It’s exhausting being a pioneer. You forge ahead, chart new territory and then watch as others follow in the path you have so hard won. You remain visionary but time alters your reputation and relevance. The past week’s dance brought three contrasting cases for consideration and review.
For more than 40 years, Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has been the queen of visionary rigour; her austere remaking of dance has inspired an entire contemporary movement. You don’t necessarily go to a work by her expecting entertainment, but you are likely to emerge provoked.
Over the past year, however, her reputation for creative discipline has been tarnished by complaints from former dancers and staff members of her company Rosas, who said she ran the company in an authoritarian way that had led to bullying and body-shaming. De Keersmaeker has now apologised “to all the people I have disappointed and hurt” and promised a better future. The company has managed to move on.
All of which makes her new piece, Exit Above, with its prescient subtitle, After the Tempest, seem remarkably pertinent. Premiered before the allegations emerged, and touring in the midst of her mea culpa, it feels like a beginning, binding the theoretical elements of her work into something freer and even joyful.
The subtitle contains a pun. Although the piece opens with a quotation from Walter Benjamin’s essay about Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, battered by “a storm blowing from paradise” that hurls “one single catastrophe… at his feet”, it is full of references to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to a sense of magic used and abjured, of paradises lost and broken. Beginning with an astonishing image of a storm, as the hip-hop dancer Solal Mariotte is weightlessly buffeted by unseen forces beneath a sheet of billowing plastic, it feels weighted with anxiety about the planet, yet full of something that seems like hope.
Its ostensible theme is the relationship of walking with dancing, its music is the blues, starting with Robert Johnson’s Walking Blues. The score, a collaboration between the late Jean-Marie Aerts, guitarist and dancer Carlos Garbin and singer Meskerem Mees, is performed live, with Garbin playing guitar and dancing, and Mees singing with piercing clarity at the same time as joining in the moves.
The 13-strong cast are credited as co-creators, and although the coloured lines on the floor are pure De Keersmaeker, representing the geometrical patterns that bind her thinking, the movement develops to incorporate breakdancing and wild bursts of party-style house.
There’s a sense of bubbling chaos; the dancers begin the work in costumes that look like severe breastplates and end it in chiffon and bare chests. At one point they collapse in a heaving, vomiting heap, like so many exhausted ravers. Yet however uninhibited, there is a precision too – a sense of movement being analysed and examined as well as performed. In its willingness to use a different vocabulary to explore its philosophical concerns, Exit Above keeps De Keersmaeker poised on the cutting edge, giving it her own particular sheen.
The street dance collective Flawless seem a million miles from De Keersmaeker’s dance quest, yet they were one of the groups that introduced hip-hop dance into the mainstream when in 2009 they reached the final of Britain’s Got Talent. It was their misfortune that their competitors included another dance troupe, Diversity, who won the overall competition.
Diversity have splintered now but Flawless are still performing, and celebrated their 20th anniversary with Past, Present, Future, a showcase that featured their founder, Marlon “Swoosh” Wallen, and seven of the original all-male crew, alongside the new company, full of women and a lot of child lockers and poppers. The tone was mixed – from the sharp-edged unison of the original to the good-humoured exuberance of the kids, but it was fun to be reminded of Flawless’s part in making hip-hop dance so popular.
Founded by Cassa Pancho in 2001, Ballet Black continues to play a crucial role in creating space for black and brown dancers in ballet. It has helped to reshape the landscape, and the fact that the nine-strong company has five new dancers in its new programme, Heroes, is a sign of the strength in depth it has helped to foster.
The programme itself features a new work by Sophie Laplane, If at First, and Mthuthuzeli November’s The Waiting Game, which both in different ways celebrate the heroism of simple endurance.
If at First is restless and disjointed, as different dancers are gifted a white crown while the soundtrack swerves from Beethoven to electronica. The Waiting Game builds its effects more patiently and is held together by detailed performances from Ebony Thomas as a man in the grip of a crisis, and Isabela Coracy as the voice in his head. Both works are beautifully performed by a company that is always a pleasure to watch.
Star ratings (out of five)
Exit Above ★★★★
Past, Present, Future ★★★
Heroes ★★★
