Christian Rizzo: Une Maison

Sadler’s Wells

Billed as a hybrid theatre piece that bears witness to its creator, Christian Rizzo’s fascination with our living space, Une Maison (A House), which dates from 2019, had its UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells, and fits into the commitment of Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels to bring new and challenging French choreography to the UK.

It’s new, and it’s certainly challenging. I don’t mind admitting that I generally prefer to be able to follow what’s happening in stage, particularly when there appears to be a hint of a narrative, but in this case found it impossible to do so.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Visually, Une Maison is dominated by an extraordinary, totally absorbing structure that hangs over the stage: a massive mobile made up of neon tubes organised in capricious shapes, that functions as architecture, scenography and light source of the piece. More: it’s its main attraction, its one genuinely interesting and original feature (set design by Yragaël Gervais).

Throughout the work’s one hour duration, this structure all but dances. A couple of times the light in the tubes throbs and fizzes in a frenzy of liquid movement; towards the end its stark white light mellows into orangey tones; and then some of its hanging branches slowly close, rather like a flower at dusk.

The other moment of visual interest comes towards the end of the piece, when one of the performers climbs onto a neat pile of earth upstage left and armed with a spade launches a vast cloud of red earth over the stage.

That is a true coup de theatre, the slow rising and then falling dust creating its own dance; but annoyingly, it’s repeated again and again in a self-indulgent sequence that sees performers come on with buckets of earth to add to the general dusty chaos.

It becomes a suffocating, rather oppressive overlong sequence, where as the dust spreads from the stage into the auditorium those of us with our Covid masks on suddenly felt grateful, rather than vaguely put upon, to be wearing them……

In between 13 performers meandered around the stage, sometimes coming together in groups of three or four for a short bout of jaunty dancing, sometimes just walking. At regular intervals two people would come together in an embrace, that could last long as a gesture of mutual reassurance, or break apart in refusal and aggression.

Une Maison is apparently meant as an exploration of humans in their living space, but we shall have to take Christian Rizzo’s word for it.

Teresa Guerreiro

Nutcracker

Matthew Bourne Production, Sadler’s Wells

It’s nearly a decade since Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker! was last seen on stage and the show, originated in 1992, is one of Bourne’s most kitsch, cartoonish and colourful (that colour is mainly pink). This spruced-up revival, however, proves that his take on the Christmas classic is not merely froth.

The success of the Nutcracker as an enduring Christmas ballet is thanks to its festive theme and endlessly tuneful Tchaikovsky score – the narrative is famously “meh”. But in Bourne’s revamps he always brings character and story to the fore; his scenarios may not be realistic but they do have logic. Instead of the plushly decorated, upper class setting we often see, Bourne’s Clara (Cordelia Braithwaite) lives in a monochrome orphanage presided over by a tyrannical matron (the brilliant Daisy May Kemp) and Dr Dross (Danny Reubens, dressed in the mode of Herr Flick from ’Allo ’Allo). It’s somewhere you might actually want to escape from, which is what this fantasy is all about.

The Nutcracker can also be read as a story of sexual awakening and first love, and that’s what drives Bourne’s version. When Clara’s Nutcracker doll is made flesh at the stroke of midnight, he turns into a pure hunk (Harrison Dowzell, with the right dose of knowingness), and takes her on a journey to Sweetieland. But Clara has competition from Princess Sugar – Ashley Shaw playing a Mean Girl deliciously in love with herself – who steals Clara’s man.

All the earlier characters appear in Clara’s fantasy reincarnated as sweets: a gaggle of Wag-type marshmallow girls, some flamenco-dancing Liquorice Allsorts, laddish gobstoppers. It’s a pink, chewy, fizzy world of pleasure and desire, bodies twisting and thrusting with sensuous thrill. It’s all somehow very innocent while being orally fixated: they enter Sweetieland through a giant mouth, there are dance moves that mime stuffing cake (gracefully) into their gobs, plus a lot of licking. Anthony Ward’s designs use warped perspective and vivid colours, somewhere between a graphic novel and an acid trip. There’s a hint of the Grease dream scene, Beauty School Dropout, all clouds and dishy angels and walnut whip hair.

Bourne gets around the potentially racist nature of some of the Nutcracker’s “national” dances by reinventing entirely the Arabian dance for the slinky and seductive Knickerbocker Glory (Jonathon Luke Baker), in smoking jacket and whipped cream hairdo with cherry on top. His flirtations are both creepy and comic and all credit to Braithwaite, who throughout the show is constantly alive to the characters around her, and here is laughing, awkward and startled all at the same time.

