Technique and dance give groundbreaking theatre experience

Dance and technology. That is the theme on the second day of the Moving Futures festival. After seeing this broadly composed programme, I no longer doubt that there is such a thing as 'progress in art'. This is not just about the new means artists can use to shape their work. The innovation is also in the awareness of how the artist stands in the world.

New dimensions

The programme gives you the chance to let this affect you on all levels. Theatre performance, experience, reflection, creative elaboration on the theme: it's all there in one evening.

The Definition of Now by choreographer Jasper van Luijk overwhelmingly immerses you in the new dimensions that technology opens up in the performing arts. Immediately after this performance, dance researcher Zeynep Gündüz will engage with the audience. As part of her PhD research at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, she has studied the merging of the dancing body and technical means. She places this topic in a broad framework. Throughout our lives, technology has developed in such a way that it has gradually become a partner of humans. No longer a tool that humans can deal with at will, but something that increasingly behaves independently and has something to say to us.

Light effects as a dance partner

So too in modern dance. In the past, theatre technique was simply something used to dress up a choreography. The technique was subservient to the dance. In The Definition of Now is radically different. From the beginning, dancer and technical staff have been actively involved in the creative process. With dancer Jefta Tanate and technicians Marcel Wierckx and Robert Groenewald, the choreographer explored how dancer and lighting effects interact. It is a new way of working together. Experimenting. Discovering possibilities they first thought impossible. Lighting technology and soundscape as part of the choreography. New interaction. Light becomes dance partner. From now on, dance is no longer purely human. American literary critic Katherine Hayles speaks of post-humanism. Man is no longer the centre. We share the world with plants and animals, as well as non-living things.

Insecure walls

And now to the performance itself. The theatre experience at The Definition of Now. Something unusual really does happen. I soon feel pulled into other, uncertain dimensions. In the foggy hall, bands of light evoke the illusion of walls. Hard walls. But walls with moving clouds as wallpaper. They form a corridor. Infinitely long, with the beamer's bright light as a vanishing point. The dancer seeks his way. Is the wall something holding him back? Trapping him? Or can he just pass through it? Does the wall have a will? The wall swings away. There are infinite walls in stock. Each time, they give way to another such wall. Is it still the same space?

Supreme technology

Dancer and light are indeed partners, but in an unequal dance. The light seems supreme. Unapproachable. Of delay or resistance it does not suffer. It plays with the dancer. It can do what it wants with him. The powerful effect of the light, which plays the whole space, makes me feel myself a partner too, even though I don't dance and have no technical button to influence the light. I feel as much a plaything of the light as the dancer. That's how strongly I am pulled away from my seat. I experience his fight.

Empathy

I realise: with him I can sympathise, but Light is a partner I cannot identify with. Yet for a moment, the performance seems to manage to break that. There follows a hellish scene with staggered stripes and figures on the floor. They besiege the dancer. At one point, the light effects seem to have a heartbeat. But the light is too big to be truly human. The dancer lies on the floor. He is the one I can empathise with. He tries to get up. Repeatedly falls back and gets up again. I feel all orientation being undermined. What is horizontal. What is vertical? Where can I go? What is my space? The light figures drag the dancer into a spiral. He spins on his axis. Or is it the whole world spinning around him?

Grand stature

The walls return, but tilted a quarter turn. The dancer stands waist-deep in a horizontal plane. As if it were water. Lovely. Idyllic. The atmosphere of a jungle river. He dives headfirst, jumps up again. Again, planes of light begin to spin down, followed by new ones, faster and faster. The dark silhouette of the dancer seems to disappear into it. He gains wings. Wings of light. A beautiful image, that dark figure, grand in the abundance of light.

Creative feedback

The festival encourages an active, creative response to the choreography in several ways. Afterwards, dancer Junadry Leocaria gives an instant body feedback on the performance in Bellevue's downstairs corridor. Powerful, swirling movements. Sometimes eyes closed. You see her scanning the space with her body sense. Involuntarily, I also watch the tracks in the tile pattern on the floor.

Feedback from the audience

Members of the public are also called upon to make their own comments, in text this time, and via a special computer programme. Edit this Post is the name of this initiative. It is a pilot in cooperation with Domain for Art Criticism. Participants give individual responses. Together, they compile a contiguous text from it. New audiences can read this feedback on the internet. The texts are also printed in the theatre. It provides a nice picture of what is experienced in the theatre. And perhaps it gives people the realisation that everyone can say something about a performance. Every experience counts.