Encontros Acarte ’90: Showdown (part one)
You can read more about André Lepecki and his poetics as a writer on the following link: http://www.sarma.be/nieuw/critics/lepecki.htm
CREDITS
Editor Sarma: Myriam Van Imschoot
Editor Portugal: Monica Guerreiro
Research in Lisbon: Jeroen Peeters
Coördination: Steven De Belder, Jeroen Peeters, Charlotte Vandevyver, Myriam Van Imschoot
Translator: Clive Thoms
Financial Support: Portuguese Institute for the Arts
Thank you to: André Lepecki for the contribution to this anthology, BLITZ for giving consent to republish the texts on www.sarma.be, Diana Teixeira (typiste)
The first showdown is with the critic trying to do his job. Acarte has a list of newspapers who are welcome to review its events. BLITZ, together with the entire regional and international press, are left out in the cold. Is Lisbon really a world venue?
1. Second showdown: Karine Saporta
I have to confess that I was sceptical even before I went to see La Poudre des Anges (which I’ll translate as Angel Powder, as the alternative – Angel Dust – is much nicer and doesn’t deserve to be associated with the piece in question), Karine Saporta’s latest choreography for the Centre Choreographique National de Caen. This was because a few years back I had the misfortune to see a terrible duet in which Saporta got her kicks from tying a geisha-like transsexual to a table and smashing the crockery for an hour or so. But it is in my nature to believe that living systems learn from their mistakes and the actual entropic passage of time, and I still had hope for the piece selected for the honour of opening this year’s Encontros Acarte, an event which can always command our affection.
The performance I refer to was that on the 5th of September, and it was presented with pomp and circumstance in the Main Auditorium at the Gulbenkian Foundation.The best thing that happened in that hour and a half of choreography was the first five minutes when a dwarf with a beautiful voice and terrific timing and stage presence recounted to us, at the same time as making abstruse movements with two sticks (I like things that don’t make sense), the happy and unhappy adventures of Elizabeth Maulier, better known as Mona Lisa, which adventures we will have to sit through again in the choreographic version. This was a visually successful moment, with masterly lighting, sets in good taste, nice costumes, all very expensive, perfect and irritatingly clean and smelling of cash.
Curiously, it is precisely this generous array of resources which first gets in the way of communication with the audience. The technical perfection of the stage paraphernalia brings us an a-temporal image, the homogenized and hi-tech picture of the black Trinitron, and takes away all the magic which the stage can offer us as the place where a performance is lived and remade in the moment. Then we are treated to a catalogue of all the hideous nonsense which French civilization is so good at offering up for mankind. First, in the narrative: it is obvious that this girl Elizabeth has to be a chorus girl cum high-class tart, who then goes to seed and ends her life as a drunken crone in a wooden shack. All in the finest tradition of the Comtess de Ségur and Claude Lelouche. Then in the way the narrative is explored: in choreographic terms, the alleged reworking of music hall, circus and cabaret movements is ridiculous. Karine Saporta is useless at exploring movement and her dancers are utterly incapable of taking a single step on the stage.
The use of the music in constructing the various dramatic nuances is also completely rudimentary. Whilst the structure of melodrama would seem to me to be best suited to the linear and romantic logic of the narrative, to think, as Saporta does, that to convey a state of profound tragic emotion to the audience you just need to turn the music up to a point where it gets distorted and pronto!, is enough to infuriate even the most patient member of the audience. Worse: as Saporta seems to have realized this (i.e. that the original score by Guy Lascales and Christian Belhomme is a complete write-off), she discovers a brilliant escape route: to underline the vertiginous effect, she speeds up the rotating stage to produce what I will call the “carousel effect” (un effet carroussel). Unreal stuff.
In terms of symbolism, the three women (all dressed as Sheba, Queen of Jungle) are: one blonde, one red-head and one black woman, thereby representing Woman, geddit? But here the questions just start popping up. Are all women Lisas and all Lisas Women? And what is a Lisa Woman? And who is that gentleman in the grey coat sitting in a corner all the way through? Has he been naughty? Do all chorus girls have triple personalities? The message is profound, hermetic even, but if I was a woman I don’t think I’d like it.
The show ends on a comedy note with a girl singing Kurt Weill’s Alabama Song. The audience agreed that a whisky bar was really what everyone needed just now…
2. The first consolation: Rosamund Gilmore and the Laokoon Dance Group
The only thing by Rosamund Gilmore I managed to see was Einmarsch, in the Sala Polivalente at the Centro de Arte Moderna. Gilmore presents herself unashamedly as the heir of the great Pina Bausch (and how much more we miss her, as the Encontros Acarte approach the end).
