Created by
Romeo Castellucci
Director
Romeo Castellucci
Music
Scott Gibbons
Choreography
Romeo Castellucci and Cindy van Acker
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Tricodex
Lyon Opera Ballet
Sadler's Wells
6 - 7 October 2005
It was a bizarre evening. So many superbly talented, skilful, versatile, witty dancers; such indefatigable lighting acrobatics by Patrice Besombes; such breathless changes of sets, costumes and supporting objects; such lavish sponsorship; everyone doing everything they can to oblige choreographer Philippe Decouflé and yet to what end?
Certainly not to little effect. The effects were incessant. Here dancers in flippers; there what looked like prancing unicorns; here some hairy beast gnarling his way across the stage; there a group of feathered creatures sauntering wildly before sudden collapsing; here sea anemones bathed in fluorescent light, there a spider with pointe shoes on her hands. And everywhere tentacles, antennae, or elephant-like trunks affixed to dancers' heads or hips or feet or backsides or all the above. Cartwheels and acrobatics alternated with snatched classical steps, circus acts (complete with hoists) with what looked like gym workouts. At one point a woman performed a graceful number on a rolling metal hemisphere. For eighty minutes this perpetuum mobile continued, sometimes variety pantomime, sometimes surreal circus. But the fantastical became oddly predictable; the sense of the surreal quickly wore off to leave…well, one effect after the other.
The question that has occasionally nagged this reviewer when does the eclectic become a meaningless melange? was finally answered: in Dechoufle's Tricodex, the third work in a trilogy inspired by Codex Serafinus, the "fanciful 400-page encyclopaedia created by Italian artist and naturalist Luigi Serafini", as the programme note tells us. Here Sarafini imagined a codified world of mythical animals, plants, insects and mathematical equations. Decoufle calls the world that he conjures out of Serafini's universe "ensemble mathematics".
There is nothing wrong with an incomprehensibly named dance universe if it sets the imagination spinning and explores its own laws of movement; but if it comes across more as "ensemble straight multiplication", a potentially infinite series of movement skits devoid of interesting choreography, it gets a little tedious. Which sadly is what this evening was.
Simon May
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