Bourne’s choreographic style is a pick’n’mix: a bit of ballet, a bit of folky footwork, mime, quirky social dances and exaggerated shapes of his own making, with all sorts of witty references. Retro skaters recall wintry ballet Les Patineurs (although apparently the inspiration was skating film star Sonja Henie), and the orphans form a tableaux Petipa and Ivanov (Nutcracker’s original choreographers) could be proud of. Monique Jonas sparkles as one of the Allsorts and Dominic North is a standout as Fritz, Dr Dross’s obnoxiously spoiled son, who’s transformed into the gluttonous and somewhat saucy Prince Bon Bon, showing that you have to be a talented physical comedian to excel in Bourne’s shows (or certainly in this one). But everyone is engaged and full of energy in this very enjoyable confection.

Lindsey Winship in The Guardian

Giselle by Dada Masilo

Giselle is clearly a thing at Sadler’s Wells this autumn. First we had the return of Akram Khan’s acclaimed remake for English National Ballet; in just a few weeks’ time Birmingham Royal Ballet will bring us its own meticulous reconstruction of the original Giselle.

In between, Sadler’s Wells is hosting South African dancer and choreographer Dada Masilo’s own reworking of this timeless and inspirational ballet.

Masilo’s Giselle follows the barebones of the original story, but differs in two important particulars: firstly, when Giselle unravels following the revelation that her lover Albrecht is a noble slumming it for a little fun, the village and her own mother show her no compassion – on the contrary, they pitilessly mock her.

Secondly, in Act II the spirit of Giselle affords a repentant Albrecht no forgiveness; on the contrary, he is fated to die and Giselle is eager to administer the coup de grâce.

Masilo likes to adapt the classics. She previously reworked Swan Lake, Carmen, and Romeo and Juliet. In doing so, not only did she mix elements of African dance forms in with the ballet steps, but she also made the stories themselves more African.

Masilo’s 2017 Giselle sits well in its new African context. The village, denoted by an impressionistic backdrop depicting shallow water and foliage, is a place where back-breaking work in the fields is undertaken with much banter and laughter.

Giselle is danced by a vivacious Masilo as a boisterous girl; while the tall Lwando Dutyulwa dances Albrecht with suitable aristocratic bearing and balletic grace.

Dada Masilo as Giselle, Lwando Dutyulwa as Albrecht, photo Laurent Philippe

For all the lively and attractive dancing of Masilo’s company of 12 – contemporary dance moves seamlessly integrated with the earthbound stomping characteristic of African dance – Act I drags a little and its narrative is not always as clear as it might be.

However, Act II, shorter and more concentrated, is a triumph. The Wilis are now a truly sinister bunch of male and female spirits, dressed not in diaphanous white, but in deep blood-red.

Their leader Myrtha is not longer the Queen of the traditional ballet, but a male ‘sangoma’ (Llewellyn Mnguni, compelling), a traditional medicine man, brandishing a fly whisk, his slow hunched movement oozing malice and menace.

Masilo brings in some steps from the original ballet – hints only – mirroring the slight references to Adolphe Adam’s original music in Philip Miller’s bespoke score.

Dada Masilo, Giselle, ensemble photo Laurent Philippe

These Wilis, the spirits of people who were betrayed in life, are vengeful and pitiless: they can only be free if they bring about the deaths of those who wronged them.

So, whereas in the original ballet a forgiving Giselle manages to save Albrecht, here she whips him to death with a terrifyingly realistic bullwhip.

Dada Masilo’s Giselle is a worthwhile and often deeply engaging work. A slight tightening of Act I would make it near perfect.

 

https://www.culturewhisper.com/r/dance/dada_masilo_giselle_sadlers_wells/14570

Bon voyage, Bob

Pina Bausch Tanztheater – Directed by Alan Lucien Øyen – Sadler’s Wells

Pina Bausch – Since She by Dimitris Papaioannou

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Among names such as Graham and Cunningham, Pina Bausch’s name is sure to follow with her revolutionary choreography that has changed contemporary dance as we know it. It was this very reason that I approached the evening with high expectations and great excitement to see the new work her company has created since her passing nine years ago. The Tanztheater Wuppertal have enlisted the help of renowned choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou, most recognisable for his work in the 2008 Athens opening Olympic Ceremony. New Piece 1/Since She exceeds all of my prejudgment and thoroughly shocks me for the full 90 minutes. I have never seen such outrageous and deeply creative moments on stage until now.

If you come to Sadler’s Wells expecting to see beautiful dancers creating stunning lines and nice contemporary dance, you will be be disappointed. In fact Papaioannou’s Since She has very little dance at all. Instead, you are in for an evening of a sheer exquisite spectacle that defies all realms of what we might expect to see on stage.

