“Die Grosse Fuge,” “Fantasie,” “Groosland”
Cal Performances, Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley
October 27-28,2006
When the Lyon Opera Ballet -- which Cal Performances presented at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall last Friday and Saturday nights -- gets on stage, there’s one thing you can be sure of, there will be athletic inventions of mind-bending capriciousness in the offing.
The works that this attractive troupe performs tend to be highly energetic and physically alert on the most obvious level, but what’s most appealing is the satisfying meatiness underneath. Their triple bill this time – featuring the works of Anna Teresa de Keersmaeker, Sasha Waltz and Maguy Marin – was not a program of esoteric intellectual works, but it was smart and even provocative on a number of levels.
The Belgian De Keersmaeker’s “Die Grosse Fuge,” for instance, made a galvanizing vehicle for the company.
On a bare stage under the hot exposed glare of a grid of lamps, seven men and one woman play out a high velocity contest in Ann Weckx’s dark business suits. Spiralling through the air with limbs flung wide or in contracted balls, they tumble and roll to the ground with an almost intoxicated zest to the music of Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” as recorded by the Quatuor Debussy.
Although there’s a story inherent in the simple fact of putting a single woman -- Caelyn Knight -- amidst the men, De Keersmaeker doesn’t make too much of the situation, rather illustrating the fugue form in the complex patterns of choreography as dancers pick up phrases of movement and then pass it to others in rolling canons. Knight devours space as hungrily as the men, rolls up her sleeves with them and takes her tumbles to the floor with the same aggressive confidence that marks all of the Lyon dancers. But doubtless De Keersmaeker’s objective is to make you notice the very fact that you’ve noticed that there is only one woman.
Sasha Waltz’s hazy, dreamlike “Fantasie,” which followed on the program, covers different and even more ambiguous ground. Created for the Lyon Opera Ballet and premiered earlier this year “Fantasie” – danced first in silence, then to a recording of the Schubert Fantasie in F minor – effects some arresting scenes. At the start Bruno Cezario and Fernando Carrion Caballero confront each other in an unsettlingly slow encounter in which Caballero’s arm seem to pass through Cezario’s body. Yu Otagaki tightrope walks into Caballero’s orbit for a duet of garishly twisted limbs and other dancers join them, swaying in a knot in the corner.
In Martin Hauk’s shadowy darkness, some of the imagery is compelling. Still, one can’t help feeling that the work lacks development and is over-long. For a lengthy section of the ballet, the dancers seem to take a childlike pleasure in flitting about the stage with “airplane arms” but the story seems lost until we see Otagaki melting away from Caballero. He appears stricken and all the dancers vanish leaving Cezario alone onstage, as if within a fading dream.
And then you have to wonder Maguy Marin’s dreams look like. Her diverting 1989 ballet “Groosland” puts 20 dancers onstage, looking uncharacteristically zaftig in Montserrat Casanova’s padded “fat suits” featuring prim blue and chartreuse outfits. They mince and teeter through complicated little folk dances with a nimble charm that elicited not a few chuckles from the audience and the Rubenesque dancers are rather touching in their obvious delight in dancing to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. These characters are obviously far more comfortable with their illusory flesh than you or I might be with a real body, and when the dancers strip off the blue and chartreuse to romp “naked,” we’re reminded that this or any other body is just a vehicle, and that the real grace comes from the dancer within.
This review originally appeared in the Contra Costa Times.
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