Le Regard Libre Nº 52 - Ivan Garcia
At the Théâtre de Vidy, death occupies the stage in Forever, a performance combining dance and music that reveals our relationship to the finitude of our existence, as well as to the possibility of eternal life.
«Death is death», reads the flyer for Tabea Martin's new show, Forever. A mysterious quotation that the paper attributes to a child, Elias, a 5P pupil in Basel. Created for a juvenile audience, professional choreographer Tabea Martin has worked with children - aged 8 to 12 - to explore their vision of death, which, when transposed onto the stage, produces an astonishing aesthetic result.
And with good reason: as soon as spectators enter the auditorium, soft, gentle music from a music box starts to play, evoking everyone's childhood; as the audience takes their seats, the melody takes them to other horizons. On this particular day, several school classes occupy the front rows of seats in the auditorium. As the light and music fade, the curtain rises on five dancers, semi-clad in white, whose posture and elegance suggest to the audience that they are divinities. The five actor-dancers - who retain their «real» names during the performance - launch into a waltz of movements and gestures that not only delight the eyes, but also draw us into a fantastic story of the struggle between life and death in an imaginary land.
Death, a guest on the set
On stage, a young woman named Tamara explains to the audience that she is going to re-enact her death. As soon as she says this, she gracefully performs various movements to Vivaldi-like music, before fainting and faking her death. And she does this with subtle variations three times in a row. The performance consists of each dancer successively narrating her death through his or her dance. These dances are ingeniously highlighted by the set design and the use of space. The stage materializes an eternal place where the actors remain, as one of them puts it, «always there, forever». Hearing these words, one can't help but think of the famous Huis clos by Jean-Paul Sartre where, in a modest apartment supposed to be Hell, three characters tear each other apart.
Except that in Forever, The sets and costumes, very white and uncluttered, place the perfection of the bodies within view, and lead us into a kind of artificial paradise where two contradictory forces are unleashed: order and chaos. This contradiction feeds the scenography, designed by Veronika Mutalova, which relies on an ingenious system of wires hanging vertically across the stage, at the ends of which are sometimes suspended objects - animal carcasses, jerrycans, balls... Behind the scenes, large white balloons stagnate, waiting for the dancers - later on - to use them to swing or to throw them at each other. The objects attached to the wires are used by the dancers to create effects and animate their movements; for example, one of the dancers will pull a ball attached to a wire, turning on the lights; another will appropriate a jerrycan filled with blood, as indicated by the label, and sprinkle it over his companions. Thus, in this proto-paradise, it would seem that, despite perfection, death is present. At first concealed, it eventually appears directly on the set.
Dance as a meeting place
As the ballet continues, one of the dancers faints: «He's dead», But in reality, he's not. After a few energetic resuscitation sessions, he finally comes back to life. Created with the help of children and for children, the actors don't hesitate to include the audience - in this case, school classes - in their performance. During a fictitious funeral, told through pantomime, the dancers bring schoolchildren from the audience onto the stage. The latter take part, not without complicity, in the curious exercise of mourning and throwing flowers at a dead person you've only just met.
The dancers, sometimes just a tad silly, sometimes just a tad cruel, alternate between perfectly rhythmic solo or group dance phases, and «combat» sessions where the stage becomes a gigantic battlefield. As the show progresses, one of the dancers writes words on pieces of the set, which she then shows to the audience. This may be a kind of thematic categorization or commentary on the scenes on display. In terms of dance, the dancers' gestures alternate between classical dance movements - such as the cabriole or adage - and more Asian or South American influences, with movements that are less rigid and structured, but sharper and sharper. Like the performance, the dances performed are multiple and sometimes opposed, but united into a whole that amazes spectators and draws them into a ritual dimension. As with music and theater, wasn't the primary function of dance basically ritual dance, that of praise and celebration within a community?
Order and chaos
In her note of intent for the show, Tabea Martin explains that’«there are many ways to achieve immortality - starting a family, creating a work of art, taking part in political action. Aware of the finiteness of life, we try to create something meaningful that remains.» Within the performance, dance serves as a vehicle for reunion, creating a possibility between two opposing alternatives: life and death, yin and yang, black and white. These dichotomies are certainly not indifferent, and evoke the Nietzschean opposition of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, found in the book The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music. The Apollonian, the aesthetic drive of form, organizes the world, creating order where the rumbling chaos of the Dionysian, the aesthetic drive of energy, overflows and destroys. Forever is a curious combination of the desire to dance beauty and the overflowing energy that consumes our being.
On several occasions, in addition to physical violence, chaos intervenes in the performance through music and noise - evoking Nietzsche's Dionysus - when the dancers can no longer control its manifestation; like a disorder, it suddenly intervenes in a random and not always graceful way, sometimes in the form of a deafening noise similar to an alarm. Conversely, order - akin to the Nietzschean Apollo - attempts to restore the original balance by controlling this overflow, through the dances, but also by integrating the audience who, statically seated on the chairs, would help to channel this overflowing energy. The aesthetics deployed by Forever makes us think of a kind of’Alice in Wonderland where, instead of the Queen of Hearts and the White Rabbit, we'd find gods caught in a perpetual dilemma in an eternal place: life or death.
Tabea Martin's new creation is rich in movement and interpretation, which - I'm sure - is not lost on the audience. By staging a playful and, at times, tragic imaginary, the choreographer tackles serious and universal themes - those of death and eternal life - through the prism of feeling and sensation. In the end, the minor role of words in this dance performance leaves spectators free to appreciate what they see, and to construct their own thread within this luminously macabre dance.
Write to the author: ivan.garcia@leregardlibre.com
Photo credits: © Nelly Rodriguez
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