Choreographer
Wim Vandekeybus
Music
David
Eugene Edwards
Lyrics
Peter Verhelst
Director
Wim Vandedeybus
|
Blush
Wim Vandekeybus
Sadler's Wells
7 - 8 February 2004
For this brilliant and inventive piece of movement theatre, audiences must put aside any prudish reservations (a happy thought: does anyone have them anymore - at least, among audiences who love dance?) about explicit representations of sex, nudity, frankly-worded challenges to the audience, and violence, and allow themselves to be transported into spectating something deliberately without limits: performance which is astonishingly physical, dangerous, acrobatic and unconstrained. Blush is movement theatre breaking bounds into speech and performance art, pushing exhilaratingly at the boundaries of what is daring. It is raw and energetic, sexual but not erotic; the psychological universe it inhabits is one of opposition, confrontation and disturbance; it is manic and unbridled; and it has a form of pulsating beauty much enhanced by the music, composed especially for it by David Eugene Edwards of the band 16 Horsepower, and performed live.
The Sadler's Wells stage becomes a place where predatory females, like spiders or Maenads, dominate confused males; where fights break out, and neurosis and hysteria flicker and flash like lightning in cloud. The ingenuity does not restrict itself to the constantly evolving and unfolding minidramas of the dance, but embraces the use of cleverly simple technology - principally, a screen through which dancers can dive and melt, depending upon whether the filmed images playing across it are of a dolphin's watery domain or a sun-speckled field of waving corn.
This troupe is accomplished not just in dance but song and speech. There is a lot of text underpinning the performance, partly written by the performers themselves, one of the most extraordinary sequences seeming to be the reflections of someone about to commit suicide in a Venice hotel room, and thinking about the things she will never see again. The poems - for that is what they are - and the music are a fabric supporting the tireless gyrations of movement which tests every capacity of the human body to catapult and twist, fly and fall, collide and bounce, climb and collapse, convolute and hold itself still. The sheer quantity of energy expended over nearly two hours of sustained performance defies measurement.
Wim Vandekeybus has orchestrated his own and his company's powers of imagination into something genuinely new. For all that Blush is not about comfortable things, or sweet things, or easy things, it is more than spectacular and powerful: it is moving, true, and in the profound impression it leaves, beautiful.
AC Grayling
|
|
