Bombyx Mori, a brilliant explosion between something and nothing

While it is rumbling in the Amsterdam dance and performance scene because of a total lack of solid support for development and experimentation (see Alert letter), choreographer Ola Maciejewska is showing the impressive Bombyx Mori at Veem House of Performance.

Maciejewska is a fine example of a talented maker who took refuge elsewhere because of the crumbling art climate in the Netherlands. After a second dance study in Rotterdam, a career as a performer with Bruno Listopad and Nicola Unger, among others, and a master's degree in theatre studies in Utrecht, Maciejewska left for France in 2013, where she went to work with Phillipe Quesne and now as 'associated artist' associated with the Centre chorégraphique national de Caen en Normandie. And in itself, of course, there is nothing wrong with a fine French-Dutch co-production. Bombyx Mori is supported by Productiehuis Rotterdam and Veem, and will also be during next month's Dutch Dance Days to see. Bombyx Mori is one of the best and most beautiful performances co-developed on Dutch soil in recent years. Maciejewska truly has her own choreographic voice, and it therefore remains painful that emerging artists of this calibre end up having to find their footing elsewhere.

Silk butterfly

The show is named after the silk larva, which after pupation becomes an equally fragile and impressive silk butterfly becomes. But he is more like a moth, one of those critters that flies against the window at night and that people fear because it might fly into your neck with its delicate body. Virginia Woolf immortalised a moth, describing its sudden end of life in The Death of a Moth. Is it something, or is it nothing? On that boundary, so peculiar to theatre, moves Bombyx Mori.

All the work of Ola Maciejewska - she once graduated with honours from the National Ballet Academy in Poland - expresses a deep aversion to the narcissism common in dance and the glorification of the human body. Rather than the heroic presentation of human figures or human expression, she focuses on the materiality of how things move and are moved by each other. Maciejewska herself refers to the intimate relationship between sculptor and sculpture. In the struggle to get the work done, material and maker are shaped.

Overwhelmingly, it is when Ola Maciejewska and her colleagues set in motion the huge amount of fabric that falls stupidly along the body at rest. Heavily twisting and swaying, the performer disappears into and under her costume, giving way to a play of volumes and lines drawn in silk, raising questions about who is now being moved by what. It is fascinating and picture-perfect. But Maciejewska goes beyond circus and aesthetics.

Insane transformations

At Bombyx Mori human scale gives way to a strange kind of steeled expression, larger than life. The energy that the performers have to invest to keep the silk high and changing shape is continuously palpable. At the same time, the dozens of metres of fabric hide the performer's figure. The dancing silk replaces the inflated, über-aesthetic dancer's body. The pathetic of human freedom, uninhibitedness and spontaneity often used in dance gives way to a dynamic between man and matter. The silk translates any play between the two. The concrete situation of working with the silk yields frenzied transformations, dazzling abstract formations with the occasional foot, head or hand still sticking out.

The silk allows Maciejewska to play an extremely delicate game with the laws of gravity and dynamics. A fluid script or drawing of ever further stacking actions and images in black and white emerges. The transformations play with expectations about represented action or aesthetics, but also systematically undermine any clear interpretation. Sometimes Bombyx Mori therefore brings to mind the unconscious ink-blot compositions of the Dadaists, or a whimsical depiction of a world elsewhere, or an absurd dream play that does not allow itself to be read. But it also appeals to the eternal struggle of living beings with the elements, the overwhelming power of matter and time.

Black box

Since 2011, Maciejewska has been performing with her solo performance LOIE FULLER: research, based on the Serpentine Dance by Loie Fuller. Now Productiehuis Rotterdam, Veem House of Performance and Paris-based La Ménagerie de Verre are co-producing a trio performance based on this study. With Bombyx Mori, danced by Maciejewska, Amaranta Velarde Gonzalez and Keyna Nara, the action moves from the 'white cube', the gallery setting where Maciejewska showed her solo, to the 'black box' of the theatre.

The material of LOIE FULLER: research takes on a whole new connotation in the theatrical space. Not only the translation x 3, but also the possibility of a sophisticated tuning of light and sound - developed with Thomas Laigle - allow a precise direction of the spectator's perspective. The use of light and dark, of (feedbacked) silence, noise and drone enhance the materiality of the experience. Where the white cube makes the solo performance primarily a fascinating object, which very slowly unleashes questions about the relationship between visual art and dance, in the world of the black box the appearance and disappearance of the three figures haunted by questions of temporality and transience.

Humor

Bombyx Mori is like a puppetry from within, where the puppeteers have become puppets that emerge by yielding to the fluidity of the silk. Though their little heads occasionally rise above the material, the performers remain 'operators', battling the elements. The silk reigns as a radiant mediator. This also sometimes produces comical moments. Maciejewska very deliberately feeds the spectator's curiosity. At any moment, the 'something' can fall back into nothingness, the droll or clownish comes along. But in the black-and-white universe of Bombyx Mori the overwhelming formations develop a drama of their own, beyond the players' struggles with the fabric or with each other.

Bombyx Mori jumps all kinds of artistic fences and social obligations in dance in a seemingly careless way. Moreover, it lovingly pays attention to Loie Fuller's legacy, but also takes it a step further. Beyond the spectacular solo, the piece plays in the mis-en-scene and timing of the threesome with possible exit situations for a social context or meaningful images. But never does the play live up to those expectations. Beckett would be jealous. His Quad does not match Maciejewska's equally existential and principled, but also playful gesture, about what movement does and how we are moved, spending our time between something and nothing.