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Company
Compagnie M
Choreographer
Maurice Bejart
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Peacock
Theatre
4
- 8 February 2003 |
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Without question,
Maurice Bejart's Compagnie is one of
the most talented collection of dancers
in the world. Wonderfully gifted and
superbly trained, each member of the
troupe is an absolute delight to watch;
and their abilities do not stop at dance,
because they can sing and act too, in
some cases quite extraordinarily well.
All these
brilliant talents are on display in
this production, Mother
Teresa and the Children of the World,
which combines movement, pose, dance,
the spoken word, acting and singing
to convey a message of concern for the
world's poor and oppressed, presumably
as Mother Teresa of Calcutta did or
would have voiced it.
And herein
lies the difficulty. With such outstanding
dancing talent assembled on the stage,
one longed to see it in full flow; but
the few and brief periods of dance we
were vouchsafed proved merely tantalising,
for in between there were long and sometimes
tedious stretches of movement and pose
rather than dance, to accompany and
sometimes to illustrate the many monologues,
most of them spoken by Marcia Haydee
in the eponymous role.
Maurice
Bejart is the son of the philosopher
Gaston Berger, which doubtless explains
his laudable interest in ideas and social
issues, and his even more laudable desire
to express them through the medium of
dance. But one can imagine this being
done less didactically, and with far
greater use of his company's physical
genius. The infinite capability of dance
to say what can be said in words, and
to say even more than can be said in
words, offers a challenge to the choreographer:
to turn text into movement, pictures
into movement, concepts into movement,
and then to add all the dimensions of
sentiment to them; so that meditations
on poverty, loneliness, hunger, love,
and the silence required for wisdom
– all themes of this production,
as expressed in recitations by Marcia
Haydee – could better (indeed,
best) be spoken in dance's rich, four-dimensional
language.
I long
to see this wonderful collection of
dancers dancing, really dancing, using
their astonishing gifts to the full,
on a big stage, with music or sound
that matches in imaginativeness and
richness what they have to offer. That
would be an evening to remember.
AC Grayling
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