Louise Lecavalier: Children/A Few Minutes of Lock

Louise Lecavalier: Children/A Few Minutes of Lock -
Adelaide Festival -
The Space, Adelaide Festival Centre, 21 March -

This program, performed by the Canadian dancer Louise Lecavalier, consisted of two works performed in an unadorned black space in plain, mostly black clothing. The first, Children, choreographed by Nigel Charnock, was the major work, at about 50 minutes in length. Lecavalier, at 52 years old, is an astonishing athlete. With short, cropped hair and a puckish build, she springs between the floor and the air if the two were interchangeable. She moves with speed and lightness and yet with a forceful vigour. She also has extraordinary stamina – she barely left the stage for the length of the performance, except for a brief pause between works.

Children, a duo performed with the sturdily-built Patrick Lamothe, is frustratingly opaque. It opens with Lecavalier skuttling across the stage on all fours. Strobe lighting and a high-pitched squealing sound, which recur at times through the work, give a sense of emergency. She dances solo for about 10 minutes, sometimes with a metal rod. She appears to be a performer of some sort – perhaps this is an allusion to her time as a lead dancer with La La La Human Steps? – but we can only guess.

The man enters, aiming the strobe lights at her. With his appearance the work enters more familiar territory, as the pair seem to mate, wrestle and spar to a soundtrack of popular songs ranging from Leonard Cohen to Janis Joplin. The children of the title are nowhere in evidence except for the occasional recorded sound of playing toddlers or crying babies. The pair finally douse themselves with bottles of water and die alternately and temporarily to a couple of bars of Maria Callas singing the famous aria from Madame Butterfly. The use of props is not well realised, and it is more often the music, rather than the dance, that gives the clue to the meaning or the emotional content.

I preferred the more straightforward abstraction of A Few Minutes of Lock, despite it being just a few excerpts (of works by Eduoard Lock). Performed with France Bruyere and Patrick Lamothe, this was really just a show-off piece for Lecavalier’s athleticism and virtuosity. It was fabulous.

- KAREN VAN ULZEN