Both performances deal with detachment in one way or another. In I Solo Ment the man becomes detached from his own self, causing a total isolation from his surrounding. In Flatland detachment from reality pulls the crane dancer into a series of self imposed sufferings. The subject of loss is also addressed in both performances. Similarly, mental disorders play a great role in creating the relationships with a person's surroundings. The style of both dances are unique in terms of movement and when compared against what is currently presented in the Netherlands within this genre. Both dances are strong and evocative in terms of effects and impressions they have on the audience. Overall considered, they are successful examples of works which manage to tell a story in a witty and original way.
I Solo Ment - Ann Van Den Broek
This performance by the Belgian choreographer is an autobiographical journey of coming to terms with the loss of a beloved person. Created in 2008, the show includes songs by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, as well as music created especially for it by Arne Van Dongen. This seventy minute double solo features two dancers: Dario Tortorelli and Cecilia Moisio. There is a subtle word play in the title: I is the person entirely focused on himself, Solo - despite two dancers it ultimately is a solo of an isolated man, Ment - from French "mentir" says the person turns all the relationships around him into a lie. I Solo Ment is a complex work which is best described when split into sections. The sections are marked during the performance by the woman's finger snap that causes change of lighting.
The introductory scene starts with an energetic rock song. There are four large photographer's lamp on tripods, a white square - approximately two by two meters - on the black floor and a projection screen high at the back wall, slightly to the left. This stage design remains throughout the whole piece. A man in a white T-shirt and black trousers, and a woman in black loose shiny dress walk on the stage. He lies down, she kneels by him mourning and preparing his body for burial. She does not touch him but moves his body as if by a magnetic bond, keeping a ten centimetre distance from his body in every move. She does not look at him, or her actions either, but instead stares bluntly in front of herself. This artistic measure is present - with one exception - until the end. It separates the two dancers in time (we will see that more clearly later), thus creating two solos, rather than a duet. Whatever the woman does with, to or after the men, he is never immediately present. Their eyes never meet. This sort of time displacement allows the choreographer to introduce different periods and different women in the man's life: mother, sister, friend, lover, nurse. The woman turns the men's body and lies behind him in an embrace - still not touching. When he gets up and leaves she kneels and cries and continues to nurse his absent body. At some point she stands up and changes the lighting with a snap of her fingers, proceeding to the next scene.
The top lights are full on. While the woman sits back to the audience at the front of the stage, the man is creating space - moves the lamps to the corners and switches them on. In a moment he stops and looks at the audience as if to check if they are paying due attention to him. Now we see the floor divided into a grid of twenty squares, one of them white, on the left side of the stage. There is no music apart from a quiet measured tapping in high tone similar to the sound of a spoon hit against a glass. The man explores the space - walks around, jumps, turns, stops at the edge of the grid, hesitates, is pulled back inside, walks and hesitates, gets ready to run, something stops him, falls and so on. While he continues the woman stands up and walks around the grid to the back of the stage. She changes her clothes into a white T-shirt and black trousers - she and the man are now wearing the same, which may suggest the actress is now playing his sister, after being the mourning and nursing mother. After looking at a large black and white photograph of a face she drops it outside the grid and enters his space, sitting side to the audience. The man is becoming faster and more violent in his movements. He moves the only white square towards her and tapes it to the floor.
Another change of light and the projection screen at the back is on. The music resumes - only instrumental. The man sits on the verge of the white screen and starts writing on it. We can see the projection on the screen at the back. The man seems to be drawing a score of a floor pattern. The woman, sitting as she was, is now behind him and her hand follows in the air the movements of his. She walks to the back of the stage, puts on white high-heels and walks around enacting the score. The man joins her but in a different dimension - they do not seem to be following the same pattern, and they never look at one another.
The lights get stronger and music of tension follows. The man is provoking the audience, standing right in front of them and smiling charmingly, then grinning with scorn, inviting with a move of his palm, just to retract quickly, pulling faces and playing with the audience. The woman crawls behind him trying to reach him, though never looking at the man. She changes her place and continues reaching from different positions. Her silent calls are futile as the man is already becoming closed his own world. By playing with the audience and sudden changes of attitude, the relationships he creates are becoming increasing untrue and unreal.
Finger snap. The woman walks around the stage clapping her hands and the man starts preparing to perform a rock star to the Supernaturally song by Nick Cave. He takes his jacket off and grabs a little container with green body paint - he covers his right ear with the paint. The significance of this may be explained with a quote (the only on the subject I could find) from the website of Mica M. Renes - a classical homoeopath who graduated Academy of Natural Arts of Healing in the Netherlands:
Green ears are labels that are put upon you that are not true, they create a continuous struggle within you. It is a struggle that you have internalized. Just like with other “energies” that you pick up that are not yours, green ears can only be recognized as not yours and released. (...) Green ears are distractions that keep you away from your real knowing and your real values. They are highly confusing and probably the main reasons for anxieties, because the value system of the green ears and your own value system are incompatible.[1]
We hear the recording of cheering audience, while the woman stands at a side clutching the man's jacket close to her chest. She sometimes follows him but never looks away from the audience. However, her look is not directed at the audience, but rather, it is an absent look of a dreamer. Although in his shadow, she seems to be happy and proud of him - his fan, colleague in love, actress, model, dancer or support cast. Suddenly the music stops, the light dim, she stands in the white square and points to her ear, looking at the audience with a grin. The show is over but she can still hear it. She may also (provided the above assumption regarding green ears is what the choreographer had in mind) point to the fact that all the internal struggles and anxieties which disrupt relationships with the world are the projections of our own mind and are acquired from the outside. The man rearranges the lamps so that they split the stage into half and all four lit the women from the left. The space is half smaller - the other side being in the darkness. After a while in silence the woman walks into the dark and falls. Cold blue light is now on her half of the stage and the instrumental music resumes. Simultaneously, she: is standing all tense, suddenly squeezes her stomach and falls repeats that at irregular intervals, trying to put a smile on her face, once on the floor she is rocking frantically to and fro, repeats, falling slowly, falling suddenly; he: writes 'introvert' and 'excuses' on the white square over the previously drawn score, then again rearranges the lamps so that they lit the back wall of the stage.
