November 10, 2010

White Noise

Rosas' The Song was kind of interesting, with some moments of striking beauty and even entertainment, but it was about twice the length it could reasonably sustain and some of it was dreadfully dull. Best things were the falling mylar, Helter Skelter and some of the early foley artistry. I'd be interested to know if anyone could identify what song the crazy bearded guy was silently hollering into the lightbulb -- I'd guess it was another White Album number, but I couldn't make it out.

Ian hated The Song so much he decided to skip the following week's Pina Bausch, which was a shame because it was by some margin the most conventional dance piece I've ever seen from her and he almost certainly would have enjoyed it. An almost completely straight setting of Gluck's opera Iphigenie en Tauride, it featured live music and singing and lots of beautiful dance -- to the music, enacting the story. It was all very pretty, but seemed amazingly conventional, with the possible exception of the heavily eroticised relationship between Orestes and Pylades, and one little silent passage with a priestess strewing flowers on the sacrificial altar at the beginning of the last act. Turns out the piece dates way back to 1974, with Bausch just teetering on the brink of becoming the dance theatre revolutionary we now know. Interesting for that, and entertaining for what it was, but not really satisfying.

Far and away the runt of the latest dance litter was the new Featherstonehaughs piece Edits, one of the most asphyxiatingly tedious things I've seen in ages. Y'all know I'm a huge Lea Anderson fan, and I can usually find something to love even in her hokier efforts, but this -- while not hokey in the least -- was just insufferable. Which was particularly frustrating since I'd seen material from it in her "work in progress" evening a year or so ago and it was a lot of fun. Unfortunately, in the intervening time that has all been sacrificed to some gratuitous high-concept toss about co-opting the jump-cut language of film or whatever. The choreography has been finely ground into a sort of attention-deficient dance gruel, chopping and changing and flicking back and forth so continuously that it makes it impossible to find anything at all to engage with. There was a lot of very detailed and inventive movement, the dancers were athletic and talented, the costumes opulent, the lighting slick -- the music pretty abysmal, you can't have everything -- but it all added up to little more than white noise.

Alongside this new work, the Featherstonehaughs are touring a revamp of 1998's mouthful The Featherstonehaughs Draw on the Sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, which is not their finest piece either but certainly a lot better than Edits. In retrospect it looks very much like a landmark in Anderson's career, planting the flag for the era of Leigh Bowery/Divine David grotesquerie that lasted at least up until the Russian Roulette variations. It's not quite clear whether Edits continues this theme or represents the start of something different. It felt like the latter to me, and I couldn't help wondering if part of the point of the Egon Schiele revival was to close out that older cycle.

There was a post-perf talk on Monday. I was tempted to stay and ask. But the audience was full of gormless A-level Dance student dolts and I couldn't face either listening to their inanities or sounding like an ancient po-faced ponce in their midst. So we slunk out to the bar for a glass of wine instead, and home.

Posted by matt at November 10, 2010 9:39 PM