Papaioannou’s imagination is admirable, and he captures a deeply dreamlike experience that at times almost replicates a nightmare. He completely captures a surrealist performance, that truly feels as though we are watching the characters of our unconscious mind come out to play. No-one is merely a dancer in this piece, instead they are an object that can be manipulated into another prop, a prop that will probably be stepped on and dragged across the stage.

Nudity also plays a big part in this new work, and Papaioannou evocatively pushes the boundaries of what this London audience are used to seeing. But while it’s startling and invigorating to watch these supposed ‘lines’ being crossed, it is simultaneously accepted and appreciated by a keen audience. The piece also achieves fantastic moments of humour and wit. This is accomplished by astonishing moments of extravaganza followed by sudden deliberate failings that have the audience chortling, as well as crude moments that are well acted by the dancers in their constant portrayal of the mad world we have entered.

Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch is made up of a mixture of mature dancers who worked with Bausch herself, and younger performers who have joined the company more recently. However, all perform with a faultless vigour, and it is impossible to distinguish the younger members from the older, as they all gel together to resemble a company that has been formed for decades.

The pace of the piece dramatically changes throughout, from static moments of a man balancing on an upside down chair, to suddenly everyone moving and being thrown around on stage. It’s quite a rollercoaster of an evening! The piece begins with the infamous team building exercise of getting across a room using chairs, the only rule being no team member is allowed to touch the floor. The chairs remain a theme throughout, finally ending with a man stacking 12 chairs on his back before promptly collapsing. The set by Tina Tzoka goes to extreme lengths to create a visual phenomenon, which truly adds to the theatricality of the whole evening.

Since She is ridden with symbols of Adam and Eve, but is another piece of theatre from which we may leave with a completely different interpretation that that of our peer. I delighted in this interpretative style, and while I’m sure Papaioannou has his own ‘proper’ meaning, I enjoy the debate of what it all really meant for hours after the show has actually ended.

Overall, I believe Pina Bausch’s company have yet again created groundbreaking work with the help of the tremendously talented Dimitris Papaioannou. I would like to think Bausch would be extremely proud to have her name attached to such a thrilling new work. However, I appreciate that this piece is not for a ‘normal’ dance audience, as it covers physical theatre more than contemporary dance, and could almost be too abstract for some. Either way, you will be in for a circus-like experience from start to finish.

Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake

Sadler’s Wells

 

It’s funny that Matthew Bourne’s shows are associated with Christmas festivity because his most famous, Swan Lake, is a dark, dark contortion of the classic ballet. A son repressed and depressed, deprived of love by his mother; hallucinations, strange sexual fantasies, a descent into nervous breakdown, a heavy dash of Oedipus complex. Twenty-three years on from its debut, this show is still best known for its gender-swapped, all-male cast of swans, but there is so much that is sinister and tragic going on here.

Of course, being Bourne, there is also cartoonishness, larky humour and toy corgis on wheels. He gets away with the huge tonal shifts because it’s all there in Tchaikovsky’s music – and the orchestra hikes up the drama to match. In fact, everyone on stage is dialled up to 11. This revival sees some updating of designs, some comic touches – the bored burlesque dancer is hilarious – and choreographic tweaks. But what’s most noticeable is a mighty injection of energy, the pack of macho swans hissing, kicking, stamping, glaring; intensity surging from the stage.

Best of all are the leads. On press night, Liam Mower played the Prince. One of the original stage Billy Elliots, Mower has really matured into a leading man. His Prince is an anxious, lost boy. While the acting in Bourne shows is often forged in bold type, when Mower is let loose from storytelling and really dances he tells you everything you need to know. In a lithe and yearning solo in the gutter after a shameful evening, he’s living every moment of his movement, escaping from his head into his body; in the suddenly electrified leaps after his encounter with the Swan, he exudes a newfound reason to live.

You can understand the Prince’s swan obsession. Matthew Ball, on loan from the Royal Ballet, is perfect casting as the Swan/Stranger, the Odette/Odile role of the original. It’s a role that represents the sensual life the Prince longs for, living on instincts and unpredictable urges, seeking skin-bristling carnality. Ball’s Swan is hugely alluring. Liquid and muscular, he’s a very powerful presence and his classical ballet pedigree effectively sets him a little apart from the flock. Ball subtly plays with the rhythm of his body against the score, wings undulating right to the end of every phrase.

