Stage, Costumes, Lighting
William Forsythe
Video Design
Philip Bußmann
Music
J. S. Bach
H. von Bieber
F. Busoni
Thom Willems
Sound Design
Joel Ryan
Piano
David Morrow
Catherine
Deneuve
Dana Caspersen
Antony Rizzi
|
Kammer, Kammer
by William Forsythe
Sadler's Wells
22 - 25 October 2003
You would have thought that Irony had been done by now. That every convention there is to challenge had been challenged; that even the concepts of a 'convention' or of 'challenging' had been challenged. That, after Duchamp, Merce Cunningham, Raymond Queneau and a host of other artists, choreographers and writers, not to mention the philosophers who preceded and accompanied them, irony had ironized itself so completely that there is nothing left but to begin afresh.
William Forsythe's Kammer Kammer proves that expectation wrong. It is, in fact, a dazzling display of how much mileage ironizing still has left in it. Like Tanzteater, a mercurial blend of dance, mime and acting developed in Germany by Pina Bausch among others, but going far beyond it, Forsythe presents a spectacle in which difficult concepts like personal identity, narrative, character and authenticity come under serious scrutiny.
Superficially, we witness two vaguely dysfunctional love stories, both homoerotic and both ending in 'failure'. They are acted by Anthony Rizzi and Dana Caspersen to the accompaniment of a troupe of dancers who, in their highly introverted movements, seem to be commenting on the proceedings like the chorus in a Greek tragedy. Rizzi plays a young man by turns desperate and angry about his subservient relationship to an older rock star who supposedly has all the confidence and glamour that he lacks. Caspersen is a professor who 'acts out' a fantasy that she is Catherine Deneuve, in part, perhaps, to assure herself that she has the erotic magnetism to seduce a female student whom she obsessively desires.
But the storytelling proceeds at numerous levels. Much of the performance - acting and dancing - is projected live onto large plasma screens dotted about the auditorium. There are moments when the films no longer represent what is happening on stage: the images are distorted or the same people are shown in different settings or doing other things. Sometimes only the camera can see what is going on live, as the dancers and actors are hidden, partially or completely, behind sliding walls. Reality, image and observer increasingly compete with one another. Certainty, which was elusive from the beginning, gradually becomes impossible. It was hard enough to distinguish, say, Casparsen from the Deneuve she had internalized or the Deneuve represented in public images of her; but now we aren't sure at all how to disentangle the actors from their characters. Yet precisely here, in this quagmire of artificiality, where even the audience's emotions seem choreographed, everything feels so real. Déja vu, not frustration, is one's reaction - at least this reviewer's.
And to say all this is not yet to comment on the superlative choreography and dancing. Which, though powerful and jagged and violent, takes time to sink in. The second time I saw Kammer Kammer the dancing no longer seemed to be commenting on the acting, but just the reverse. The story lines, with their many layers, were still riveting; the contorted and subverted personal identities of the characters still interesting; the video displays still dazzling; but, for me, the dancing stole the show. Though there isn't much of it, it packs a tremendous emotional punch. We see choreographed anarchy of merciless precision; tortured introversion expressed with stunning verve; wide open emotions - of lust, fear, desire, confusion - enacted with illuminating subtlety.
Nonetheless, the blinkered forces of conservatism in Frankfurt's city council have decided, on budgetary grounds, to drive out a great innovator like Forsythe. And his glorious Ballett Frankfurt is shortly to be wound up after nearly two decades at the helm of international contemporary dance.
Simon May
|
