A pedestrian
casualness pervades the patterns and steps in Sinfonia Eroica,
which Belgian choreographer Michèle Anne De Mey first made in
1990 for herself and the six other dancers who formed her then-new dance
group in Brussels. This 2006 restaging for nine dancers from Charleroi/Danses,
the company she has co-directed for the past two years, is a mostly
engaging study of group dynamics and courtship, oddly affecting in parts
and marked by unstressed virtuosity and easy chemistry among the cast.
While the 80-minute piece is named after its main musical inspiration,
Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, the taped score also features
the overture from Mozart's 1768 singspiel Bastien and Bastienne
- the melody of which has an eerie resemblance to the Beethoven - and
rocker Jimi Hendrix's Foxy Lady. The music juts in and
out of blocks of silence, as the performers mess with the sound system
in full view, pausing and switching tracks midway.
That's the thing about the show's workaday world, which
stretches to the furthest wall of the stripped-bare stage: everything
is revealed. The inner wiring and Fresnels are exposed to us so the
dancers have no wings in which to hide, getting on and off stage via
doors that everyone can see.
At the heart of visual artist Michel Thuns' stark set, however,
stands a makeshift flying fox, which the dancers use to sail across
the space while gripping a small handle.
The everyday elegance of the scenography matches the movement here,
a basic palette of gestures that unfold and return to the body with
little fuss or flourish, as well as locomotive steps that take off with
little preparation or skid loudly into the ground. The dancers respond
to the choreography with an offhand air; even their more taxing stunts
- including handstands and jumps from all fours - are jauntily
shrugged off, mingling with moments of laid-back contact with one another.
What flowers from their interaction as a group is sometimes funny,
even absurd. When six of them sit on the floor in a row with their backs
facing us, they're suddenly racing upstage on their buttocks;
one dancer turns race commentator and watches them "competing
for the best ass" from the side. This same performer later gets
drawn into solo tennis practice, shunning the shower of oncoming balls
as best as he can. Enter a tennis ball the size of a watermelon, and
the scene swiftly shifts to a penalty kick, with a second dancer rolling
up his pants to play the goalkeeper.
From these encounters, couples pair up and part ways, changing mates
along the way. Men and women dance for one another in their own idiosyncratic
styles, chatting intimately and sharing lifts bubbling with sexual tension.
Sometimes they horse around on the flying fox, which leaves one person
vulnerable to the other party. In one instance, a woman slides down
the cable only to be pushed back up by her partner, who brings her down
and wraps her in a long, passionate kiss.
The show threatens to flatline when their constant couplings seem to
head nowhere, but thankfully, the youthfully insouciant dancers help
it reach a stirring finish. By the end, they're splashing each
other with buckets of water and gliding across the wet floor with slippery
ease: one big emotional release. |
"A mostly engaging study of group dynamics and courtship, oddly
affecting in parts and marked by unstressed virtuosity and easy chemistry
among the cast"
Credits
Choreography: Michèle Anne De Mey
Assistants to Michèle Anne De Mey: Gregory Grosjean,
and Johanna O'Keefe
Assistant and Music Advisor: Thierry De Mey
Performers: Ilse Ghekiere, Géraldine Fournier,
Mylèna Leclercq, Eléonore Valère, Gabriella Iacono,
Sandy Williams, Stefan Baier, Adrien le Quinquis, Gabor Varga
Scenography: Michel Thuns
Lighting: Simon Siegmann
Costumes: Isabelle Lhoas
|
