© John Ross 'Kammer/Kammer' reviews recent Ballett Frankfurt reviews more Brendan McCarthy reviews

For all of Forsythe’s pleadings that Kammer/Kammer “could only have been created by a dance mind", the piece is a key shift away from dance and towards the theatre of the word. Despite its seemingly post-modern sensibility, it more nearly recalls the theatrical and televisual avant-garde of the 1960s.

When the audience enters the theatre, the dancers are already warming up. The principals are mic’d and, like a television floor-manager, start calling to members of the audience. In the background the dancers warm up with the usual tendus, ronds and attitudes: pretty well all there is of classical dance for the night.

Seven large plasma screens are suspended overhead. The convention followed is that of the live television drama (almost a lost form now, although – very unusually – ITV is showing one this month). The stage is subdivided into several different sets. While the action takes place partly in direct view of the audience, crucial sections are hidden by the set, filmed instead by a cameraman and visible only on the overhead monitors.
 

The dramatic action interleafs two texts: "Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve", a ‘prose-poem’ by the Canadian classics professor Ann Carson and Douglas Martin's "Outline of My Lover". Both stories are of homosexual desire and rejection, the first that of a manipulative university professor (played by Dana Caspersen) who fantasises herself as Catherine Deneuve in her secret passion for one of her students. The second story - much less distinguished than Carson’s - recounts the humiliations of a young man’s affair (played here by Antony Rizzi) with a rock star.

The treatment is heavily episodic. Many of its dance elements are visible only on the television monitors, recalling a liturgy masked by the reredos of a mediaeval cathedral. While there are dance moments centre-stage, they seem oddly hollow and overwhelmed by the sheer torrent of high-energy speech.

Video was used thoughtfully and brought a multi-focal dimension to the performance, blurring reality and virtuality. Few choreographers understand video, often deploying it to mask the substantive shortcomings of a work. Forsythe, on the other hand, uses video in a considered way, orchestrating his cast and his vision-mixer to produce some moments of real beauty. What was less clear was the function of dance, other than to add some residual brush-strokes.
 

He is still a choreographer, less interested now - it seems - in the gestural language of human bodies than in orchestrating props, technology, texts and voices. He can be deliberately contrarian, unafraid of repeating what has been done before, or of making a dance work which subordinates dance to other forms. But on last night’s evidence, Forsythe seems to have slipped moorings in a more decisive way. He and Ballett Frankfurt (soon to be disbanded) leave having done dance considerable service.

Had Kammer/Kammer been given at – say – the National Theatre, it is not clear that it would have cut quite as much ice as with a dance audience. It lacks the necessary tension and it is hard to see any reason why we should care about the principal characters. There is a time and a place for bricolage, but if Forsythe is to prosper in his apparent new choice of direction, he may have to choose between being an opera, theatre or film director, placing himself at the service of someone else's text, or alternatively setting pen to paper himself.