Something Raw has for more than a decade been one of the few places in the Netherlands where the question of artistic and social urgency of the body is explored on stage, with all the fun and risk involved. Many performances struggled with the 'impasse of display': have people then become mere things to look at? Porn is one extreme, the good dancer of the big company (modern, classical, it all doesn't matter anymore) represents the other extreme on the scale of things that do no harm - a scale that seems to be the only one to be honoured after the end of the coming government cuts.
Angela Schubot and Jared Gradinger battled for three quarters of an hour with their breathing, which in pre-orgasmic tempo beat the beat for a gymnastic exchange between two people in jeans. Eleanor Bauer, with five fellow dancers, concentrated on the pure form the body can take when it sings itself free of psyche and human actions. Vibrations, matter, symmetry and chain reactions led to a wonderfully lived-in aesthetic. Ivo Dimchev lived up to his name as a fantastic performer, even if he and his three copycats lapsed into repetition (sic). Where in the Netherlands do you still get to see this kind of topical and fresh theatre?
In search of necessity and feeling, human scale and eloquence, the artists in Something Raw question what motivates them. Although old-school hippy stuff (sex, nudity, happening) is never far away, this year's programming shows a striking tendency towards individual gratification and the once popular identity politics (sex, gender, race) aside. The focus on 'me and my body in resistance' shifts to more social questions. The festival's motto is 'explorations in solidarity', which is also the title of a symposium where professors Rudi Laermans and Pascal Gielen will cross swords with Artists in Occupy Amsterdam. It is then about how the creative existence, work and life of artists, can contribute to a restoration of the public domain.
The downside of conceptual work is that the idea dominates and the performance can sometimes only be enjoyed afterwards. "What they are instead of" of Schubot and Gradinger suffered from this. For those who could see through the thud of the panting, a bizarre combination of sexual acts without erotic effect unfolded. The ferocity of real sex was carefully reconstructed, but the lack of nudity and other pornofernalia, it was the viewer who had to add up panting and acting. Sex is not to watch, but to do, seemed to be the message. During scarce moments of silence, the performers briefly returned to the world of the audience, like sweet exhausted people, for whom you would so go get a glass of water or a towel.
"A dance for the newest age" by Eleanor Bauer made an immediate impression as an incantatory group work, so detailed in its application of geometric principles that it was pleasing to the eye. It is not DaVinchi's water works, it is not Escher's drawing, but it comes close. In search of basic values, the performance breathed a wondrous kind of futurism, reviving the old ideal of pure movement. The six dancers became absorbed in a tangle of complex relationships and attunements, pushing individual presence entirely into the background. Unfortunately, Bauer then ended with a scene based on individual associations, far too obvious.
Dimchev in "X-ON" again played a wonderful game by offering himself for sale as a work of art alongside the work of Biennale laureate Franz West. The latter made dysfunctional objects in the 1970s, which have gone global. Dimchev puts them on stage and uses them. Almost naked and in high heels, in the guise of his alter ego Lili Handel, he persiflates artistry and art, which goes down in a spectacle of borrowed and copied experiences. Instead of "out in your own country" it is now "tourist in your own existence." Melodrama and old-fashioned actionism, more kicks, blood and sex, seem to be the only ritual remedy. Despite the predictable nature of this sequence, Dimchev ends very clearly: art is what the fool gives for it, and that can also be very simple and moving.
For the whole programme see: frascati theatre and the brackish ground
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