It wasn’t easy to get going again after I have settled into my couch after dinner; but I had to get up, have a quick shower and head out again: I had a date with culture. The streets of New Town were quiet as usual, and I popped into Café Centro for a quick pick-me-up espresso macchiato. While the café owner is indeed Italian, the staff is mainly Polish, so I can have amusing tri-lingual conversations with Rai Uno in the background; and they’re not a chain store, which is a Good Thing. However, this cultural medley means that drinking espresso at the counter is a no-no: to go or table only. It’s nice to be waited on, but it does make you settle. When I got back to Princes Street and cast a quick look at the clock atop the Balmoral, it was quarter past seven. Fifteen minutes to go until the beginning of the performance, and I did not even know where the theatre was!
The centre of Edinburgh is, fortunately, really quite small, and some minutes of power-walking later I was in front of the glass façade of the Fringe Theatre. The body of the building is not very inspiring, it could be a multi-screen cinema or a shopping mall. The inside, however, is renovated, but old fashioned. Stainless steel and glass don’t make it beyond the doors of the auditorium. In fact, the inside took me by surprise – it was so much like the local theatre in my little town back in Poland, for a second I felt I as if had travelled back in time. Gold-painted plaster decorations, art-nouveau inspired lamps, the red, plush curtain, and the general feeling of dusty grandeur. The carpets were balding in the centre, and between the seats the wood of the floorboards was showing from below the peeling paint, perhaps a sign of many enthusiastic applauses when you feel your hands are not enough and you have to stamp your feet too. It felt small and homely, while I was prepared for the immense scale of Saddler’s Wells theatre were I used to go to watch dance shows in London. The scale of the place had one important plus – I was much closer to the scene then would have ever been possible for just 20 pounds in London, and if t weren’t for the rather tall lady in front of me, my mid-row seat would have been perfect.
I came to watch a performance by Rambert Dance Company; I had done very little research before buying the tickets, so I was not quite sure what to expect. I knew the school was famous, and I was looking forward to finding out exactly why.
The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, and a nigh-time scene was revealed, with a group of six dancers, a family, walking under a starry sky. It begun. The group broke up into individuals, couples, then became a group again, only to break up, and kept moving like this, in continuation, like a flock of birds, or a wave. The theatre interior, and everything else, slipped from my mind as I struggled to keep up, on the one hand trying to appreciate the choreography of the whole group, on the other constantly drawn to wonderful detail of each dancer’s performance. There were two daughters, two sons, a mother and a father, and in the hypnotising plaiting and unplaiting of the group the individual relationships were played out – the three women caressing one another’s faces in passing, the father picking up the youngest daughter like a baby, the parents strong embrace and quick parting. They were settling down to sleep, and the rest of the night was to be spent on individual performances. Each character told their story, and others would wake up and join in, and then take over, until, at dawn, the whole family was in dance together again.
The complexity was amazing, and the movement… The father picks up the daughter, and makes her seem light as a feather as she floats down again easily, over his arm and down his back, escaping. The father and mother dance a dance of worry and wanting, and their feet barely touch the ground. Each movement is precise, muscles tense, making them seem like moving statues, as if it were a slide show, each slide a perfectly staged photograph. When the curtain drops I buy the programme, and find out this piece is called Hush.
Seeing and being seen at break time.
After a break we settle back again, and it’s time for the main piece of the evening, The Comedy of Change. It is a celebration of the Darwinian theory of evolution, I read, and the movements are inspired by the dance of birds. The scene is black and empty, apart from pupa-like pods scattered around the floor. Slowly and painfully, like insects, the dancers emerge from their shells. They are all dressed in skin-tight lycra suits, black at the back, white at the front, like fish. The music is difficult, abstract, with rhythms hidden below layers of random notes and high-pitched sounds. To this, the dancers begin to display. They flash their white bellies and dance briefly in the spotlight, and then turn around and blend into the darkness again. It is well performed, and I can see what they’re doing, but it is very alien and abstract and I find it difficult to feel with the dancers as I did in the previous part. It is, indeed, like watching a display; and then there is a moment which makes it all come together, when a few of the dancers pair up to mate. Slow, gravity-defying entangling makes them seem like sea creatures. Grabbing one another tight, tumbling slowly, they blend into the dark and disappear from view.
The costumes make it possible to really focus on the bodies of the dancers, and I see how incredibly athletic they are. Each muscle is well-defined, each tendon visible. The dancers come in all shapes and sizes, and ages. They are very dissimilar, it is nothing like watching a ballet, where each performer seems an exact copy of the other – here there is a great diversity. A tiny South-American girl next to a thin blond woman, next to a stocky young man with a shock of red curls, next to a statuesque black man. There is one thing they all have in common, something about the way they are built. They all started out with normal bodies, like mine and yours – but now they are fleshed out to the maximum, each muscle worked to perfection. They are there a hundred percent. Where you and I have a muscle, they have a line of pure steel. It is fascinating to watch, because they are not in-human, they are not overtly thin or bulky, they are just – fulfilled.
Comparing notes at break time.
There is another break, and then the final piece of the night. I feel a bit dozy and distracted after the last performance, so the beginning of this one nearly throws me out of my chair. Lights on. All the dancers of the school are on the scene, men standing with silver collars around their necks, blinding the public with reflected light as they – shout at us! The female dancers are sitting in the middle of the floor, and they too shout – no, bark – rhythmically at the public. For a few shocked seconds, I just freeze. Then the rest of the lights come on, and the Rambert orchestra becomes visible – they are sitting on a platform above and behind the dance floor, and are performing live, wild, percussion-heavy music.
Forget Rio, for the next twenty minutes the theatre is the carnival. The performance is exhilarating. Waves upon waves of dancers clash into one another and bounce back, and then run out of the scene to make space for smaller groups to appear. They taunt one another, laugh and shout and show off, moving the performance straight into the streets of Cuba, of Rio – men and women parade their bodies and their skills, jump and twist and laugh out for the joy of movement. The last scene is a flurry of bodies as all the dancers perform together, my heart jumps, the tips of my fingers send off little sparkles, my head swims, and then it’s over, they stand in silence, apart from one dancer, still in the spotlight, unable to stop, continues to jump high into the air, up and down, and shout for more. We emerge back into reality, and it’s a rebirth.
No comments:
Post a Comment