The following scene slightly changes the direction of the action - the woman starts dealing with her memories by deleting them and creating new ones. This process of coming to terms with the loss and investigating ways of dealing with it will continue until the ultimate hallucination of once again displacing two (or more) different worlds - so real in the mind of the woman that they will become present. In the darkness, with the light only on the white square and the projection screen at the back switched on, the woman is browsing through large black and white photographs. Some of them show a man, some only part of the face, and others show a photographer's studio - reminiscent of the stage design. In the programme notes we can read that the piece was created in memory of Tom Van Den Broek - Ann Van den Broek's late brother, who was - amongst other activities - a photographer. Suddenly the woman casts aside all the photographs and extends her body onto the square. We see her on the projection screen writing 'zyprexa' on her arm. Zyprexa is a medicine used for psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It's functioning is not entirely known and the drug has a very long list of side effects [2]. We can not tell whether it was an indirect cause of death, but surely it must have had enormous influence on the person medicated and people surrounding him - or her. The woman proceeds to wipe the entire white square and gets rid of the photographs in a frenzied rush until she notices the camera above head. She stares at the audience through the projection screen as if realising this was all illusion, a film, a projection. The lights go off with her finger snap.
What follows is a dark account of an outburst of anger in a sound scape of muffled metallic echo. In a typical for Ann Van Den Broek slow-fast and hesitate-pull movement language the woman is falling, crawling, walking fast, suddenly stopping, pulling back. The echo comes closer and changes into banging. The movements become more aggressive. The man walks in backwards, is shaky and deranged, seems to argue and attack someone. The drumming volume increases. The woman falls and runs, looses balance, is pushed by an invisible force as if someone kicked her. They never look at or relate to each other. He slowly disappears in the darkness on the peripheries of the stage, clambering along the walls, secretly watching her. Her movements slow down, she falls once more and does not stand up. The man drags the lamps tightly around the white square, sits on it and wipes the green of his ear. The music wanes slowly.
The long intimacy scene that follows can be seen as the climax of the performance. It is here that for the first and only time the dancers touch. The man however does not seem to be present, despite all the efforts the woman puts into drawing his attention. There is no music. The man is making out with an invisible woman. The physical woman walks in and fits into his movements - the distance between the bodies is still maintained. She leaves the white square, he continues. She returns after a while in a green shirt and high heels and for the first time they embrace passionately. Few moments in, she realizes this must be a fantasy and leaves again. He continues. The music starts, the man proceeds with an intercourse with an invisible woman. The physical woman returns several times, each time with less clothes until she is naked. She slips under him. They do touch and have passionate sex, him being dressed. All the time - whether the woman dancer is there or not - the man stares in front of himself absent-mindedly. The woman, his lover, still can not reach him in his isolation. Her efforts are futile. She once again cries, lying naked on the square.
The projection screen lights and frenzied music follows. The man nervously draws arrows in all directions on the free space on the square. He wipes them and starts again, faster and more chaotic. While he continues, she crawls off the square and walks back and forth outside the brightly lit area. In the meantime she dresses in tight black clothes. The man gets mad drawing on the square until he falls, his hand scribbling something with remains of strength. We see him dying alone, the lights around the square dim.
The top lights bring some brightness over the stage. The woman in very fast pace is performing the initial movement of mourning an preparing the body for the burial. She moves from place to place repeating the same ritual. This time she enacts the last woman taking care of the man - a nurse. The same echo as before resumes, and she goes on from place to place performing nursing on invisible dead bodies. The man lies in the darkness with his hand moving slightly and automatically. He is not totally dead, just a little bit - his body is still functioning but his mind is long gone. His surrounding deemed him dead already. The nurse being the only person who can see that, yet helpless and unable to do anything. She starts loosing balance and falls.
What happens inside the man's head? Is he as dead as he seems to others, or is he so isolated that his loved ones gave up? The light on the square resumes and we see him toddling in place, not even trying to get out of the cage created with bright lamps around the square. He steps nervously around, and rocks back and forth as if in a trance. He could not be more isolated - mentally and physically. The woman is far outside at the opposite corner of the stage. She stares in front of herself and falls. Falls and recovers, rocking, swinging, fast and slow, reaching, mourning - she repeats all her roles in fast forward. The lights fall on her only, showing her pain when she cries and falls racked with pain, squeezes her stomach and falls, stands up and tries to put a smile on her face but suddenly her entire body, every muscle, becomes tense. The scene is very evocative. The music is a mixture of an echo, hospital equipment sounds and beating. She stands and time after time her body becomes tense for longer and the un-tense shorter. She cries and shakes.
