'Claude Pascal' reviews 'Last Touch' reviews '27' 52"' reviews recent NDT reviews more Renee Renouf reviews Discuss this review (Open for at least 6 months)

Music: Dirk Haubrick
Choreography, Production and Text: Jiri Kylian
Concept Decor Jiri Kylian
Costume Design: Joke Visser
Lighting Design: Kees Tjebbes

Despite having to perform to a taped score, the visual perfection of Nederlands Dans Theatre's productions are breath-taking, if frequently little more than a back drop and exposing the side lighting and exits. For this type of production, Zellerbach is a splendid setting.

Kylian has created a series of near Kafka references with four dancers - a woman in a black bustled gown, elaborate hat and fan, two men in de rigeur street wear of the same era and a youngish girl with striped stockings and bloomers, sporting a tennis racket. They come forward from angled screens, white on one side, mirrored on another, angled backward on the stage, so that other dancers in darkened leotards and tights can slither in and exit from upper and lower stage left. The costumed four deliver their lines, straight to the audience, disappear behind the screen at designated spots, and appear again, disappear again in what seems to be a 3 act sequence, shortened in terms of usual dramatic standards. Their signature props eventually cross characters.

The spoken text, probably miked, smacks of Dada in period costumes. Both costumed and performing dancers are slender, marvelously controlled, freely moving, the interplay between them always at a distance, unexpectedly calculated, the contrast a counterpoint of the bizarre. Kylian seems to be saying, "From that to this, isn't it remarkable? Does it, like anything else in today's life, make any sense?" From the veneer of positive expectations the costume figures seem to signal, the pared down, highly articulated movements of the active dancers, nothing seems certain except their ability to execute.

Last Touch (2003)

Music: Dirk Haubrich
Choreography: Jiri Kylian
Assistant to the Choreographer: Glenn Edgerton
Decor: Walter Nobbe
Costume Design: Joke Visser
Lightig Design: Kees Tjebbes

If Claude Pascal was deliberate, Last Touch is not only a period piece, but a timed exposure worthy of the invention of Louis Daguerre. The stage is covered with a canvas, as if the scene presented as the curtain rises was captured by a linen frame. It is a stage set with a woman (1) in dark clothing standing at table at lower stage right, with a mirror and a door behind, closer to the center; a window beyond is flanked by two chairs and a table between. Down stage slight to the left is another chair with a woman in white seated (2) and almost dead center looking right another woman (3) in white reads a book. The table is covered with white and a lighted taper sits on the stage center end. A man (4) sits at one of the chairs under the window and another man (5) is slowly entering the door.

In constantly sustained slow motion, 1 starts pulling the linen off the table, while 2, looking bored, begins to lift her skirts displaying her legs, trying to arouse 4. 5 walks over to 4 and sits, as if to greet and discuss something. 5 walks over to 3 and tries first to engage with her via the book and then to take away the book. 2 gets out of her chair and sheds one of her voluminous garments, getting some reaction out of 4, but nothing conclusively sexual seems to occur. You get the feeling that 1 is in a definite fury, major-sized; 4 makes his way over to 1,lifts her on to the table, where you note that her dark dress is really brown. There is no clear sense that 1 has been had, but there is less struggle than what goes on between 5 and 3 with that book held like a protective sword. 5 manages to wrest the book from 3, takes it over to the table where he ignites it with the candle; a major sound follows. Momentary darkness ensues. Just as you think that's all, folks, the lights go up again; the figures are seen in the positions they possessed at the beginning of the work.

For this and Claude Pascal, Dirk Haubrich's score follows the vogue of clinks, burps, pauses and slinky noises on whatever instrument is believed to reinforce the mood. This accompaniment does not particularly support the dancers, but they seem to be sufficiently rehearsed so that the counts and the tempo are deeply ingrained. What Last Touch conveyed was the extraordinary control the dancers possess of their instruments. The first two pieces seemed to tell the viewer that Kylian is interested in how far can dance go before it is considered non-dance. He echoes the same style that the contemporary Chinese painter Li Hua Yi has undertaken; how dark can black ink studies be and still be discernible as paintings. Interesting, both painter and choreographer are just about the same age.

27' 52" (2001)

Music: Dirk Haubrich, based on two themes of Gustav Mahler
Choreography: Jiri Kylian
Concept Decor: Jiri Kylian
Costume Design: Joke Visser
Lighting Design: Kees Tjebbes

The program lists meticulously the number of hours required to rehearse, build costumes, compose, record, discuss and create production, create the choreography, teach class, give physio therapy to the dancers, assemble the program notes and photographs, stated it took 4,418.75 collective hours to make this production.Then a note states "This work will be performed and viewed in 27 minutes and 52 seconds." All of which, to me, says that making work is a sobering exposition of the labor intensive nature of art. Calculating the list of the hours expended for the 15 activities brought my total to 3608.75. What happened with 810 remaining hours I have no idea, but it does occur to me that the list may have been facetious.

Kylian has chosen a minimalist set with two sets of floor coverings, which are used to wrap or encase dancers in. In contrast to the first two works, 27' 52" is mainly action, usually in couples who frequently are in tension or struggle, the women frequently giving as good as they get, against, between or after texts which include a Baudelaire poem, Bruce Lee and the Dalai Lama. The costuming is regulation nondescript, disguising nothing of the marvelous technical acuity and partnering rapport of the dancers.

One movement device I found recurring is the use of the head as the fulcrum of turning, usually the hands belonging to the men and the head belonging to the women. With the struggle and tension depicted, it seemed an act of faith by the women to permit this; a little less control it could lapse into the lethal. Is Kylian saying something about the feminine universe being controlled by men, as well as sporadic borders to their movement?

Coming out of Zellerbach, I felt I had inhabited, briefly, an entirely different landscape, disturbing, perhaps, but utterly absorbing.