PERFORATIONS FESTIVAL
DUBROVNIK & ZAGREB
24-30 SEPTEMBER 2009

Should anyone invite you to Dubrovnik , drop everything and go!  What an amazing city; it combines a long and troubled history with stunning architecture and the surrounding sea.  The complexity of such a combination is mind boggling.  Looking through a book on the 1990’s war with photos of massive destruction, it is hard to believe that, not 20 years later, thousands of tourists get off cruise ships each morning and fill the streets with shoppers.

Organised by Zvonomir Dobrovic, the founder of the ground-breaking festival, Queer Zagreb, this first Perforations Festival included theatre, dance and performance art from Bulgaria, Serbia, Slovenia and Macedonia, as well as Croatia.  The first three days took place in Dubrovnik, the next three in Zagreb.  There is a strong conceptual streak in contemporary visual art as well as performing arts in the region and the borders between the genres are quite fluid.  Siniša Labrović is one such conceptual artist whose work is often critical of today’s culture.  His work, Perpetuum Mobile, posits that the body is a self-sustainable unit.  This is illustrated, for 15 minutes, by the expulsion and ingestion of his own urine.  This was, hands down, the most radical of the performances we saw, an especially tough one for my jet-lagged American colleagues sitting in the front row.

Via Negativa is a Slovenian theatre company that, over the past several years, has been working on a series of performances investigating the seven deadly sins.  One piece incorporates the role of the dead rabbit from Joseph Beuys’ first exhibition, another involves a rhythmic game with knives in which the hands of the two performers are nicked, leaving bloody traces.

Branko Brezovec , a pioneer of Croatian theatre from the 1970’s, founded the theatre group Coccolemocco at the age of 15.  So So, a co-production with the French Compagnie des Loups, was performed in a penthouse hotel suite in Cavtat, south of Dubrovnik on the border of Montenegro.  Three actors, speaking in French and Croatian, engage in mysterious and portentous behaviours.  The full moon, setting into the sea, added an ineffable element of décor.

Dance artists included Dalija Aćin from Serbia whose work, Duets/Meet the Expectations involved individual audience members entering a performance area with the choreographer which was visible from the viewing area but acoustically isolated.  I was only able to stay long enough to watch two of these encounters, in both of which the pair conversed but never moved.  BADco., from Croatia, presented a work entitled The League of Time.  A “mad” scientist filled blackboards with endless equations while two women seemed to chase futurist possibilities, bounding in and out of the space, “flying” on a ladder etc.

The Slovenian choreographer Mala Kline showed a work in progress, The End, “a game piece” somewhat inspired by Artaud.  Trying on, trying out characters to see what we, the audience, wanted, she became more and more frantic but never quite found her answer.
Ivo Dimčev is a Bulgarian choreographer whose solo, Lili Handel, has toured widely.  In Dubrovnik, he presented that solo plus Paris, created for Christian Bakalov, a fellow Bulgarian dancer currently based in that city.  An extreme performance, Bakalov’s tasks involve both the painful (hopping on his knees) and the risky (slip-sliding on a painted – or bloody –floor).  A poignant portrait emerges of the anger and humiliation one experiences as an immigrant.  A happy substitution for a company that had to cancel was the young Macedonian choreographer Kire Miladinoski who presented One Way Inside, a short solo and a duet with Ana Josifovska.  His vocabulary Is very personal and I hope to see more of his work.

The schedule was intense, with performances starting from 7pm and going until after midnight.  But this gave us day time to see the islands off the coast of Dubrovnik and swim in the sea – a great bonus.  Heading back to the hotel at 1:30am one night also gave us the incredible opportunity to see the main street empty.  Five stars!

VENTANA DE DANZA MADRILEÑA
17-20 SEPTEMBER

This “Window on Madrid Dance” was organised by the Madrid Regional Government to showcase 20 works – both full works and excerpts - by Madrid’s dance companies over four days.  The second edition of this biennial event, the performances and studio showings took place in the new Canal Theatres and the Canal Dance Centre (with nine studios!).  About 70 programmers and professionals were in attendance, 18 of them from outside Spain – from as near as Portugal and as far away as Egypt.

The work covered a very broad range from traditional Spanish and “new flamenco” to experimental, from children’s work and family events to ballet.  But no matter what the genre, an intensive energy permeated every performance.  The commitment of the dancers and musicians was wholehearted and their technical skills were, across the board, more than equal to the choreography’s requirements.

