It is the spatial arrangement that immediately impresses in The Way You Sound Tonight, the ninth performance by choreographer Arno Schuitemaker. There are roughly 25 seats too few. The last Holland Festival visitors to walk onto the Rabozaal stage during the premiere have to find a seat themselves on the still-scented wooden floor.
Pijpela
Schuitemaker, I presume together with lighting designer Jean Kalman, has set up a kind of piped enclosure. In it, the audience can sit along the long sides of the stage on low stands, about three rows up. Behind them gently reflecting walls, allowing those seated there to remain gaugeable in relative darkness.
On the short side across from the entrance it is dark. There, then, most of the disengaged audience nestles. Near them, a dancer is already moving, making gentle pulse movements from his chest and hips.
Soft pulse
Very slowly, the pulse develops, in a play between the dancer's body and an extremely simple, slightly swelling beat. New dancers make their entrance, each contributing new touches, just as the music does, working within the one beat. Tucked between them, in the relative darkness across the street, I repeatedly discern that one spectator, with blonde hair and a backpack, watching the spectacle, as we all do.
Contours
Horizontal light across the diagonal makes the entrance of the dancers tangible. It enhances the sharpness-depth of the experience, especially for those on a short side of the stage. But it also dazzles and often deprives onlookers of the concreteness of the bodies. The light and mis-en-scène make dancers and audience coincide as ever-changing figures in one intuitive space. The contours of the space, of the dancers and of the audience space get lost, only to reappear again and again, in a different way.
Unconscious group behaviour
The accumulating, transformative minimalism of The Way You Sound Tonight makes the composition extremely relatable in the experience. Breathing, depending on the point from which you look and feel. Very rarely does Schuitemaker opt for a frontal or monumental moment, just as the dancers almost never really move in sync or in a clearly marked formation.
Aptly, Schuitemaker links the intensity of movement to a certain ungracefulness of composition, which shifts only gradually and never becomes dramatic. He thus achieves a less geometric, more organic or intuitive aesthetic, though an intense awareness of spatiality and time emerges. It is reminiscent of the logic of unconscious group behaviour, as animals do in a herd, or people in a square, on the dance floor or at a concert: moving from different impulses in relation to a common beat: by feeling, in trance, from habit, practically.
No dance floor after all
One big difference from the average dance floor, though, is the inward-looking posture of the dancers. The intensity of their movement is accompanied by a deep concentration, so there is also a certain calmness or serenity that runs along under the increasing intensity of it all. The way you sound tonight is really a spectacle, which you can watch quietly as a spectator, although many have their heads or feet moved along and I can imagine that there are also audiences who would like to go a bit further.
Trance
From the very first moment, light and sound indicate very precisely the experience in The Way You Sound Toningt, by the effect they have on everyone's experience of time and space. The dancers never step out, never work against. In that respect, The Way You Sound Toningt a truly classical dance performance, without drama, purely focused on an intense, trance-like experience of body, space and time.
When composer Aart Strootman very surprisingly makes his entrance on stage at the very end after an hour as steaming as it is flowing, guitar in hand, his playing now visibly tuned to the last dancer left under one small light on stage, a rare calm descends. The hall doors swing open and the audience is invited to leave the dance floor as they came.
Schuitemaker has succeeded extraordinarily well in replacing the purely visual-aesthetic deployment of the body, so dominant in Dutch dance for decades, with a feeling, resonant deployment of dancers. His previous performance If You Could See Me Now (2017) still pinned the viewer to her chair, so the frontal perspective combined with the open nature of the composition worked a certain dullness. The Way You Sound Tonight manages to achieve the opposite through an ingenious and gossamer choreographic coordination of sound, lighting, dance, setting and audience direction.
Also to be seen at Theatre Festival Boulevard in Den Bosch
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