There is nothing dainty about any of these swans, they are dangerous beasts. The Prince and the Swan’s meeting is a combative encounter, Ball’s wary Swan both attacking and defensive. But from initial menace a tender understanding emerges. It’s never a human connection – this is a wild beast – but we are sucked into the Prince’s strange fantasy as he is.

Ball reappears as the leather trouser-clad Stranger crashing the royal ball, oozing louche sexiness. He and Mower dance a taut tango along the same fine edge between connection and rejection, but this time more consciously vicious. Ball yields and snaps; lifts and drops; pulls the Prince in and callously throws him off. The poor Prince punishes himself even in his own fantasy.

Katrina Lyndon gives a brilliant comic turn as the Girlfriend, and the whole cast works hard, with much attention to background detail, even if not every ensemble section feels essential. But it’s the strength of the leads that really impresses. Two decades on, Bourne’s Swan Lake still retains its power.

Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian

Swan Lake

Matthew Bourne production, Sadler’s Wells

Icon

Icon by GöteborgsOperans Danskompani, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Antony Gormley at Sadler’s Wells.

Sadlers Wells (with K, B & A)

GöteborgsOperans Danskompani paired the sculptor with choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui for this thrilling piece exploring how we mould and remould ourselves

Sculptor Antony Gormley is credited as the designer of this collaboration with choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, but in reality he lets the dancers do the work. Over the course of an hour, three tonnes of clay are moulded, pounded and remoulded by their hands as Icon sets out to show how we create objects, communities and ideas, then destroy them and start all over again.

This is the UK debut for Sweden’s GöteborgsOperans Danskompani. They’re an impressive troupe, fully in tune with Cherkaoui’s earnest and often spiritual world. Dressed in monkish garb via Belgian high fashion (courtesy of Jan-Jan Van Essche), they are like people relocated from trivial real life into the rituals of some other plane: a cult, in essence, whose members are united by an intensity of purpose and a subsuming of the self into the group – and also into movement. Cherkaoui’s musical choices underline that spiritual tone, his love for haunting, ancient songs – in this case from the Mediterranean and Japan, the combination of nations adding up to somewhere otherworldly.

It’s a habit of Cherkaoui to have one dancer, and then the whole company in unison, deliver a conversational lecture, a kind of TED talk, while posing arms and hands in rhythmic semaphore. It might be annoyingly mannered if it didn’t add an interesting layer to the themes. Here, the lecture is a Jason Silva text on cognitive framing – the art of remoulding ourselves through the way we perceive our experiences.

The dancers also deliver a paean to paying attention in the moment – “spontaneous flow” – which, when they’re not talking, seems to be exactly what’s happening to them, whether it’s the whole company pulled in waves by a strong undertow, or in some extraordinary writhing and melting solos where the dancers’ agency is seemingly replaced with a pure urge that hoicks, lashes and churns their bodies. Michael Munoz is especially thrilling, an extra inch of flex in every move.

For all the specificity of the text, and of the moulded props, which include baseball caps, cameras and cocktail glasses, Cherkaoui gracefully grazes the big themes. People are pliable. Cultures are built and obliterated. Nothing is really sacred. Everything can be remade.

Lyndsey Winship in The Guardian

Sasha Waltz & Guests: Körper

Sadler’s Wells

In Körper, Berlin-based choreographer Sasha Waltz prods at the idea of the body. She literally piles up her dancers, creating patterns or random heaps, questions how they see themselves or plunges them into surreal activity. One dancer puts on skis and a safety harness to swoop down a vertical wall; when the wall falls, it sends a gust of wind through the theatre, ruffling the audience’s hair.

Waltz crosses art/dance boundaries, working extensively in museums and with opera. Her appointment as co-director of the Berlin State Ballet, a role she takes up next year, has already proved controversial, since she’s a contemporary dance choreographer taking over a classical ballet company. Körpershows her working firmly in the dance theatre tradition of Pina Bausch, looking at her dancers’ bodies and vulnerabilities in a mix of speech, dance and physical theatre.

The show starts as the audience arrive, with dancers prowling about the stage, working through repetitive patterns. Two men lie down or inch along a wall, holding hands. Their bodies smudge the chalk figure drawn on the wall; Waltz keeps drawing marks around bodies, then erasing them. Fingers, hands and faces poke out from holes in the wall, in creepy or surreal poses.

The dancers are quick and agile, but they also have to fight against the set design, by Waltz with Thomas Schenk and Heike Schuppelius. They squeeze themselves into the narrow space behind a window, wriggling and climbing over each other. It’s a tight enough fit that any wider body parts – shoulders, noses, breasts – get squished against the glass, leaving smears. There’s plenty of nudity, but little interest in sex.

