Innovation in dance: give young creators space and you'll get it!

Water and dance have agility in common. Yet there is much more to be gained from this interface. Two choreographies in the New Adventures series give audiences a water experience that is both playful and reflective.

Under the title New Adventures Dansmakers Amsterdam presents work by selected dancers and choreographers created during a four-week study stay at the production house. In this, the production house Dansmakers Amsterdam, which is threatened with dissolution, acts as a laboratory for innovation.

Choose for yourself

'We are our choices'. This quote by Sartre is the motto of The sea is where you think it is by dance collective Chronos. You enter the hall and can choose where to sit or stand. Lying down is also allowed. And during the performance, you can move around as much as you like.

An elongated shallow pool of water on the floor attracts attention. The dancers hand out transparent marbles. You can do whatever you want with it. If you throw it into the water, it becomes invisible.

As you wait to see what happens, three dancers emerge (Charlotte Mathiessen, Coralie Merle and Vera Goetzee). There is something wave-like about them, as they move from one pose to another like a chain formation. They move between people, like water chooses openings through which it can pass. You think: would they come flowing past me here too? Involuntarily, you take a few steps in their direction.

Splashing water

There is an element of chance in it for the dancers. After all, the spectators choose their seats. The creators of the performance have no control over where the spectators are. There you are as an audience. Partly because of your choice, the performance turns out the way it does.

The dancers enter the pool. The water gurgles. You can feel the tension in the audience: the dancers are getting wet! Completely wet, as they lie down and then get up dripping. The black clothes stick to their bodies. People are startled by the wetness coming at them. Yet no one flinches when they are splashed wet. But the tension grows as the dancers wet themselves among the audience standing a little further away from the basin.

Once again, they surrender to chance. And the audience gets to choose something. The dancers take off their wet clothes and push a rack of costumes across the dance floor. Striking, colourful, eccentric creations. The audience gets to choose what each one puts on. Being faced with a choice like this gives the performance a refreshing element.

Marbles

The game expands and becomes infectious. Marbles hit the floor. First a few and then masses of marbles. Like a stream, they roll across the floor. You catch them, choose a direction and bump them off again. Underneath the dancing, curvy bodies, to other people in the audience, with a splash into the water. The rolling sound, the circling, the thrilling laughter. It is enjoyment, a tingling game, where dancers and audience merge together.

And afterwards comes thinking back to the simple means and ideas with which Chronos put such fun into motion. Water and marbles - soft and hard - shapeless and bulletproof, these are abstract terms that you experience concretely here. Marbles and water roll around freely, impeded only by who stands in the way or by who intervenes. The choice you have to give chance a bump or let it flow past you. It almost gives you the feeling of wanting to make it your own.

Melting ice cubes

In a very different water world, dancer Lois Alexander takes you into Neptune. Water here initially has the hardest form it can have: ice. The blocks of ice suspended high above the floor evoke an atmosphere of stillness and hardness. It is very beautiful the way Lois Alexander develops such an ever-flowing dexterity to go with it. Flowing lines and transitions, alternating fast and slow movements. Subtly, the dancer communicates with her surroundings. She drags you along with the tension that she alternately builds up and relaxes. The small, refined, almost hidden moments when she gets close to the ice are pearls in the flow of time.

From above, spotlights shine on the ice blocks. This allows you to see how, over the course of the show, they become less cloudy at the edges and acquire an increasingly shiny surface. They will melt, flow away. You know that and every moment that realisation is with you, even if the 25 minutes of the performance are too short to really melt them.

Sharp lines

It does not stop at ice. A chilling stream of water pours out across the dance floor. It prompts Lois to make some forceful gestures, as if, at the unbridled splash, she feels the need to draw sharp lines through the pool of water she is standing in.

Finally follows the third state that water can be in: vapour, mist, steam. Mysteriously it clouds into space. It is precisely in this fanning out form that the water assumes that Lois Alexander concentrates most on her body and her movements, on what is going on deep inside her. More than before, she retreats into introverted contemplation.

Neptune is a masterfully performed spectacle, touching you from moment to moment, with a richness of experience of something as simple and elemental as water. With her impressively smooth and concentrated dance, Lois Alexander movingly imparts her experience of water to the audience.

Seen on 3 February at Dansmakers Amsterdam's theatre. Both choreographers are a co-production of Dansmakers Amsterdam and ICK.

Read about the threatened situation of production house Dansmakers Amsterdam:

Innovation in dance: give young creators space and you'll get it!