'Bringing back the soul of modern dance.' This is what the six Cullberg dancers promise at the beginning of Harrell's 'The Return of the Modern Dance'. Get rid of the obfuscation of recent decades. An intricate web of questions has laid itself over modern dance. What identity do dancers convey? What forces shape their dance and the way audiences view it? Politics, emotion, psychology, eroticism, language, race, gender? What they want back is: personal expression.
But where is that individuality in this performance? Everything is so little different from each other: the solos with undulating torsos, shoulders and arms, the group passages with simple motifs, culminating in steps like soldiers in a row. You see stripped-down references to modern dance by other choreographers, but where do these dancers break through this material to reveal their own motivations? No tension grows in the austere movements. The music is diverse, but all songs spread the same languid atmosphere in the auditorium. The dancers don women's clothes, but so little else happens with them!
As a spectator, what am I supposed to do with it? Only at the end does the choreography get a little more punch. But the liberated way the dancers whirl across the stage is also so minimal, so unspoken! Where is that soul of modern dance, I wonder at this. But by then the lights go out.
The premise of Eszter Salamon's 'Reproduction' is easy to sum up. Eight men take all the time they need to have sex in front of the audience, in all the positions and poses they can think of. At first they are real men, mustachioed and tough, doing it two by two. Later, when they have changed into sophisticated women's clothes, more group work follows, mixed with catwalk mannerisms. A special feature is that they do this whole act, from start to finish, at an extremely slowed-down pace.
The latter leads you to think that the choreographer wants you to think about something. So that's what I was going to do. The slowness and silence make sex seem unreal. It is the distant dream that fashion, media and marketing make of it. The showy and later (gl)amorous images also made me think: do we really give of ourselves when we make love according to the norm of media and advertising? And linked to that: do we really want the other person as they are when we sleep with someone or are we just lusting after the image, the appearance? And after a while I thought: are they elaborately rolling out a joke here to show the absurdly clichéd? And finally but again the question: is this dance?
Of course, it is useful to ask yourself these kinds of questions, but in 'Reproduction' it is made difficult. The performance lasts so long that the questions that came to mind deflated like a balloon. The content is ultimately so thin and so little essentially happens! From the get-go, you stop with that realisation. Haven't these kinds of questions been asked very often? And haven't we gradually come to see all movements as potential dances? However awakening 'Reproduction' may have been intended, I left the auditorium feeling: now I want to see dance that really takes me across borders.
Still to see: Sat 20 and Sun 21 June, 20.30 (preview: 19.45), Theater Bellevue, Amsterdam
Photos: Carl Thorborg
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