In the short epilogue, he stands in the square, touching his hair, seeming not to know what is going on. She switches the laps around him. He is gone.
Flatland - Mor Shani
The Israeli choreographer has been known in The Netherlands since 2007 when he received a scholarship from the ARTD foundation and a residency in Dansateliers Rotterdam. His previous work LuCarmella - on which Flatland indirectly builds - has won numerous prizes and was touring The Netherlands as a part of the DanceClick tour 2011. Flatland is a work in progress, produced by Dansatelires Rotterdam and premiered on the 1st of July 2011 in Rotterdam.
Four men walk on the white floor surrounded with bare walls. They are dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans. One man approaches a yellow music stand with a microphone – the only prop present on the stage. He welcomes the audience and starts telling his story. Three other men stand behind him like personal guides. “It's a story of loss and discovery. It's a journey to the expanses of the human mind” - the words come from the video presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor on TED[3] titled The Stroke of Insight [4]. She talks about a research into her own brain during a stroke when apparently she remained conscious. She had been involved in research motivated by the need to find the difference between the mind of her schizophrenic brother and her own. Her speech is about eighteen minutes long, and its fragments are spoken on the stage for over thirty minutes with intervals, during a forty minute performance. Choreographer Mor Shani said that he received this video in mail and found it funny in its seriousness and pseudo-scientific tone preaching spiritual enlightenment. Initially he incorporated the speech in order to ridicule it. However, Flatland still being a work in progress, he later refuted this motivation, saying it actually deals with a lot of issues he reflects upon in the show. Flatland was inspired by the notion of “spiritual flatland” introduced by Ken Wilber, the author of Integral Theory and a founder of Integral Institute. He claims that although the theories of Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Marx offer complimentary, rather than antagonistic approaches, they create an empty space between the empirical observation (behaviourism and Marxism) and interpretation (psychoanalysis and philosophical hermeneutics). Wilber blames modernity for the too large a focus on the social and behavioural, and for neglecting the aspects of the cultural and the intentional. This “pathology” Wilber calls “spiritual flatland” [5].
The text plays an important part in the performance for it overtakes the initial scene, subordinating the movement to the words. It is interesting to see, among many examples, how the dancers enact "sharing of the tools for not being lonely". Chilled country-rock guitar song starts and the three dancers walk to the back of the stage and face the audience. One of them takes his trousers off. The other two make seducing smiles. They stand there for several minutes while the speaker, standing at the front to the left, scans the audience for reactions. When the music stops, the pant-less man slowly and gently moves towards the audience, with his look into the ground. He goes back and repeats several times. He reminds of a scared fragile wild crane. Suddenly the two dancers standing at the back and the speaker run towards him and knock him down. They kick and punch him violently. He manages to free himself and runs away but the others chase him and continue their attack. It is ironic to think of it as a “strategy for avoiding loneliness”, but as the choreographer commented “being a victim is one of many such strategies”. This scene sets up the disposition for the rest of the show. The crane character – as I will call him from now on – will suffer a lot more unpleasanties due to victimizing himself.
Following the attack, the speaker returns to the microphone and continues the story – the reversed story of Jill Taylor – in his version the sister had a severe mental disorder and a brother scientist. He wonders why he can “make his dreams come true” and “what is it about his healthy brain that his sister does not have”. We can clearly see the choreographer's scorn for this kind of knowledge and for people who fall victims of such sectarian teachings. What is it, that his sister can not connect to reality instead of creating illusion? The answer seems to be one's own voluntary victimization. This however is only one of the many layers and meanings Flatland addresses. The crane dancer walks to the front and opens his arms towards the audience. He is enacting, in a very minimalistic way, the words spoken by the speaker: healthy person being very high and schizophrenic slightly lower, bipolar disorder somewhat twisted. The movements are subtle, witty and funny when juxtaposed with the seriousness of the speech. Representation of “sounds communicated”, “meaning of life”, “bodily chemicals”, “discover of own brain disorder” etc. follow. The dancer bites his hand, stretches the skin on his face revealing teeth and almost trying to tear his face off, stands on his shoulders with the bottom towards the audience and falls. Meanwhile the two other dancers slowly take their trousers off. They start moving in a graceful horse-like trot. “We are brothers and sisters, we are whole and we are perfect” - the dancers form a unit of evenly trotting figures just like horses in the paddock. The crane dancer is at the periphery, trying to fit into the group of stronger animals, occasionally he is even with them, at some point holding hands.
