Choreographer: Maguy Marin
When the lights go down, the Sadler’s Wells auditorium is enshrouded in darkness. Not an emergency light in sight. The audience is left straining to adjust their senses for an almost uncomfortable period of time. Then, in infinitesimal gradations, the spotlight creeps in upon ten crooked figures, standing like statuary. Hamm’s whistle (from Beckett’s Endgame) sounds, and the spectral, sheet-clad shuffle begins.
May B is a much-reprised work by the French dance company of Maguy Marin. First conceived in 1981, the piece draws from a desire to translate the physical potentialities of Samuel Beckett’s minimalist theatre to the medium of dance. Set to a score featuring Franz Schubert, Gilles de Binche, and Gavin Bryars, the performance is broken into three parts, each demarcated by tonal distinctions in the music, choreography and, most notably, costume design (Louise Marin).
Much of Marin’s choreography is composed of subtle movements made against the void. Her company’s stated aim with the project is “to succeed in unveiling the tiny or spectacular gestures of the many unnoticeable and inconspicuous lives in which waiting and ‘not quite still’ stillness create a void.” In large part, this proves successful, at others, (quite literally) it shuffles upon the borderlines of tedium.
The more undesirable territory of the production is most observable in its first phase. It’s characterised by each dancer’s lack of an identity informed by anything beyond their silhouettes. Somewhere between ghosts and a rabble of post-spectral Scrooges staggering to the basin, the figures shuffle in together and then pull apart. Variations upon this stagger are played out against Schubert’s string-heavy repertoire. We watch each of the figures in various stages of cavorting, fighting, and making love (think a Bruegel utterly washed of colour and much of its allegory or narrative).
In all, the recourse to air-humping and all-around genital fascination reaches towards excess even for the most primed of Beckettian shoegazers and Francophiles. But it is decidedly worth persevering through to the second phase. This consists of a set piece of Beckett’s most recognisable characters. The light design (Albin Chavignon) is deeply memorable here. It fades in and out in delicate consonance with the score and choreography. From the ghostly pallidness of the opening frieze to lambent, candlelit scenes.
It is the third phase of the performance, however, which utterly saves the show. Set to the hauntingly beautiful refrain of Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, Marin assembles a troop of wayfarers, portmanteaus in hand, circuitously departing and then re-entering the stage. Having viewed the dancers first as anonymous figures, and then as highly identifiable archetypes of Beckett’s oeuvre, each figure suddenly appears individuated, as if in possession of composite lives. Here, what Marin refers to as the “not quite still stillness” in the smallest of idiosyncratic mannerisms and movement, is masterfully realised.
Her choreography distils that peculiarly Beckettian paradox of appearing to be both interminably waiting for something and travelling somewhere at the same time: to be directionless while stubbornly in possession of some enduring destination. It is a paradox which sustains Beckett’s greatest expressions of the absurdity of the human condition, and it is etched into the pathos of May B’s ending. The result is a worthwhile study of the faltering, quiet beauty of the quotidian.
Reviewed on 21 May 2024
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Quiet beauty of the quotidian