The event was an excellent introduction to the work being created in the Region of Madrid, which is less well known internationally than the work from Catalunya – primarily from the city of Barcelona – which seems to tour more widely.  Madrid’s contemporary artists include Pedro Berdayes and Chevi Muraday, who have been working for many years, and Daniel Abreu and Janet Novàs, relative newcomers.  All these artists incorporate strong visual imagery in their work.  Prominent flamenco artists included Aída Gómez and Antonio Najarro, both of whom have a stage presence that singes everyone in the house.  Both Najarro and Cruceta Flamenco, a newer company, add jazz musicians to their ensembles.  Ballet de la Comunidad de Madrid – Compañia Victor Ullate comprises a host of well-trained young dancers who revel in the partnering and split second timing of contemporary ballet.

Ana Cabo, Mar López and Fanny Skouvari, the organisers, were indefatigably cheerful and kept us on schedule from morning through night.  Fortunately, they included long lunches and late dinners to keep our energy up!  Saturday night of this weekend was Noche Blanca, or White Night, and there was, I’m told, dancing in the streets till the wee hours!

TANZ IM AUGUST
21-23 AUGUST

After arriving, I found my way to UferHallen, a rehearsal studio north of the city.  The U-Bahn is fairly decipherable, even for a non-German speaker, and I had good directions and a Google map.  A pair of U.S. artists, Mark Coniglio and Dawn Stoppielo, was working on their new creation, Loop Diver, a piece that would open in October at the University of Nebraska’s Lied Center.  Since Mark has moved to Berlin, they were finding it more efficient and less expensive to work in Europe.  As Mark’s contribution of media and sets was not yet in place, it was a good challenge to imagine those visual elements behind the looping choreographic material.

From there we went, in a smashing thunderstorm, to the HAU (an amalgamation of several theaters on the banks of the River Ufer, anchored by the Hebbel am Ufer) to see Parades & Changes, Replays, a re-interpretation of Anna Halprin’s pioneering 1965 work, Parades & Changes.  Directed by French choreographer Anne Collod, the work features an international cast.  Although not an exact imitation of the original work, the cast traveled to Halprin’s northern California studio (designed by her husband, Lawrence Halprin, the renowned landscape architect who died on 25 October), for her approval of the props and the working concepts.  Comparing this version to an archival film I’ve seen, the 21st century performance is much more polished and presentational but retains a fundamental honesty that was greatly appreciated by the audience.

David Zambrano’s Shock* was presented at Radialsystem V, a space that is the home of Sasha Waltz & Guests but, as a privately funded space, is also regularly rented out for meetings and conferences.  Set on the River Spree, the building was one of the old water pumping stations of Berlin.

While similar in vocabulary to Soul Project (seen at DDF 09), Shock takes place onstage, on a white floor, and is set to Requiems by Mozart and Vivaldi as well as Elvis Presley’s “Love Me Tender”.  This piece, for an all male cast, is structured into duets which appear highly competitive and somewhat aggressive.  Even from the more standard point of view of a seated audience, in contrast to walking among the dancers as we did for Soul Project, their energy is palpable.

*Shock was not a Tanz im August presentation.

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day and I couldn’t resist taking a boat ride on the River Spree.  Undeniably for the tourist, it nonetheless offered a new perspective on the city.

A somewhat different view of the Bode Museum.

The Akademie der Kunste is semi-hidden in the Tiergarten, a large and lush garden in the middle of the city.  Accords, a piece by Thomas Hauert, a Swiss choreographer based in Brussels, was presented in the Akademie’s theatre.  In this work, set to a wide-ranging musical collage, the highly skilled cast of seven dancers follows a score of improvisational tasks, primarily focused on following the leader.  In duets and with the full cast, the dancers try to keep up with whomever leads for a particular period of time.  The results are often comical, occasionally inspired and wholly delightful.

There was much more work to be seen in the following days, including The Song by Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and this summer’s festival favourite, the Spanish flamenco dancer Israel Galvan.   But Dublin, and other festivals beyond, called.  Hopefully, I’ll be back in Berlin before another ten years go by.

Laurie will be attending the 14th meeting of the Aerowaves network in Vilnius, the European Capital of Culture, this week (the hotel she’s staying at has guaranteed her “an Irish welcoming smile”!!) in order to take part in the assessment of over 300 applications from promising young companies and choreographers across Europe who are seeking to tour abroad.  The chosen artists will then be invited by the partners to perform in their cities.

For the first time this year, approximately 80 performances took place beyond London in Moscow, Oslo, Tallinn, Vilnius, Copenhagen, Dublin (as part of Absolut Fringe), Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Frankfurt, Prague, Poznan, Warsaw, Zurich, Lausanne, Bassano del Grappa, Rome, Porto, Limassol, Osijek and Zagreb. Aerowaves plans to extend the number of opportunities in 2010. This expansion of Aerowaves performances is a development that provides a European network without precedent in dance.