The speaker continues talking while the dancers perform a dressage routine at a horse trails. The connotations are numerous, yet one exhibits strongest – that of people being moulded by the routine and by blind following of instructions without questioning their meaning and value. The dancers come to take the speaker's hands but he does not seem to notice it. He keeps on talking, quite exalted, rising his hands up, all four men stand in a row: “molecules around me, I can just detect this energy”. They form a circle, obscuring the speaker, just to cling to him after a while. He keeps on talking when they lift him lightly off the ground in their collective embrace. “Imagine all of the stresses and strains in your relationships... I feel lighter in my body”. Suddenly his “left hemisphere comes back online” (this phrase is literally taken from the video) and the dancers drop him, move back a step and watch him perplexed while the speaker continues talking about his right arm paralysis... It is extremely entertaining to watch the initial ridicule Mor Shani intended through the actions of truly involved persons in the surroundings of a haunted individual. The most hilarious part of text perhaps comes here when the speaker mocks the original video: “and here I realize I'm having a stroke! Wow! It is so cool!”. We can hear the audience laughing. And it is a brilliant portrayal of nowadays sensational media culture – persons who are not serious or competent enough to appear in public as scientists still find applause at pseudo-scientific spiritually enlightening platform as TED – which incidentally originated at a Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in the '80s. This time all three dancers enact the brain-stroke: they fall, stare, crunch, crawl, twist, reach up, reach down, make contorted poses... The speaker stops talking as if he only noticed them now. He watches carefully, slightly surprised. When two dancers form a couple, he seems to be reflecting on his talk, or life perhaps.
The duo initiated in this moment evolves into a complex reflection on the power struggle within a relationship. The crane dancer is leading the dance and initiating all the movements of his partner. The partner is not looking at the crane dancer. When they hug, it is the crane dancer who clings to his partner and puts his arms around himself. The partner is gently pushing him away but he repeats the forced hug. I mentioned in the beginning of this analysis that the crane dancer set up his image as a victim in the initial scene. It is what follows here that justifies the above statement. Each situation in which the crane dancer is rejected or suffers in some other way is initiated by himself. Mor Shani said this was really the essence of his work – to explore and expose how suffering and loneliness is in fact a result of one's own action. The couple drifts through the bare cold landscape of the stage until the crane dancer falls as if he was pushed away. He then takes his partner's hands and pulls him across the stage with head on his chest. They hug again and walk backwards to the opposite corners of the stage, just to come back and meet in a hug several times in the centre. Here again the embrace is initiated by the crane dancer. The speaker remains silent, with a look directed to the floor and hands in pockets. The third dancer watches the couple.
Suddenly loud music starts and the third dancer enters while the partnering dancer falls. Nothing happens for a while except the dancers biting their own hand. The crane dancer and the third dancer perform mirroring movements over the first partner's motionless body. They pull apart and come close, checking out their other selves. They stand up and and fall synchronically, the lying dancer gets up and walks around watching them. The falling is not violent but soft and rocking as if they were having a lot of fun. The crane dancer engages in a play with the third dancer as a means of evoking jealousy in his partner, who, by the way, does not seem to be touched by the whole situation. He joins the game of falling and rolling until the music stops and they split again.
The speaker continues and the crane dancer and the third dancer re-enact his words. The crane dancer in the front, the third dancer watching him carefully and repeating his movements. The partner dancer stands at the back with his arms raised in praise of some invisible deity, then crawling across the stage in slow motion. “I found myself expanding in the space” and the dancers rip open their chests, “silent euphoria, nirvana” and they touch their stomachs and back of the had at fast pace. “I found nirvana” and the partner dancer raises from the floor, walks across the stage towards the front right, starring into the sky with an enchanted look, the light of glory falls upon his face and he reaches towards it. Fast beat music starts, the speaker preaching about nirvana, all three dancers automatically and at fast pace perform a movement reminding of a samurai reaching to the back for his sword and cutting across his own body. They become frantic and chaotic, traversing the space, the music getting louder and faster in a style of a western movie and a chase across the prairies. They slow down, the music gradually changes into an atmospheric trance and the crane dancer is again coupled with his partner.
The music stops. The partner dancer crouches and the crane dancer sits on his shoulders. He covers the partner's face with his hands, blocking the air flow both through the nose and through the moth. The third dancer watches them and the speaker scans for the reactions of the audience. The scene is long and silent. The partner dancer starts suffocating, we see him struggle in trying to take the crane dancer's hands off his face but to no avail. The third dancer intervenes – he puts his hand on the shoulder of the crane dancer reminding him that this is enough. His hands slide on the crane dancer's neck and clutch tightly. The allegory of this image is that the crane dancer by his intrusiveness suffocates his partner, but that in turn has identical effect on his own self. The scene is very disturbing as we watch the partner dancer struggling for air. He eventually frees himself. The speaker resumes: “so, who are we? We the life force power of the universe”. The third dancer takes the crane dancer by the neck off the shoulders of his partner and puts him next to him.
The partner dancer lies down, the crane dancer holding his thigh, and the third dancer playing with the crane dancer's hair. He and the speaker look at each other and simultaneously walk away and sit at the peripheries of the stage, leaving the couple alone. The intimacy scene begins with the crane dancer slowly, piece by piece, undressing himself and his partner who is starring in front of himself absent-mindedly. He fondles his skin aggressively. The only music are two guitar chords. The crane dancer slips in front of his partner, into his embrace. The partner starts slapping his naked skin leaving red marks. The crane dancer is in pain, his skin becoming all red, yet he holds the embrace of his partner. The speaker returns to the microphone and after a while of consideration says nothing. He leaves. The dancers follow.
