at the Macmillan Theatre for Luminato
June 11-13, 2009

   No doubt that the first attraction for an audience is Jiri Kylian, the Czech-born dancer-choreographer who studied German modern dance in Prague and ballet in London before joining the Stuttgart Ballet and becoming the resident choreographer for several decades of the Netherlands company. Kylian’s massive reputation precedes him to Toronto, and it is true, as Arlene Croce once maintained, that Kylian can make audiences sit up to watch the stage with shining eyes. Kylian’s ensemble (drawn from various nationalities) always appears effortlessly responsive to his personal style that has developed more sophistication and subtlety in the past thirty years when it had seemed to Arlene Croce and others to be small, repetitive, and not given to individuality in dance steps. Kylian no longer makes a fetish of impersonality or blank singularity. Yes, his dancers go for duplicable speed, shape, and finish, but their previous controlled look has yielded to personalized (which is to say individualistic) intimations of anxiety and estrangement. Such is the case in Wings of Wax (1997) where an eclectic score (from John Cage, Philip Glass, Johan Sebastian Bach, and Heinrich Ignaz Franx Biber) allows the dancers to break patterns of repeated glissando movements and fluent arabesques with adjustments that seem angular or jagged. Though the eight dancers are uniformly costumed in black leotards, and they perform the customary repertoire of Kylian’s duets doubled, tripled, or quadrupled, they widen the magnetic field. The circular pattern to Michael Simon’s extraordinarily simple but effective décor helps. A tree hangs upside down over the floor, its branches outspread like wings, while a spotlight moves slowly around it like a moon dreamily revolving in the sky. Simon’s lighting brightens in one section, perhaps illustrative of the Icarus act of flying too close to the sun as the dancers move and weave like birds in flight, but otherwise the mood is dreamy, except for when the fluent ease and rapid steps turn into mechanical, largo movements. The one thing missing in this piece, however, is actual narrative. However, Kylian’s intent here is not expressly for storytelling.

   That is left to the husband and wife team of Lightfoot Leon (Paul Lightfoot and Sol Leon) who exploit the suggestiveness and scope of psychology in Shoot The Moon (2006), an incredibly intriguing modern parable of a love triangle, danced to Philip Glass’ Movement II from Tirol Concerto for piano and orchestra. As in the Kylian piece, the core dance form is the duet, but the solo has almost an equal status. The innovation of the piece is its shifting perspective, as if the revolving set by Lightfoot Leon (simply walls with windows to mark off separate rooms) were the equivalent of a page-turning storybook. The use of video, beginning with a close-up of a nude woman’s back at a window, supplies a wonderfully imaginative kinetic, for there are sequences where what is seen in the video windows are only partial views of what is actually being danced in each room. The overwhelming signification is of windows and doors of perception that make us all into voyeurs of some private psychodrama. Subdued lighting by Tom Bevoort acts in concert with the restrained costumes to impart a bleached effect, all the better to bring out the flesh colours of the dancers. Because of Luminato’s egregious reluctance to name the dancers or use their photos, I cannot, alas, name the members of the extraordinary ensemble and pay each one his or her proper due as an artist, but suffice it to say that each dancer is superb. There is, as can be expected of NDT, an identifiable classical ballet base, but this is modified by a very modern expressionism that imparts graphic power to the sequences.

   This piece has strong dramatic gestures in the dancers’ faces and bodies. One of the females expresses silent cries or gasps as if she had emerged from a Munch canvas. In another scene, a couple seems to be in a conversation we cannot hear. In a third, a man seems to be literally climbing the wall in slow motion, and in another, the man appears to be hanging on a hidden hook on his wall. Movement tends to be harsh and angular in usually allegro tempo that becomes molto agitato. My overall feeling was that the piece had the extreme expressionism or menace of a Munch with some of the surrealistic mystery of a Magritte. It is not possible to resolve all the ambiguities or ambivalences in the piece, but that is because the rapid rushes and lifts, the pivots and scissor extensions, the pulls and balances determine mood without necessarily clarifying the root narrative or the significance and identity of each character. What mattered most was the striking union of music, dance, and drama. In other words, the piece’s amazing ability to turn music and movement into structured emotion.

   The most ambitious piece, as far as ensemble size is concerned, is Crystal Pite’s The Second Person (2007). This one is designed for 25 dancers and a miniature marionette.

Under an inky storm sky (designed by Pite herself, who also supplies and voices the text on tape), the large ensemble (all wearing dark glasses and dressed in identical costumes of business suits) incarnates the idea of mass conformity and society’s manipulation of its members. A duet of two women underscores this point, and there are repetitions of the idea from the manner in which the miniature marionette is manipulated by multiple members of the ensemble as the rest follow as if part of a herd. Much of the opening seems to be clichéd, but the strong comic flourishes break any monotony, and the explosions of hard edged, spastic or martial arts movements are welcome tropes that take the idea of interior states in different directions. The piece concludes with a remarkable female dancer who mimics a life-size marionette with extraordinary accuracy, infusing the sequence with a poignant, humanizing quality. Who, then, is the second person of the title? It may be the miniature marionette of the opening or the life-sized one at the end. It could also be merely an idea, a projection of what each of us would like but can never seem to be in reality. The frequent use of closed patterns or of tight collective movements by the ensemble sustains the sense of a dance that parodies the human condition by a beautifully shaped metaphor.

 
photos: Joris Jon Bos

pic 1: scene from The Second Person

pic 2: Shoot The Moon



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