Medusa – Sadler’s Wells, London

Director and Creator: Jasmin Vardimon

Reviewer: Richard Maguire

After 20 years Israeli-born choreographer Jasmin Vardimon is still in the game. However, while beautiful to look at, her new postmodern version of the Medusa myth lacks a cohesive frame, and the focus is often upon image rather than story.

Medusa is frequently a symbol of misogyny; the hysteric woman or the woman scorned wrecking her revenge on the male population. We envisage Medusa with a headful of snakes. Too often a man’s hand holds her severed head aloft, the sight of which turns other men to stone. There is no evidence in Ovid or Aeschylus, where her story is told, that any woman ever meets the same fate after viewing Medusa’s head, and Freud suggested that she symbolises men’s fear of castration. She is certainly a potent figure in Greek mythology.

In her Medusa,Vardimon attempts to make this tale of misogyny into a story of feminism. It begins with the female dancers arriving on stage covered in plastic like they are new dolls waiting to be unwrapped. The men come on stage, take the women out of their shiny packages and engineer their bodies into passive poses, creating housewives ready-made with oven gloves and stripy aprons. This chauvinism is maintained throughout the 80-minute show as the men compete for control over these women’s bodies.

We also witness Medusa’s rape by Poseidon in the Temple of Athena, the dancers throwing macabre shadows against the back wall, lit handsomely by Amadeo Solernou. So angry that the rape took place in her temple Athena punishes Medusa by transforming her hair into writhing serpents, while Poseidon walks away scot-free. For a few seconds in Vardimon’s version, Medusa (a moving Silke Muys) is able to walk away from this brutal assault, and briefly Poseidon is violated instead. It’s a scorching image.

Vardimon’s skill at creating such arresting images does mean that sometimes the storytelling is obscure in places, especially when environmental issues, such as the plastic littering our seas, make their way into this myth’s retelling. The choice of music is also confusing; rather than one uniform sound design we have everything from Handel to Aphex Twin, from Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)to the soundtrack of In the Mood for Love. Each piece of music has its own dance style with the dancers sometimes flopping and bending like ragdolls or clicking precisely like clockwork automatons. The only constant between the various different styles is that every inch of the dancers’ bodies are involved in the choreography, from their arms, which never stop moving, to their mouths, which are often agape with despair.

Among the eight dancers, only one speaks: Joshua Smith. In his blue suit, he tells us about another interpretation of the Medusa myth. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s reading, he suggests that we all exist as objects for other subjects, that our subjectivity is not as free as we think. It’s a complex theory to tackle in a few minutes of dance, and perhaps this overreaching is true of the whole show. There is simply too much going on, and ultimately Medusasuffers from a surplus of images and symbols. Medusa is also the word for jellyfish in many European languages, but Vardimon’s Medusadoesn’t quite sting as it should.

Runs until 24 October 2018 | Image: Tristram Kenton