Notes
[1] http://www.micarenes.com/greenears.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olanzapine#Side_effects.2C_adverse_reactions
[3] www.ted.com
[4] http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
[5] www.kenwilber.com
This performance by the Belgian choreographer is an autobiographical journey of coming to terms with the loss of a beloved person. Created in 2008, the show includes songs by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, as well as music created especially for it by Arne Van Dongen. This seventy minute double solo features two dancers: Dario Tortorelli and Cecilia Moisio. There is a subtle word play in the title: I is the person entirely focused on himself, Solo - despite two dancers it ultimately is a solo of an isolated man, Ment - from French "mentir" says the person turns all the relationships around him into a lie. I Solo Ment is a complex work which is best described when split into sections. The sections are marked during the performance by the woman's finger snap that causes change of lighting.
The introductory scene starts with an energetic rock song. There are four large photographer's lamp on tripods, a white square - approximately two by two meters - on the black floor and a projection screen high at the back wall, slightly to the left. This stage design remains throughout the whole piece. A man in a white T-shirt and black trousers, and a woman in black loose shiny dress walk on the stage. He lies down, she kneels by him mourning and preparing his body for burial. She does not touch him but moves his body as if by a magnetic bond, keeping a ten centimetre distance from his body in every move. She does not look at him, or her actions either, but instead stares bluntly in front of herself. This artistic measure is present - with one exception - until the end. It separates the two dancers in time (we will see that more clearly later), thus creating two solos, rather than a duet. Whatever the woman does with, to or after the men, he is never immediately present. Their eyes never meet. This sort of time displacement allows the choreographer to introduce different periods and different women in the man's life: mother, sister, friend, lover, nurse. The woman turns the men's body and lies behind him in an embrace - still not touching. When he gets up and leaves she kneels and cries and continues to nurse his absent body. At some point she stands up and changes the lighting with a snap of her fingers, proceeding to the next scene.
The top lights are full on. While the woman sits back to the audience at the front of the stage, the man is creating space - moves the lamps to the corners and switches them on. In a moment he stops and looks at the audience as if to check if they are paying due attention to him. Now we see the floor divided into a grid of twenty squares, one of them white, on the left side of the stage. There is no music apart from a quiet measured tapping in high tone similar to the sound of a spoon hit against a glass. The man explores the space - walks around, jumps, turns, stops at the edge of the grid, hesitates, is pulled back inside, walks and hesitates, gets ready to run, something stops him, falls and so on. While he continues the woman stands up and walks around the grid to the back of the stage. She changes her clothes into a white T-shirt and black trousers - she and the man are now wearing the same, which may suggest the actress is now playing his sister, after being the mourning and nursing mother. After looking at a large black and white photograph of a face she drops it outside the grid and enters his space, sitting side to the audience. The man is becoming faster and more violent in his movements. He moves the only white square towards her and tapes it to the floor.
Another change of light and the projection screen at the back is on. The music resumes - only instrumental. The man sits on the verge of the white screen and starts writing on it. We can see the projection on the screen at the back. The man seems to be drawing a score of a floor pattern. The woman, sitting as she was, is now behind him and her hand follows in the air the movements of his. She walks to the back of the stage, puts on white high-heels and walks around enacting the score. The man joins her but in a different dimension - they do not seem to be following the same pattern, and they never look at one another.
The lights get stronger and music of tension follows. The man is provoking the audience, standing right in front of them and smiling charmingly, then grinning with scorn, inviting with a move of his palm, just to retract quickly, pulling faces and playing with the audience. The woman crawls behind him trying to reach him, though never looking at the man. She changes her place and continues reaching from different positions. Her silent calls are futile as the man is already becoming closed his own world. By playing with the audience and sudden changes of attitude, the relationships he creates are becoming increasing untrue and unreal.
Finger snap. The woman walks around the stage clapping her hands and the man starts preparing to perform a rock star to the Supernaturally song by Nick Cave. He takes his jacket off and grabs a little container with green body paint - he covers his right ear with the paint. The significance of this may be explained with a quote (the only on the subject I could find) from the website of Mica M. Renes - a classical homoeopath who graduated Academy of Natural Arts of Healing in the Netherlands:
Green ears are labels that are put upon you that are not true, they create a continuous struggle within you. It is a struggle that you have internalized. Just like with other “energies” that you pick up that are not yours, green ears can only be recognized as not yours and released. (...) Green ears are distractions that keep you away from your real knowing and your real values. They are highly confusing and probably the main reasons for anxieties, because the value system of the green ears and your own value system are incompatible.[1]
We hear the recording of cheering audience, while the woman stands at a side clutching the man's jacket close to her chest. She sometimes follows him but never looks away from the audience. However, her look is not directed at the audience, but rather, it is an absent look of a dreamer. Although in his shadow, she seems to be happy and proud of him - his fan, colleague in love, actress, model, dancer or support cast. Suddenly the music stops, the light dim, she stands in the white square and points to her ear, looking at the audience with a grin. The show is over but she can still hear it. She may also (provided the above assumption regarding green ears is what the choreographer had in mind) point to the fact that all the internal struggles and anxieties which disrupt relationships with the world are the projections of our own mind and are acquired from the outside. The man rearranges the lamps so that they split the stage into half and all four lit the women from the left. The space is half smaller - the other side being in the darkness. After a while in silence the woman walks into the dark and falls. Cold blue light is now on her half of the stage and the instrumental music resumes. Simultaneously, she: is standing all tense, suddenly squeezes her stomach and falls repeats that at irregular intervals, trying to put a smile on her face, once on the floor she is rocking frantically to and fro, repeats, falling slowly, falling suddenly; he: writes 'introvert' and 'excuses' on the white square over the previously drawn score, then again rearranges the lamps so that they lit the back wall of the stage.
