Programme including Hambre (Compañia LA), The Canon for Duet (Chisato Minamimura Dance Company), Beautiful Dance (Albert Quesada and Vera Tussing), Illuminate Georgia (Helga Stromberger/Vilas Con Krilas)
The ROH2 Firsts project uses the Linbury Studio as a lab rat for what works, what’s new, which elements of performance can and cannot be forsaken. Firsts 2008 is billed as a synthesis of film, dance, music, theatre$$s$$ the ‘incorporation’, the bringing into the body of these disparate elements.
The curation of the season – the second programme at least – calls into question the nature of physical theatre. Wikipedia gives a generalised definition as any performance inclusive of mime, contemporary dance, clowning, puppetry and/or theatrical acrobatics. For me, this is not enough. Specific to physical theatre is the use of both the body and the performance space in a new and alarmingly unexpected way. The intensity of engagement resonates with risk and drama. It is dynamic, bold, powerful, dark. There is no space for the dropping away of focus, no space for pretence or routine. Physical theatre for me is a total, identity-sucking embodiment of a performance concept, a realisation through which the artist in their everyday skin has no voice, is reduced to an empty husk, a puppeting of the human form by a looming, monstrous, fantastical idea.
This is a tall order for a showcase platform of young and emerging talent. Fresh creative ideas in our current climate are a rarity. Everything’s been done, everything is derivative. These might well have been “new artists, new audiences”, but I challenge the labeling of this curation as either really new art or as physical theatre in its truest kernel.
My general sense was of disengagement with the aural plane. Of the first three pieces, two were essentially danced in silence and the third suffered severe lapses between a sequence of tandem juggling routines. The reasons for the silence were noble. The Canon for Duet “explored visual sound from a deaf perspective”, projecting a flickering and fluctuating graph of musical meter as a substitute for a soundtrack. Beautiful Dance gave a rendition of Beethoven’s Sonata No.13 but “set for a new instrument, the body”, notational aspects of the musical score directly translated into and replaced by short, taut physical gestures. Although both of these works were physically energised, mentally focussed and comprised multiple layers of visual understanding, I could not help but feel that the internal motor had dropped out and with it, the sense of generic fusion as they reverted to being merely dance ideas.
The most vibrant and autonomous work of the evening was Helga Stromberger’s Illuminate Georgia. With its murmuring, hyperflexed human marionettes as a three-dimensional dynamic canvas, the piece used abstract digital imagery in a remarkable and surprising way, so as to genuinely “sculpt the human body with light”. Glowing heat spots, bleeding whirlpools and ultrasound clips were projected onto unusually posed organic forms on a dark stage, naked, limbs protruding. Driven by a pulsating soundtrack which thankfully sustained both rhythmic and metric momentum, the result was spooky, unearthly, very Blair Witch.
As an experimental cabaret, Firsts is a valuable opportunity to allow emerging companies access to a central London venue. However, physical theatre is by necessity a poignant, terrifying, exhilarating genre which, to my mind, encapsulates only the very upper echelon of hybrid performance. Edinburgh’s Aurora Nova and London’s International Mime Festival set the international standard to which there is no second tier. Physical theatre as a genre hinges on total authenticity: there can be no less than a five-star performance.
ROH2
14 November 2008 to 22 November 2008
Linbury Studio, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9DD
Next 2 Performances
Fri 21 Nov 2008, 7:45 PM Buy Now
Sat 22 Nov 2008, 7:45 PM Buy Now
