Dancing on the Edge festival started with a sense of urgency.

At Amsterdam's Brakke Grond yesterday, the  Dancing on the Edge festival (DOTE) with an evening that showed right away what the span is. The first performance, Blank, entered into a direct relationship with the audience. In the second, and official opening performance, Plastic, it was more about the dynamics between the performers themselves and with the soundscape.

With her opening speech, director Natasja van 't Westende highlighted that the festival has an urgency like never before. Subtitle of DOTE is urgent artistic dialogues with the Middle East. The images of refugees cannot be dismissed from the news. Our worlds are connected, whether we want them to be or not. Artistic dialogue is important because art can build bridges. DOTE wants to offer a personal perspective on the Middle East through theatre. How personal it can be for the creators is shown by the fact that some of the performers do not get exit visas. We do not hear during the opening speech whether this is because the performance is so fraught or because the political situation in Syria does not allow it for other reasons. The Syrian theatre group Koon goes Above Zero play, but with a partly new cast. It makes the situation there, in a different way tangible for us. I think that's a win.

Audience fill-in exercise

The aforementioned -urgent artistic- dialogue was conducted in both performances.
At Blank quite literally: the audience is leading in the play. The performer, someone different each time, is given a text by Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour. It is full of dotted lines, on which the audience has to fill in words by shouting them loudly. Fill in the blanks. In the first bit, this is still corny, when we have to invent an imaginary playwright, she first worked as a hooker. It becomes different when someone from the audience is asked to fill in the dotted lines of his past. We hear that he is from Groningen and who he fell in love with as a four-year-old. Honest and disarming. When the audience is asked to fill in his near future, we are also a lot nicer: we have him meet God in his dream, and a nice girl when he is in the taxi.

The beauty of this work is that it is unpredictable and carried by the interaction between audience and stage. Every time is different. There is no routine. The disadvantage is that everything has to be read out because the performer is also seeing the text for the first time. Sahand Sahebdivani was first up and quickly got into his role. At times it was a bit searching and the whole thing ran out of steam, which could hardly be otherwise with this format. But the message was clear: we are nothing without our past. You only get to know another person, and yourself, when you know something about the past. And what better way to do that than by telling stories. Or, to quote, which question tells you more: the one about one's gender or about one's first great love.

Four men and a wall of sound

Plastic by Meher Debbich Awachri was less easy to interpret and place: overloaded with meanings, but for the audience it was sometimes searching. Didn't van 't Westende already say not to underestimate the audience? Five men on stage, four dancers/performers and one sound artist who live created the score. A solid wall of sound, sometimes reminiscent of industrial music from the 1980s complete with jackhammers, and then again recognisable in fragments of Alle Menschen Werden Brueder To transition into rousing drums.

The dancers probe each other, take each other's measure and show aggression, but also show vulnerability at certain moments. The work is divided into separate fragments. One features jerky, nervous movements reminiscent of Edouard Lock's dance group La La La Human Steps. Other passages refer to boxing moves and streetdance. Towards the end, one of the men is thrown to the ground. The others use his limp body as a kind of ventriloquist's puppet, while we have a quote hear: "Defend and Love your country." It ends with another voice telling us that you don't come from a black hole, it's a one-way street.

Dancing on the edge of a black hole

The players, Meher Debbich Awachri, Maciej Beczek, Hazem Header and Mahrez Taher, hail from Egypt, Tunisia and Poland. Countries with a rich but tumultuous history. The old ghosts were still around, the young men have to deal with that. Is that the black hole? Is that patriotism? The play feels heavy. Is it the disappointment over the Arab Spring? Or is it the reckoning with that and a look forward, away from the black hole? Or does it end with the black hole because it is inescapable? The show doesn't feel quite finished yet, leaving questions like these lingering a bit. But, as the programme booklet also says, the festival is also more about asking questions than giving answers. Here, the dialogue was between five men, three countries, three histories. Big questions in a sober, charged setting. In any case, the conversations afterwards were more intense and substantive than usual at an opening. It seems to me that the festival has already achieved its first goal.

 

Dancing on the Edge can be attended in Amsterdam, Utrecht, The Hague and Rotterdam until 13 November.

Click here for more information on Blink and here for more information on Plastic.