Les Ballets C de la B: Gardenia

Les Ballets C de la B
Adelaide Festival of Arts
Festival Theatre
Adelaide
March

As one of the headline acts of the 2012 Adelaide Festival of Arts, Les Ballets C de la B’s Gardenia was highly anticipated. The Belgian “new-wave” dance company has featured in previous Adelaide festivals and the current work has been well received internationally. Gardenia was inspired by the film, Yo say asi, about the closing days of a transvestite cabaret in Barcelona.  Having seen the film, Belgian TV presenter and transsexual Vanessa Van Durme persuaded Alain Platel, founder and choreographer of the company, to create a dance-theatre work based on the same premise. The Gardenia of the title is the name of the cabaret, and Van Durme has assembled seven transvestites and transsexuals, mostly in their seventies, as its putative cast (on opening night the cast was reduced to six due to illness), along with Griet Debacker as the “real woman” and a young man, who acts the ingenue part.

The program tells us that Gardenia “goes deep into the turbulent lives of nine singular people”. It cannot be disputed that these are singular people, no doubt with very compelling life stories, but just how deep the work goes into those stories is questionable. From the opening sequence, in which Van Durme introduces the suited men through a series of salacious vignettes about their sexual histories, to the grand finale, a red carpet rendition of Marlene Dietrich’s “Sagt mir, wo die blumen sind”, the work rarely strayed beyond the clichés associated with the depiction of the “tragic tranny” in popular culture. Sexual titillation, the impersonation of tragic female divas (Dietrich, Liza Minelli, Norma Desmond), mawkish sentimentality, self-loathing and the slipshod application of female frippery and artifice: every box was ticked.

The cast, initially seen shuffling about the steeply raked stage in suits, gradually divest themselves of their straight attire to reveal feminine florals underneath, and series of mildly diverting tableaux vivantes ensue. This segues into an overly long section in which they dress for their onstage personas in the final cabaret, while the soundtrack arcs from Madam Butterfly to “Forever Young” to Ravel’s Bolero. Then the young man, Hendrik Lebon, clearly meant to embody the anguish of embarking on the life, performs the only real dance of the piece to Charles Aznavour’s song “Comme il dissent”, with its chorus “Je suis un homo, comme ils dissent” (I’m a homo, like they say). The choreography is unremarkable but there are moments of pathos here, unfortunately soon undercut by the mawkish dialogue he has with an Aunty Mame impersonator (“Am I beautiful?  “Is my life beautiful? etc). After he wrestles with Debacker for a while, a fairly obvious representation of the divided transvestite self, the work slowly winds its way to its red-carpet finale, Marlene’s famous song sung rather beautifully by Richard “Tootsie” Diereck, surrounded by the now fully bedecked and bedizened cast.  

All in all, it’s hard to know what Festival director Paul Grabowski was thinking when he signed up for this one. Surely there are ways of depicting the transsexual and transvestite experience that don’t merely recycle overworked clichés?  It’s disappointing that in Gardenia we are offered nothing but the most superficial rendition of what are no doubt compelling life stories.

- Maggie Tonkin