The following scene slightly changes the direction of the action - the woman starts dealing with her memories by deleting them and creating new ones. This process of coming to terms with the loss and investigating ways of dealing with it will continue until the ultimate hallucination of once again displacing two (or more) different worlds - so real in the mind of the woman that they will become present. In the darkness, with the light only on the white square and the projection screen at the back switched on, the woman is browsing through large black and white photographs. Some of them show a man, some only part of the face, and others show a photographer's studio - reminiscent of the stage design. In the programme notes we can read that the piece was created in memory of Tom Van Den Broek - Ann Van den Broek's late brother, who was - amongst other activities - a photographer. Suddenly the woman casts aside all the photographs and extends her body onto the square. We see her on the projection screen writing 'zyprexa' on her arm. Zyprexa is a medicine used for psychotic conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. It's functioning is not entirely known and the drug has a very long list of side effects [2]. We can not tell whether it was an indirect cause of death, but surely it must have had enormous influence on the person medicated and people surrounding him - or her. The woman proceeds to wipe the entire white square and gets rid of the photographs in a frenzied rush until she notices the camera above head. She stares at the audience through the projection screen as if realising this was all illusion, a film, a projection. The lights go off with her finger snap.
What follows is a dark account of an outburst of anger in a sound scape of muffled metallic echo. In a typical for Ann Van Den Broek slow-fast and hesitate-pull movement language the woman is falling, crawling, walking fast, suddenly stopping, pulling back. The echo comes closer and changes into banging. The movements become more aggressive. The man walks in backwards, is shaky and deranged, seems to argue and attack someone. The drumming volume increases. The woman falls and runs, looses balance, is pushed by an invisible force as if someone kicked her. They never look at or relate to each other. He slowly disappears in the darkness on the peripheries of the stage, clambering along the walls, secretly watching her. Her movements slow down, she falls once more and does not stand up. The man drags the lamps tightly around the white square, sits on it and wipes the green of his ear. The music wanes slowly.
The long intimacy scene that follows can be seen as the climax of the performance. It is here that for the first and only time the dancers touch. The man however does not seem to be present, despite all the efforts the woman puts into drawing his attention. There is no music. The man is making out with an invisible woman. The physical woman walks in and fits into his movements - the distance between the bodies is still maintained. She leaves the white square, he continues. She returns after a while in a green shirt and high heels and for the first time they embrace passionately. Few moments in, she realizes this must be a fantasy and leaves again. He continues. The music starts, the man proceeds with an intercourse with an invisible woman. The physical woman returns several times, each time with less clothes until she is naked. She slips under him. They do touch and have passionate sex, him being dressed. All the time - whether the woman dancer is there or not - the man stares in front of himself absent-mindedly. The woman, his lover, still can not reach him in his isolation. Her efforts are futile. She once again cries, lying naked on the square.
The projection screen lights and frenzied music follows. The man nervously draws arrows in all directions on the free space on the square. He wipes them and starts again, faster and more chaotic. While he continues, she crawls off the square and walks back and forth outside the brightly lit area. In the meantime she dresses in tight black clothes. The man gets mad drawing on the square until he falls, his hand scribbling something with remains of strength. We see him dying alone, the lights around the square dim.
The top lights bring some brightness over the stage. The woman in very fast pace is performing the initial movement of mourning an preparing the body for the burial. She moves from place to place repeating the same ritual. This time she enacts the last woman taking care of the man - a nurse. The same echo as before resumes, and she goes on from place to place performing nursing on invisible dead bodies. The man lies in the darkness with his hand moving slightly and automatically. He is not totally dead, just a little bit - his body is still functioning but his mind is long gone. His surrounding deemed him dead already. The nurse being the only person who can see that, yet helpless and unable to do anything. She starts loosing balance and falls.
What happens inside the man's head? Is he as dead as he seems to others, or is he so isolated that his loved ones gave up? The light on the square resumes and we see him toddling in place, not even trying to get out of the cage created with bright lamps around the square. He steps nervously around, and rocks back and forth as if in a trance. He could not be more isolated - mentally and physically. The woman is far outside at the opposite corner of the stage. She stares in front of herself and falls. Falls and recovers, rocking, swinging, fast and slow, reaching, mourning - she repeats all her roles in fast forward. The lights fall on her only, showing her pain when she cries and falls racked with pain, squeezes her stomach and falls, stands up and tries to put a smile on her face but suddenly her entire body, every muscle, becomes tense. The scene is very evocative. The music is a mixture of an echo, hospital equipment sounds and beating. She stands and time after time her body becomes tense for longer and the un-tense shorter. She cries and shakes.
