Netherlands Dance Theatre: Triple Bill
Netherlands Dance Theate: Triple bill
Arts Centre Melbourne, 25 June
Netherlands Dance Theatre came to Melbourne after an absence of five years for an exclusive season – a triple bill comprising two works by the choreographic partnership of artistic director Paul Lightfoot and artistic advisor Sol Leon, and a third by associate choreographer Crystal Pite.
The first of the two works by Leon/Lightfoot was Sehnsucht, which translates loosely as as an “intense yearning”. Sehnsucht is inspired by Beethoven’s intimate piano adagios as well as his exuberant Fifth Symphony, and Lightfoot says in the program notes that he wanted the work to embrace the two worlds exemplified in those pieces of music. The work is laced with a sense of halves and doubles, of opposites and reversals, with each a necessary complement to the other.
The stage consists of two sets in one – the stage itself, black and borderless, and a contrasting boxed interior of a room suspended in the centre. Inside the room are a man and woman, with a chair, table, door and a window. A single male figure, magnificent and God-like in physique, gestures and yearns towards it from the stage below, dancing with broad and plangent gestures, sometimes with the weighted, stuttering moves of an old man who has seen too much. He reminded me of a story-teller, the one who knows how the tale will end.
Within the room the couple’s dance is confined by the smallness of the room, using the walls and furniture as part of the choreography. At times the box rotates so that it is on its side, or upside down. It is like peering into a spacecraft, where there is no gravity, and the choreography itself suspends with normal viewpoint, rotating through all planes of the room and conveying a sense of tightness and restriction. Eventually the man escapes the room and joins the man on the floor. Each of the male figures seems to desire what the other has. An ensemble of men and women form on the main stage and dance to the glories of Beethoven’s Fifth. With black pants on the bottom half and flesh on top, their bodies form two halves, divided horizontally at the waist line, and the perfect reverse of the leading male figure’s black skin and white pants. The visitor returns to the room and the woman and the intimate music, but then she departs, headfirst and sideways, through the window and into the void of black. The work ends with the first man alone on stage in his original position, folded overhimself so he looks barely human, just a black and white shape. He remains in that position while the company takes its bows, the curtain falls and the house lights come up, whereupon he slowly unbends and leaves the stage.
Leon/Lightfoot’s second work, Stop-Motion, closes the program. Like the first work, the design is an intrinsic part of the whole, with a projected image of a young woman (the couple’s daughter, Saura) dominating the proceedings. To the evocative music of Max Richter, this haunting work is described as depicting the “process of farewell and transformation”. Choreographically this work is less of an ensemble work than a group of people together on stage, focussed on two couples engaged in their own introspections and torments, while other dancers support the stage composition, often standing motionless, appearing and disappearing in the dimness. A veil is lifted to uncover a floor coated in white powder, which is tossed in clouds into the air by the dancers’ movements, reminiscent of dust and all its associations with human transcience. The choreography runs at various speeds, from controlled slowness to punctuations of frenzied movement, and even appears to rewind at times. The final image, when a handful of powder is transformed into a bird (projected) that takes flight across the stage, is a stunning and emotional piece of theatre.
I find Leon/Lightfoot’s creations are often frustratingly inscrutable, but their intrinsic beauty, their stage craft, their visual fascination, are entirely satisfying in themselves.
My favourite work of the evening, however, was Solo Echo, by Crystal Pite. Inspired by a poem by the American writer Mark Strand, "Lines for Winter", a meditation on death, it takes place on a night-lit stage against a background of softly falling snow. The music is cello and piano sonatas by Brahms.
Beginning with a figure in a runner’s starting crouch, a position that becomes the work’s motif, the piece is in two parts. The first has the dancers moving across the stage in straight lines from side to side, entirely focussed ahead, the second has them breaking into a greater variety of clusters and patterns.
Solo Echo is quite simply beautiful. Pite manages to make the movement flow from one dancer to the next to the next, so that it seems a separate force, like wind or water. The choreography is superbly evocative of the swirling flurries of snow that are the metaphorical heart of the poem, but also a visualisation of emotional forces driving this group of human beings. To me this merging of movement with emotion is the height of choreographic achievement. The dancers connect in sculptured groups that dissolve into something else before your eyes or break away and carry the movement impulse with them so that it seems to reverberate around the space. The skill of the dancers in modulating and controlling the dynamics, softening their falls and extending every movement beyond the limits of their bodies, was a marvel to behold. I wanted to drink it all in. My only quibble is that the lighting was just a bit too dark.
Altogether this program was just so full of riches – music, design, brilliant dancers, imagination and invention. Netherlands Dance Theatre continues to justify its reputation as one of the greatest companies in the world.
- KAREN VAN ULZEN