Choreographer and Director: Eva Recacha
Orange is the only fruit for Eva Recacha in her new surrealist piece The Picnic, a sometimes sinister, sometimes joyous celebration of connection and being outdoors drawn from the Hieronymus Bosch painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. This enjoyably weird 60-minute dance, performed in the Lillian Baylis Studio at Sadler’s Wells for two nights, is remarkably like Bosch’s busy triptych employing a large cast of dancers, each enacting an individual and collective ritual around the stage, attentive to the painting’s celebratory aspects but also the danger and corruption in its day to night detail.
The Picnic opens with the dancers surrounding and posing with a large foam orange with a tunnel cut into its centre through which every individual passes, as though they are specifically born into the world of the picnic. Recacha’s choreography in this early section is deliberately intimidating and unnerving, with the performers starring aggressively into the audience for several minutes, squirming and squeezing their way across the floor, while Alberto Ruiz Soler’s intense composition provides a backing track.
“I have never had so much fun,” the soundtrack proclaims, which the dancers begin to chant, only, here at least, their movements, facial expressions and energy suggest otherwise. Recacha has the company move from side to side, eventually forming a worshipful group as the foam orange is held aloft, rolled around them and idolised, yet the poker-faced performers remain in thrall as though compelled rather than choosing to enjoy this part of the garden.
As Recacha adds more props, including long tendrils that suggest orange rind, the dancers become tangled in these pieces, mirroring Bosch’s evocative painting with smaller group and individually choreographed pieces that start to build a happier fantasy. As The Picnic unfolds, the fun does, too, as controlled carnage takes over, enlivening the performers who work together to create movement around the room or pockets of activity that are often intensely focused on a specific task.
When more oranges arrive – this time the real thing – that focus shifts to standardising patterns and more creative experimentation with opportunities to line them up, roll them around and play with concepts of regularity and abundance. In this final segment, the dancers reach an almost hysterical pitch that borders on genuine enjoyment but is also performative. Having entered Bosch’s garden, they must convince themselves and the audience that they are having as good a time as they seem.
The Picnic is a very strange watch, filled with lots of different impressions, emotions and attempts to communicate, which has a compelling quality of its own but probably means a lot less without at least a visual impression of Bosch’s painting to guide the audience through the rituals being performed. Some sections are a bit pulpy, including an overlong narrative about the personalities of individual oranges who are associated with partygoers, but there is both ambition and impressive execution in Recacha’s work that brings The Garden of Earthly Delights to life.
Runs Until 29 November 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Enjoyably odd