In the short epilogue, he stands in the square, touching his hair, seeming not to know what is going on. She switches the laps around him. He is gone.
Flatland - Mor Shani
The Israeli choreographer has been known in The Netherlands since 2007 when he received a scholarship from the ARTD foundation and a residency in Dansateliers Rotterdam. His previous work LuCarmella - on which Flatland indirectly builds - has won numerous prizes and was touring The Netherlands as a part of the DanceClick tour 2011. Flatland is a work in progress, produced by Dansatelires Rotterdam and premiered on the 1st of July 2011 in Rotterdam.
Four men walk on the white floor surrounded with bare walls. They are dressed casually in T-shirts and jeans. One man approaches a yellow music stand with a microphone – the only prop present on the stage. He welcomes the audience and starts telling his story. Three other men stand behind him like personal guides. “It's a story of loss and discovery. It's a journey to the expanses of the human mind” - the words come from the video presentation by Jill Bolte Taylor on TED[3] titled The Stroke of Insight [4]. She talks about a research into her own brain during a stroke when apparently she remained conscious. She had been involved in research motivated by the need to find the difference between the mind of her schizophrenic brother and her own. Her speech is about eighteen minutes long, and its fragments are spoken on the stage for over thirty minutes with intervals, during a forty minute performance. Choreographer Mor Shani said that he received this video in mail and found it funny in its seriousness and pseudo-scientific tone preaching spiritual enlightenment. Initially he incorporated the speech in order to ridicule it. However, Flatland still being a work in progress, he later refuted this motivation, saying it actually deals with a lot of issues he reflects upon in the show. Flatland was inspired by the notion of “spiritual flatland” introduced by Ken Wilber, the author of Integral Theory and a founder of Integral Institute. He claims that although the theories of Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Karl Marx offer complimentary, rather than antagonistic approaches, they create an empty space between the empirical observation (behaviourism and Marxism) and interpretation (psychoanalysis and philosophical hermeneutics). Wilber blames modernity for the too large a focus on the social and behavioural, and for neglecting the aspects of the cultural and the intentional. This “pathology” Wilber calls “spiritual flatland” [5].
The text plays an important part in the performance for it overtakes the initial scene, subordinating the movement to the words. It is interesting to see, among many examples, how the dancers enact "sharing of the tools for not being lonely". Chilled country-rock guitar song starts and the three dancers walk to the back of the stage and face the audience. One of them takes his trousers off. The other two make seducing smiles. They stand there for several minutes while the speaker, standing at the front to the left, scans the audience for reactions. When the music stops, the pant-less man slowly and gently moves towards the audience, with his look into the ground. He goes back and repeats several times. He reminds of a scared fragile wild crane. Suddenly the two dancers standing at the back and the speaker run towards him and knock him down. They kick and punch him violently. He manages to free himself and runs away but the others chase him and continue their attack. It is ironic to think of it as a “strategy for avoiding loneliness”, but as the choreographer commented “being a victim is one of many such strategies”. This scene sets up the disposition for the rest of the show. The crane character – as I will call him from now on – will suffer a lot more unpleasanties due to victimizing himself.
Following the attack, the speaker returns to the microphone and continues the story – the reversed story of Jill Taylor – in his version the sister had a severe mental disorder and a brother scientist. He wonders why he can “make his dreams come true” and “what is it about his healthy brain that his sister does not have”. We can clearly see the choreographer's scorn for this kind of knowledge and for people who fall victims of such sectarian teachings. What is it, that his sister can not connect to reality instead of creating illusion? The answer seems to be one's own voluntary victimization. This however is only one of the many layers and meanings Flatland addresses. The crane dancer walks to the front and opens his arms towards the audience. He is enacting, in a very minimalistic way, the words spoken by the speaker: healthy person being very high and schizophrenic slightly lower, bipolar disorder somewhat twisted. The movements are subtle, witty and funny when juxtaposed with the seriousness of the speech. Representation of “sounds communicated”, “meaning of life”, “bodily chemicals”, “discover of own brain disorder” etc. follow. The dancer bites his hand, stretches the skin on his face revealing teeth and almost trying to tear his face off, stands on his shoulders with the bottom towards the audience and falls. Meanwhile the two other dancers slowly take their trousers off. They start moving in a graceful horse-like trot. “We are brothers and sisters, we are whole and we are perfect” - the dancers form a unit of evenly trotting figures just like horses in the paddock. The crane dancer is at the periphery, trying to fit into the group of stronger animals, occasionally he is even with them, at some point holding hands.