Watch this space for news of whom we’ll be inviting to Dublin for DDF 2010!

Dublin Dance Festival had its first event for Friends on Friday, October 2. The Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival kindly treated DDF’s Friends as if we were their own so that we could experience the phenomenon that is DV8.

To Be Straight With You proved a powerful, often violent and beautiful work – vignettes of spoken word and dance conjuring characters and events that were variously shocking, disturbing, humorous, full of fear and sometimes glimmering with hope.  The ‘In Conversation’ session that took place beforehand with Artistic Director Lloyd Newson (moderated by the omnipresent Caroline Williams) provided insight into the factual background of the work without giving too much away.  It was a great chance to see some world-class dance theatre and catch up after the summer.

If you’d like to Be Our Friend and be in the know about events like this one,
you can join here.

EDINBURGH
AUGUST 13-14 2009

Early morning in August, it must be time to head for the airport for my third annual pilgrimage to Edinburgh’s Dance Base to “give dance a chance” as Morag Deyes, Artistic Director, exhorts.  Each year, Dance Base programs a multitude of mixed bills that run at different times, day and night, over at least ten days, giving audiences and visiting curators a good chance to see the work.  It’s really worth it, with tickets at only £5 and a lovely cafe where you can re-charge between shows without having to deal with the crowds (or the rain) outside.

The fare ranges widely each year – this season encompassing dance for children (the delightful Dilly Dilly by Tabula Rasa Dance Company), youth dance (Something About Others by Nottingham Youth Dance in association with New English Contemporary Ballet), contemporary Bharatanatyam (Ring Cycle by Shamita Ray), and everything in between and beyond.  Fearghus Ó Conchúir with Li Ke and Yin Yi reprised Dialogue, a dance conversation between cultures and between dance and sound.  Appel, by Company Décalage, brought street dance and capoeira vocabulary together with Indian flute and tabla.  Company Chameleon’s Rites featured two dancers to watch – Anthony Missen and Kevin Turner.  Watch IT, by Anthony Mills, was a send-up of a man thoroughly obsessed by his television.  Laila Diallo showed The Wayside, a subtle and moving solo and Portuguese choreographer Pere Faura danced with Gene Kelly in the projected film of Singin’ in the Rain in a piece entitled This is a Picture of a Person I Don’t Know.

In addition to Ó Conchúir, Irish artists included Fidget Feet, presenting the energetic aerial dance RAW offsite at Out of the Blue Drill Hall; Rex Levitates’ Unsung was due up the following week.

Among other Fringe dance shows, there was a showcase organized by Jodi Kaplan from New York featuring seven U.S. companies from five cities and David Parker and The Bang Group’s riotous Show Down, inspired by the 1940’s musical Annie Get Your Gun.

Despite the construction of a tram line that had streets torn up all over town, the jostling crowds were generally cheerful as they gathered around clowns, drummers, bagpipe players, fire eaters etc.  Festival fever electrifies the air; you could stay for weeks and still not see everything on offer.  It’s an exciting, if overwhelming, experience.
Two days is barely enough to scratch the surface.

PARIS QUARTIER D’ETE
JULY 22-29, 2009

Everyone knows that Paris shuts down in the summer – especially in August but even July can be fairly bleak with boulangeries, charcuteries et restaurants fermées. Twenty years ago, it was decided that a festival in and around Paris would wake its citizens out of the torpor of summer. Thus was Paris quartier d’été (the neighborhood of summer) born.

The multi-disciplinary festival always includes a lot of music in addition to a bit of circus, theatre and dance. Outdoor venues are used as much as possible. For this year’s anniversary edition, several significant older works were presented and succeeded in meeting the festival’s goal of offering work that you hadn’t even realized you’d been waiting to see. In past years, I’ve seen Merce Cunningham (who sadly passed away while I was in Paris) and Elizabeth Streb on a fantastic stage constructed in the courtyard of the Palais Royal. This year, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Ook, created in association with Theater Stap and Nienke Reehorst, took to this stage on a night when it had been raining up until five minutes prior to curtain time. Theater Stap is a Belgian company comprised of actors who are mentally disabled. Ook, which means “also” in Flemish, encompasses the philosophy behind this company. The images created by Larbi and Reehorst were beautiful and universal. The sight of ten performers riding bicycles around the stage was especially resonant given the diversion yet inter-dependence of their paths.

