Springdance Festival: Dances in May
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 Springdance Festival, one of the leading dance festivals in the north of Europe, has changed track. A portrait – albeit incomplete – of the event.
Springdance, which takes place each year in the Dutch city of Utrecht, has a long-established link with Portugal. its main director, George Brugmans, was co-programmer of the Encontros Acarte during the time of Madalena Perdigão. Recently, the festival’s ties with Portugal were strengthened by the creation of the Tejo Trust, in conjunction with the Klapstuk Festival (Leuven, Belgium) and Forum Dança (Lisbon), with a view to producing four new works by Portuguese choreographers over the next four years (the first will be by Vera Mantero).
At the last two festivals, Springdance has complemented its traditional programme with a special “experimental” programme, known as Voorland, designed to provide opportunities for “young” choreographers. For this sub-programme it invited the Portuguese choreographers Vera Mantero and Joana Providência, who shared an evening’s programme. In this they were one step ahead of the mass “discovery” of New Portuguese Dance by other European programmers.
The fact is that, despite the intentions, the combination of Voorland with the programme of established artists created a degree of unevenness in the festival, which got worse when in practice the main selection criteria were those of budget and the duration of the works, rather that artistic quality and/or professional experience. This meant that mature pieces by experienced choreographers were placed side by side with pieces from the fringes of the bad amateur circuit, merely for reasons of time management. One thing was however certain: if anything gave SpringDance its identity, amongst the performances by the major companies which were to be found just about everywhere, it was without doubt the Voorland programme.
This year, Bruno Verbergt, the Klapstuk director, has been invited to programme Springdance (as well as the 1994 festival), and a break has been made with the past. The new concept is: “Springdance is now Voorland”, as Verbergt told me.
For better or worse, my very short and highly concentrated stay in Utretcht was not enough to assess the results. But it is good to find the willingness to try new directions. So this is what I saw….
1. Saburo Teshigawara, Bones in Pages
The idea of the stage set as installation is increasingly working its way into contemporary choreography. In Bones in Pages, a duet for a male dancer and a crow, choreographed and performed by Saburo Teshigawara from Japan, this idea is carried to a point as explicit as the construction itself is beautiful – a space which serves as the setting for a dance but also a microcosm densely endowed with meanings which, by simply existing, serves as the main building tool for the dance presented within it.
Four walls, one of them transparent to allow us to look invasively inside, enclose the dancer in black and the crow with clipped wings: spectacular co-inhabitants. Hundreds of books piled up on the floor, more books lined up, open, reminding us of felled trees, or a jungle of limestone, along the walls. On the opposite side, on the floor, hundreds of pairs of shoes, arranged in rows, facing us. A table with shattered glass. Plexiglas boxes destroying the symmetry. Enclosure, accumulation: of people (in ghost form), of knowledge (dead, closed), words, emptiness, everything. In this environment, the sometimes disjointed, sometimes mechanical, and always virtuoso body of Teshigawara moves in dubious unison with the music, in a stylistic display accentuated by the ballet steps and the symphonic grandeur. Style and precision, precision and style. But the music alternates with electronic percussion, sounds of breaking glass.
On to this metaphorical enclosure, I will have to project another: that which represents his place in the world of art – the agent of a certain vision of the stage as a place of extravagant grandeur (including the financial grandiosity of the production). The crow here is also a mirror: also constrained, also with clipped wings.
2. Vera Mantero, Perhaps she could dance first and think afterwards
Vera Mantero’s improvised solo, presented for the first time in Lisbon a few weeks ago, after almost two years of touring around Europe, is a piece on which I also worked myself. So I won’t present a critique. Instead, I’ll raise a few questions – a list of unanswered questions – which the opening night made me ask. On the real meaning of “improvisation” when the same piece is performed over and over again; what is the importance and the crystallizing weight of form, in dance where the centre is a state if mind which might no longer make sense to the dancer? And another question, one which looks to the future with eager anticipation: what new formulation of dance will Vera Mantero offer us when she premieres her new piece in Lisbon in October? In this instance, my intuition tells me it will be something strangely savage. And beautiful.
3. Angels Margarit, Corol. 1ª
How distant and outdated the last two or three years of the eighties now seem, when Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and her Rosas Company got all the world’s aspiring lady choreographers twirling around in their skirts, centred on themselves, arms in the air, hips swinging. How strange it is to see Corol. 1ª, by Angels Margarit, a solo danced by the choreographer herself in which this language is taken on board without question, without reflection, and without any acknowledgement of its history. How strange it is to see a woman decide to present herself like this in our world and say that this is art. How strange it is to see the audience lap it up, and to see that for many of them dance still means filling the stage with the idea of graciosity, femininity, virtuosity and prettiness (linearity, clarity, harmony, luminosity of content: in the music, the sets, the dance): the legacy of ballet. Angels Margarit is a superb dancer, a good-looking woman and a bourgeois choreographer, in the worst sense of the word. How strange success is!