The speaker continues talking while the dancers perform a dressage routine at a horse trails. The connotations are numerous, yet one exhibits strongest – that of people being moulded by the routine and by blind following of instructions without questioning their meaning and value. The dancers come to take the speaker's hands but he does not seem to notice it. He keeps on talking, quite exalted, rising his hands up, all four men stand in a row: “molecules around me, I can just detect this energy”. They form a circle, obscuring the speaker, just to cling to him after a while. He keeps on talking when they lift him lightly off the ground in their collective embrace. “Imagine all of the stresses and strains in your relationships... I feel lighter in my body”. Suddenly his “left hemisphere comes back online” (this phrase is literally taken from the video) and the dancers drop him, move back a step and watch him perplexed while the speaker continues talking about his right arm paralysis... It is extremely entertaining to watch the initial ridicule Mor Shani intended through the actions of truly involved persons in the surroundings of a haunted individual. The most hilarious part of text perhaps comes here when the speaker mocks the original video: “and here I realize I'm having a stroke! Wow! It is so cool!”. We can hear the audience laughing. And it is a brilliant portrayal of nowadays sensational media culture – persons who are not serious or competent enough to appear in public as scientists still find applause at pseudo-scientific spiritually enlightening platform as TED – which incidentally originated at a Technology, Entertainment, Design Conference in the '80s. This time all three dancers enact the brain-stroke: they fall, stare, crunch, crawl, twist, reach up, reach down, make contorted poses... The speaker stops talking as if he only noticed them now. He watches carefully, slightly surprised. When two dancers form a couple, he seems to be reflecting on his talk, or life perhaps.
The duo initiated in this moment evolves into a complex reflection on the power struggle within a relationship. The crane dancer is leading the dance and initiating all the movements of his partner. The partner is not looking at the crane dancer. When they hug, it is the crane dancer who clings to his partner and puts his arms around himself. The partner is gently pushing him away but he repeats the forced hug. I mentioned in the beginning of this analysis that the crane dancer set up his image as a victim in the initial scene. It is what follows here that justifies the above statement. Each situation in which the crane dancer is rejected or suffers in some other way is initiated by himself. Mor Shani said this was really the essence of his work – to explore and expose how suffering and loneliness is in fact a result of one's own action. The couple drifts through the bare cold landscape of the stage until the crane dancer falls as if he was pushed away. He then takes his partner's hands and pulls him across the stage with head on his chest. They hug again and walk backwards to the opposite corners of the stage, just to come back and meet in a hug several times in the centre. Here again the embrace is initiated by the crane dancer. The speaker remains silent, with a look directed to the floor and hands in pockets. The third dancer watches the couple.
Suddenly loud music starts and the third dancer enters while the partnering dancer falls. Nothing happens for a while except the dancers biting their own hand. The crane dancer and the third dancer perform mirroring movements over the first partner's motionless body. They pull apart and come close, checking out their other selves. They stand up and and fall synchronically, the lying dancer gets up and walks around watching them. The falling is not violent but soft and rocking as if they were having a lot of fun. The crane dancer engages in a play with the third dancer as a means of evoking jealousy in his partner, who, by the way, does not seem to be touched by the whole situation. He joins the game of falling and rolling until the music stops and they split again.
The speaker continues and the crane dancer and the third dancer re-enact his words. The crane dancer in the front, the third dancer watching him carefully and repeating his movements. The partner dancer stands at the back with his arms raised in praise of some invisible deity, then crawling across the stage in slow motion. “I found myself expanding in the space” and the dancers rip open their chests, “silent euphoria, nirvana” and they touch their stomachs and back of the had at fast pace. “I found nirvana” and the partner dancer raises from the floor, walks across the stage towards the front right, starring into the sky with an enchanted look, the light of glory falls upon his face and he reaches towards it. Fast beat music starts, the speaker preaching about nirvana, all three dancers automatically and at fast pace perform a movement reminding of a samurai reaching to the back for his sword and cutting across his own body. They become frantic and chaotic, traversing the space, the music getting louder and faster in a style of a western movie and a chase across the prairies. They slow down, the music gradually changes into an atmospheric trance and the crane dancer is again coupled with his partner.
The music stops. The partner dancer crouches and the crane dancer sits on his shoulders. He covers the partner's face with his hands, blocking the air flow both through the nose and through the moth. The third dancer watches them and the speaker scans for the reactions of the audience. The scene is long and silent. The partner dancer starts suffocating, we see him struggle in trying to take the crane dancer's hands off his face but to no avail. The third dancer intervenes – he puts his hand on the shoulder of the crane dancer reminding him that this is enough. His hands slide on the crane dancer's neck and clutch tightly. The allegory of this image is that the crane dancer by his intrusiveness suffocates his partner, but that in turn has identical effect on his own self. The scene is very disturbing as we watch the partner dancer struggling for air. He eventually frees himself. The speaker resumes: “so, who are we? We the life force power of the universe”. The third dancer takes the crane dancer by the neck off the shoulders of his partner and puts him next to him.
The partner dancer lies down, the crane dancer holding his thigh, and the third dancer playing with the crane dancer's hair. He and the speaker look at each other and simultaneously walk away and sit at the peripheries of the stage, leaving the couple alone. The intimacy scene begins with the crane dancer slowly, piece by piece, undressing himself and his partner who is starring in front of himself absent-mindedly. He fondles his skin aggressively. The only music are two guitar chords. The crane dancer slips in front of his partner, into his embrace. The partner starts slapping his naked skin leaving red marks. The crane dancer is in pain, his skin becoming all red, yet he holds the embrace of his partner. The speaker returns to the microphone and after a while of consideration says nothing. He leaves. The dancers follow.
Notes
[1] http://www.micarenes.com/greenears.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olanzapine#Side_effects.2C_adverse_reactions
[3] www.ted.com
[4] http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
[5] www.kenwilber.com