‘About You’

Grande Salle, Centre Pompidou: 25 January 2008

“I could give you another 200, if you like”, said the man at the desk when I collected my ticket and sure enough the theatre turned out to be very sparsely populated, although the small audience was peppered with recognisable luminaries of the French contemporary dance scene. Small, but very select.

It began with footsteps and then dramatic light from total darkness and four performers already in position: one standing at a control keyboard and three others dressed sportily (one in proprietary fencing breeches, another in a garish pinky-blue tracksuit) standing within a pink square, just like the zone in which an Olympic gymnast’s free exercises are performed. The controller played sounds, prompting a particular response in bespoke movements from one or other dancer, beginning with one sound repeated slowly, then more being gradually introduced and accelerated until six or more competing sounds began to form complex layers which led to frenetic repetitions of the simple movement motif for each dancer (two-footed hops, unbalancing stretching, pulling up clothing with arms crossed etc) so that the sounds elicited an increasingly frenetic response. There was something mildly intriguing about the simplicity of it all, which took on an academic context later when one realised that this was an exercise in deconstructing dance, since the sounds were isolated chords or electronically enhanced passages from the work's eponymous theme song. To add to the effect, another keyboard lay on the floor and dancers who rolled or trod on it produced an unpredictable extra layer of sound.

But beyond this degree of clarity what happened thereafter was unfathomable. There was a boisterous game of tag, with some unseen force being thrown from person to person and then the four performers moulded together in a passionate group hug, with a roving mike stuck between them, capturing heartbeats and gentle orgasmic sighs; then one performer peeled away and disappeared behind the curtain. The microphone was placed against dancers’ foreheads revealing either no life within or the muffled sound of Elvis singing ‘Are you lonesome tonight ?’; and finally, only the garishly-clad tracksuit girl was left behind to perform a solo to the full song of ‘About You’ ending up in the pose of a dead fly.

Although the ensemble gamely came out for three curtain calls, there was clearly little enthusiasm in the select audience’s rather polite applause.

Elsewhere in the Centre Pompidou, three huge and completely plain, white canvasses occupied a significant amount of gallery space for no discernible purpose and, ultimately, Sylvain Prunenec’s peculiar brand of art in movement had an equally mystifying effect.

Graham Watts