Compagnie Retouramont (pictured above) presented Vide Accordé (a hard one to translate, something about a Valuable Void?) in several sites, both urban and less so.  I journeyed via RER to Bagneaux where folding chairs were set up in a semicircle around a green park at the end of a small cul de sac (part of the adventure of the festival is finding the performance locations!).  The 30-minute performance consisted of a trio of incredibly virtuosic women climbing, crossing and spinning on the wires rigged simply via a large crane.  The local audience of all ages was enthralled.

Carlotta Sagna’s Tourlourou, a tough solo set on a small square miked stage, took place in the garden of a library in Saint-Ouen (as well as at two other locations).  Satchie Noro’s point shoes stabbed and pounded the wooden floor; the amplified echo seemed to shake the trees.

Josef Nadj, born in the former Yugoslavia, is the prolific Artistic Director of the National Choreographic Center in Orléans.  His work, Le Temps du Repli, was seen in the 2004 International Dance Festival Ireland (now Dublin Dance Festival).  Within Paris quartier d’été, he was given a special residence at the Maison des Métallos at which he showed two performance pieces and exhibited a series of drawings.  Les Corbeaux is a work created in collaboration with composer/musician Akosh Szelevényi. Without giving it away, the transformation from man to crow was fascinating.  Petit psaume du matin, created in 2001, is a duet with Dominique Mercy (a long-time member of Pina Bausch’s company).  Consisting of a series of somewhat surreal vignettes, the impact of the piece is heightened by the power of the two men commandeering the stage.  You don’t want it to end.

And, of course, one wishes that a week in Paris would, likewise, never end…………

MONTPELLIER DANSE (FR)
JUNE 22-28, 2009

Festival los Veranos en la Villa/Matadero Theater, Madrid (ES)
July 2, 2009

Montpellier Danse combines the blissful weather of the south of France with an excellent swath of dance companies from young and experimental through experienced and traditional (not necessarily in those pairings!).  Originally confined to a few theatres in the old centre, Montpellier Danse now programs in venues around the Languedoc-Rousillon region (thankfully providing bus transport for professional visitors).  In its 29th edition this summer, it was laying a little low in order to spring a grand 30th anniversary event in 2010.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of performances and a good number of colleagues with whom to discuss them afterwards over a glass of the regional rosé.  As the website says, Montpellier Danse is “Un paradis pour les amoureux de la danse.”

Among the artists performing that last week of June were a number of French companies. Local choreographer Didier Théron teamed up with former Trisha Brown dancer Keith Thompson on Democratic Combine, shown outdoors.  The two are somewhat hampered by costumes filled with air – kind of fat suits – that provide comical balance problems.  The high winds at the opening performance added to the challenge.  Yet the piece has a deeper layer, an investigation of teamwork and collaboration.  The Bagouet Studio in the Choreographic Centre is an excellent black box space (when its skylights are covered – a light-filled rehearsal studio when they’re open) that seats about 150 and has a stage that is more than 15m deep (green again…).  David Wampach and Héla Fattoumi/Eric Lamoureux presented work there that questioned identity – Wampach’s Auto looking at gender issues and illusion while Fattoumi/Lamoureux’s Manta explored the role the veil plays for Muslim women.
Angelin Preljocaj (whose Empty Words, parts 1 and 2, was seen at DDF 2008) performed a tour de force solo for himself inspired by and incorporating the text of Jean Genet’s Le Funambule.  At the intimate Opéra Comédie, a stunning set and gorgeous lighting enhanced the work’s power.  American choreographer Stephen Petronio (seen at IDFI in 2004) created Tragic/Love, a full-company work for the Ballet de Lorraine based on letters written to the Juliet Foundation, in Verona.  Yes, people actually seek advice on love-related problems from Shakespeare’s famous character!  Brazilian choreographer, Bruno Beltrão, and his company, Grupo de Rua, presented H3, an astounding and sophisticated piece, which was based on but not stuck in hip-hop vocabulary.

Of course, there were many more I missed – Emanuel Gat, Raimund Hoghe, Vera Mantero, Mark Morris, Filiz Sizanli and Mustafa Kaplan….  I always leave vowing to stay longer NEXT year!

The following week I took an overnight trip to Madrid to see an exquisite programme presented by the Baryshnikov Arts Center that had been touring in Europe.  Three Solos and a Duet were performed by Mikhail Baryshnikov and Ana Laguna, both riveting.  Two of the four pieces (the duet, Place, and Solo for Two (danced primarily by Laguna with a cameo by Baryshnikov) were choreographed by Mats Ek.  These works brought out both the depth of the performers’ technical virtuosity and their confident and elegant stage presence.  The other two solos, performed by Baryshnikov, were Alexei Ratmansky’s Valse-fantasie and Years Later by Benjamin Millepied.  The latter charmingly incorporated film of the young Baryshnikov, ebullient in his adolescent physicality, observed by his older persona.