I’m not one of those people who think that art has to consist of an obsessive search for novelty and originality. That is not its only role, and is not even its essential or original role. I’ve also got nothing against using models, as long as they’re good models (as in this case). So there was no reason for me to have any problem with this piece (never reject anything without first giving it a chance). And I confess that I came out with that pleasurable feeling of having sat through some good work. But the fact is that, some time after the show, I can clearly see that part of its success with myself and the rest of the audience was due to the first performance coming right after the Saporta’s French nightmare.
Gilmore brings five characters together in a room, two men and three women, and in a noticeably twenties’ atmosphere they relive the ascent of Nazism. Reliving is the right word, as this is what is proposed to us at the start of the piece: to the sound of a metronome, the dancers/persons talk to us about what they intend to do during the performance, and kindly offer us champagne (in a clear and welcome quotation from the master, Pina Bausch), before getting down to work. Although the dancers are nothing special, it is good to see them so honestly committed to the piece, which is held together by the successful use of humour, especially in Carol’s drunken scene, and in the foxtrots, twists and other dances from the roaring twenties, in which the histrionic capabilities of the two men (Bernd Bender and Ian Owen, and particularly the latter, who dances superbly) are crucial in holding the audience’s attention. Here starts and ends the excellence on the work. Otherwise, there is a lack of dramatic consistency in the construction and transition between the different scenes, and a certain immaturity in the composition of the movement emerging from the references to ballroom dances. The transition from the light and airy atmosphere of the pre-Nazi period to the heavy darkness of the Anschluss is a complete failure. You need a lot more skill or else a great deal more work to transform a festive banquet into a nightmare (Buñuel is in a class of his own), and the connection we inevitably make with Visconti’s The Damned further undermines the intended dramatic intensity on stage. But it is satisfying to see work which is honest and free of pretensions, and which although rather overdone, is sometimes quite successful.
3. Finally, Giorgio Barbiero Corsetti: During the construction of the Wall of China.
The audience is still finding its way to the best sets at the Foundation’s Open Air Amphitheatre and you can feel that something very special was about to happen. Arranged along the stage and down to the edge of the lake, four huge white pipes tilted at different angles demarcate the space with the monumentality of Stonehenge (certain volumetric patterns appear to be significant for Homo Sapiens – there seems no escaping from it, they are part of the species’ ethogram). On the left, a fire escape, like those found at the back of buildings in New York, comes down from the sky, from nowhere. At the top, a door closed against nowhere provides a dream-like touch. Planks of varying length scattered around the floor arouse our curiosity and send the expectant imagination into overdrive. On the right, a huge white box completes the stage picture. The ceremony is about to begin…
And it begins. People emerge from the tops of the pipes, grey people (grey is the synthesis of the two non-colours of the set design; white and black), Kafka’s bureaucrats, who from their ridiculously exalted position castigate the common citizens, also all in grey, who despite everything keep the system rolling. And the stage fills with people, still in black and white and these people talk and shout and attack each other energetically, all getting hurt, and hemming each other in with the planks scattered about the stage. Absurdity takes over. Then the stage empties and a person and his shadow emerge against the big box. But the shadow is white, and the effect is stunning. This is a pleasure to see. And it’s a pleasure to hear the excellent, vibrant, well-judged and hard-hitting music of Harry de Witht, some of it recorded and some of it played lived by the actual bodies of the dancers/actors. And then there is the abundance of free association, cleverly contained by an intelligent decoding of Kafka’s universe revealed in the way nonsense punctuates the piece and the paradigm of which is the revelation of the contents of the white box: an absurd system of gears crossed with the man-eating machine from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and a bicycle, whose wheels/cogs endlessly spin around two chained-up dancers.
The economy of the visual resources and the amazingly successful and constantly surprising use to which they are put throughout the piece clearly illustrate the fact that a profusion of technical resources is not in itself sufficient to put on a good performance: you need intelligence, determination, creative imagination and strength. We are worlds away from the unbearable Saporta. And although, in my view, Corsetti was unable to resolve the piece satisfactorily, which was a shame, it was he who, at the end of the first week of these Encontros Acarte, showed us that there is still hope for European theatre/dance. More next week.
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