When they talk about their bodies, the dancers are both matter-of-fact and back to front. Describing how it feels to swallow coffee, a woman strokes a hand down her leg rather than her throat.  A man discusses his fears of illness, focusing on his organs while admitting he has no idea how they work. Scenes of chaos are weaker, with a lot of running and shouting.

Waltz is concerned with the day-to-day experience of inhabiting a body, in making sense of it. Yet she also makes it strange. Dressed in flowing skirts, one dancer perches on another’s back, creating a composite creature like a centaur. Measuring themselves, trying to track how their bodies work, the dancers become both literal and dreamlike.

 

Zoë Anderson in The Independent

BalletBoyz: 14 days

Michael Nunn and William Trevitt have always had great instincts when it comes to sustaining the buzz around their company, BalletBoyz. As artistic directors, they’ve never been less than committed to deepening the artistry of their male dancers, but they understand the marketing power of the clever concept and the rogue collaboration. Even if the results can be hit or miss, we always come to a new BalletBoyz show with the expectation of something different. So it is with Fourteen Days, a programme whose opening half is made up of four new dances, all linked by the fact that each had to be created in just two weeks, that each was paired with its own commissioned score, and that each had to use the theme of balance and imbalance as its starting point.

The first of the four is Javier De Frutos’s The Title Is in the Text, and it’s one that makes most mischievously literal use of its allotted theme by having a seesaw as its central prop. Over the work’s 18-minute duration, De Frutos explores every possible variation of tipping, tilting, pivoting and sliding. One man holds the seesaw in a precarious equilibrium by sustaining a long arabesque; another’s sideways stretch topples it slowly off centre. There are sections where the dancers battle to gain control of the seesaw’s momentum, others where they move as a collective body, swaying and slithering in a unison duel with gravity.

As pure physics, De Frutos’s choreography is typically ingenious, but just as typically it comes charged with pungent emotion. A moment of electricity flares when two men touch hands; a combative eroticism surfaces as others grapple for dominance of the seesaw; sometimes there’s an undercurrent of simple boyish hilarity when it feels like the men are just playing in the park. But also crucial to the drama of the work is Scott Walker’s recorded score, an unsettling, tumultuous soundscape with snippets of text that reference images of political and economic discord.

Without forcing the image, De Frutos allows us to regard his seesaw as a metaphor for our own small attempts to maintain control in a frighteningly unstable world. In Human Animal, Iván Pérez works with a much smaller palette. His music is a brightly rhythmic score by Joby Talbot (played live, like the following two works) which all but dances alongside the five men as they circle the stage, moving with a high-stepping prance that’s reminiscent of equestrian dressage. There’s an ambiguous mix of exhibitionism and remoteness in the men’s demeanour; they’re dressed in underpants and vividly patterned shirts, yet their expressions are grave. And it’s in this quirkily unreadable context that Pérez elaborates his own formal study of balance – a game of hesitations and reversals in the flow of the dancers’ phrasing which, while simple at first, builds to a dance of mysterious, absorbing charm.

Christopher Wheeldon’s Us is the most directly legible of the works, a duet that takes the physical elements of trust, support, risk and balance and transforms them into a love story. The unabashedly romantic use of strings in Keaton Henson’s score sets the tone, but Wheeldon himself is working on an inventive and emotional high. In this eight-minute duet, he relishes every possibility of man-on-man partnering, playing with lifts and balances that exploit the muscular heft of his dancers Jordan Robson and Brad Waller. But he also sensitises the men’s gestures, even the surface of their skin, to create an emotional register that moves from quiet moments of tenderness, where one man’s fingers delicately map his partner’s body, to a more passionately visceral tangling of limbs. It’s impressive how many shades of maleness we get to see in the programme (although it would have been interesting to have had at least one work filtered through a woman’s lens).

Only in Craig Revel Horwood’s The Indicator Line do we get a more blatant blast of testosterone. Driven by the percussive power of Charlotte Harding’s score, the men line up in work trousers and clogs, sometimes dancing up a unison storm, sometimes locked into power struggles between themselves and a tyrannical overlord. The Broadway brashness and colour of Revel Horwood’s style sits a little oddly with the preceding three works but the company, who are in superlative form, let rip in its choreography.

The best of the evening, however, comes last, with a revival of Russell Maliphant’s 2013 work Fallen. Aside from the elegant, circling intricacies of its opening section, this piece takes the company to a place of rare beauty, in a section of angelically suspended lifts, rolls, balances and falls that not only seem to liberate these powerful male bodies from gravity but to suspend the passage of time.

Judith Mackrell in The Guardian