Original music by
Martyn Jacques
Performed by
The Tiger Lillies
Choreography
and performance
Noam Gagnon
and
Dana Gingras
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Circa
The Holy Body Tattoo
The Barbican
4 - 15 February 2003
Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras call themselves "The Holy Body Tattoo" because, as Ms Gingras explains, "as creators we have to mine and explore the experiences that our bodies contain. The body never forgets. We have what we call tattoos or scars or wounds, and they tend to come from experiences that have really affected you." In the time that Gagnon and Gingras have been dancing together those tattoos - or scars or wounds - might have been literal ones: these astonishing dancers are performers of risk and limitless physicality, putting every sinew and bone to gruelling test every time they move. It will surprise some that the pair think Circa is a rest from their punishing ultra-physical, even brutal, performances in their past, for in the intimate space of the Pit their physical commitment and daring remains at times almost alarming in intensity. But the performance also has great subtlety and sensuality, premised as it is on the tango, from which there develops a series of themes of love and conflict, passion and ecstasy.
The other - and very rich - simultaneous half of the evening's art is the music of Martyn Jacques and his confreres in the Tiger Lillies. Funny, poignant, rhythmic, excoriating, clever and full of black farce, the songs (and the performance of them: Jacques in a disaffected clown's face plods across the stage in despair and disgust, investing his powerful falsetto with every emotion from pathos to scorn as the evening unfolds) are a treat, and carry the dance strongly along. The dark comedy of the music and the near-abandon of the dance, aided at times by atmospheric black-and-white scenes of Paris, among them the avenues of the necropolis of Pere Lachaise, combine to produce a full-bodied hour of drama, at its centre the tense, taut, dangerously emphatic bodies of the dancers, shot through - as if by lightning - by the moon-pale sexy legs of Dana Gingras, thigh-slits at one end and six-inch high heels at the other.
AC Grayling
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