Choreographers: Damien Jalet (Skid); Sharon Eyal (SAABA)
Composers: Christian Fennesz, Marihiko Hara (Skid); Ori Lichtik (SAABA)
The GöteborgsOperan Danskompani has brought an intriguing double bill to Sadler’s Wells.
The curtain opens on the radical staging for the first part, Skid. A white rectangle is canted at 34 degrees. The designers are very precise about this; 45 degrees was too much and the dancers had no control over their descents. Trial and error determined that 34 degrees was the steepest tilt that worked). Under clear white lights, a succession of dancers appear over the top of the rectangle, slide down it, and disappear into the void below. They descend slowly, they descend fast, they spin, and they try to stand up. Their bodies make intriguing shapes against the stark white backdrop, their attempts to resist the downward slide are heroic, and it’s quite funny.
The second part of the dance piece involves a collective advance up the face of the rectangle, as a dozen or so dancers stomp up against gravity, assist each other, slide down and get caught. Less individual movement, more of a wave of bodies. The final part features a single dancer cocooned in fabric. He writhes inside it, fights his way out, and emerges, naked, to climb to the summit of the rectangle and briefly pose in glorious golden backlight before the curtain falls.
Sharon Eyal’s SAABA features dancers crossing the stage in distorted poses, their legs bent, chests and buttocks thrust out, up on their tip-toes to make their steps stuttery and hesitant. Elegance is a long, long way from anyone’s mind. The musical accompaniment is a relentless electronic bass pulse. It is uncomfortable to hear, and the dancers’ physical distortion is quite hard to watch. Dancers really can’t help being graceful, and every so often a leg or an arm extends in a languid sweep to remind everyone that they are being this graceless on purpose. It isn’t very clear what the purpose is.
Waiting for the piece to resolve into less angular shapes is waiting in vain. The chief modulation is the lighting that shifts from cones of top light to cones of side light, with copious amounts of haze making everything mist. Finally, the stage and the dancers are covered with a pleasing blood-red wash. Again, this doesn’t seem like a particularly purposeful statement, but it looks nice, for which the lighting designer Alon Cohen deserves a special mention.
The Danskompani is deliberately setting out their stall to explore different vocabularies of movement. These two pieces are both intriguing, both slightly over-long, and both excitingly experimental. Seeing the dancers move naturally would have been a happy contrast to the stilted effects of SAABA or the slightly gimmicky nature of Skid, but the effects of stressed physicality persist in the mind, which may, in fact, be the point.
Runs until 13 May 2023