The Teatro Matadero, on the grounds of an old slaughterhouse just a few Metro stops from the centre of Madrid, is part of a fascinating cultural facility.  And the 38° sunny weather was a real treat for 24 hours after the thunderstorms in Dublin the previous night!

Yep. You missed it. The last chance saloon has stopped serving.

Relax.

We gave the festival quite a send off. Aretha Franklin featured, James Brown did a turn and we got to experience some of the best soul-rending music I’ve ever heard….even if it was recorded. But what really raised the temperature in Smock Alley were David Zambrano’s Soul Project performers who - inspired by and driven to emulate in their own idiom the powerful example of the vocalists - expressed in movement an extraordinary depth of passion, revealing an almost spiritual intensity. Moving around the space and getting as close as possible to watch each dancer move, it was impossible to avoid sensing both their abandon in performance and the effect of this on one’s fellow spectators.

Mmmaybe it was a little too long…but really, what I felt it needed were a few more audience members. And the last two weeks deserved a show that reminded us a little of how much fun dance is, and how enlivening. Afterwards, Caroline ‘Rummy’ Williams led the march over to Project for the big send-off, the ample flow of liquor given a twist by being served by trained fire-eating monkeys; about midnight, Laurie started cutting her favourite deck and….but hey, you know what? You missed it. Better luck next year.

What now? Well, if you like, you can revisit past glories by just scrolling down the page.

But me? To be honest, so distraught am I at the ruthless cutbacks in dance provision in the Irish Republic, I’m heading to Romania for a theatre festival. So, if you’re in Sibiu over the next two weeks…heh…well, let’s just say, les jeux sont faits…

One more night.

One more show to see…and I can’t really believe it. It’s been quite an experience.

And the fact that my last show will be David Zambrano’s Soul Project sort of feels…right. Fitting. Apt. Because the chance to witness so many performances, to enjoy so many productions into which people have poured body, inspiration and heart…it brings home to you how the arts aren’t just another industry. Sure, artists and companies may talk about developing a marketable product or how best to brand ourselves and market our events. Some days we even find ourselves unconsciously parroting the squawks of some captain of industry we overheard on radio. But I bet most of us can’t put any real feeling into those lines.

Because in our hearts, we know that what we do…it’s not really the stuff of indices. Or earnings reports. Or economic summaries. Because we know – from experience – that the measure of a work’s worth is not the aggregate mean take from some notional demographic. No.

It’s the jagged silence that falls in a theatre house on the edge. It’s a movement phrase that catches you off guard and steals your breath away. It’s the scene that leaves you feeling both damned and redeemed. And it’s the instant between blackout and lights-up, when you have to come back just to get to your feet.

See, that’s what this festival has been. A series of soul projects.

That soulful quality was palpable with José Navas’ Miniatures, a work that drew the spectator’s gaze past the apparent, privileging us with a glimpse of the desires, compulsion, abandon and nostalgia that make up his past. It was a beautiful intimate presentation – one that could so easily have veered into the mawkish, camp or sentimental at various junctures, yet didn’t thanks to Navas’ choreographic integrity and intense commitment to his craft as performer. Perfectly judged and a festival highlight for me.

Similarly – though an utterly different kind of work in derivation and delivery – Ioanna Mona Popovici’s Work in Regress reflected the artist’s intensity in its conception and realisation. Even if I don’t tend to agree with her starting definition of authority, the piece that resulted from that definition perfectly captured the absurd lengths to which a power centre, stripped of its habitual (or any) periphery, might go in seeking to re-establish its purpose for being. All that…and it made me laugh too.

And then there’s Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, a work that artfully led us to grasp the reality that, in Melbourne in 1970, a dreadful thing happened. Guerin’s composition raised its structures and paced its momentum with such sensitivity to pendle and weight, balance and link that it made the suddenness of the radio report a truly breaking kind of news. And yet, as art has a unique power to do, it inevitably swayed us to an understanding that all this…passes. However sad it may be. That though all may falter and fail, all may yet rise again – indeed will rise, inexorably, no matter how terrible and great the tragedy.

And that’s why work like this, work like this festival has made it possible for us to see, well…you can’t denominate the worth of such a thing; can’t price it, tag it, stack it or stock it. Because, recession or boomtime, numbers can’t count its true worth.

But we can.

Final soul project tonight. One last time.