i was sitting right in the middle of the front row
thinking about what a weird audience we had to be
would Cristina Blanco notice Dora was watching the piece
while listening to her Ipod?
how far was Ana prepared to go with being a pain in the ass, annoying the public?
in fact the situation was completely absurd!                                                                                                         french critic gérard mayen proposed some instructions to us                                                                                       one piece - cristina blanco's - but eleven different ways of looking at it                                                                    me i had to concentrate on the body
trying to forget about scenery, sound, etc                                                                                                          that's how eleven lunatics ended up in a small public of – how many? Thirty?
what a lack of responsibility on behalf of the jury!
if we had some authority before, it had to be gone by now
i was imagining Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker giving the award:
and the cucumber goes to....'MAMMA MIA'!
(luckily we saw the performance twice)
must say i had a hard time concentrating on the performer's body alone
trying to cut out all the rest
this had nothing to do with the audience business
because soon it didn't bother me no more
as i was sucked inside this bubble
of tensions, thoughts, perceptions, desires
that were moving, running fast, stumbling over each other
finally ending up in my little notebook or just slipping into oblivion
no it was difficult to stay focussed on her
first because she was so close – two meters or three?
and we as a public sat in the same light as the performer
so no way i could hide myself in that secure darkness of theatres
in which one can look, stare, sleep
without being troubled by feelings of fear or shame
second reason was that cristina blanco often turned her back on the public
not out of arrogance
but to focus our attention on the scenery
this distance i appreciated very much
for me the piece was smart and funny
but it didn't force to make me laugh through a sophisticated manipulation of the audience
a lot of stand-up comedians don't leave their spectators some free space of their own
with their face, their body and their voice
they build up everything rigidly towards little outbursts of laughter
cristina blanco's kind of neutral facial expressions and her monotone voice
indicated that this phantasy world she build up on stage
was not about her at all
how do signs rule our lives? do they form a language that's universally understood?
then how come their forms and meanings are so arbitrary?
what happens when you forget what you have been taught?
everything cristina blanco does
from the little salsa dance to the caricatural football scene
every absurd action stems from a highly new and original
or just an extremely literal interpretation of specific signs
cristina blanco shows there's a world of possibilities
behind the thin veil of what we call 'reality'
at the same time she seems to say:
signs rule our bodies, but without them we're lost
 

We use an amazing quantity of terms to classify dances: performance, choreography; Tanztheater, ballet, neo-classical, expressionism, modern dance, contemporary dance; ethnic, folk or social dance… And there is a hierarchy between those dance genres: ballet dancers despise “hermetic” contemporary dancers; “transnational” contemporary dancers dislike too easy and “local” folk dances.

However, such sterile categories don’t help at all to broaden critical understanding of dance. As early as 1969, the anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku proposed a reading of classical ballet “as a Form of Ethnic Dance”. Her fundamental critique of the Eurocentric approach in dance studies enhanced general awareness about the social context of dances. We know that all dance forms – be they Western or not – reflect the society within which they are developed. Differences thus exist, in bodies, in cultures, in thinking. But the critical appreciation may remain the same. While writing on stage performances of “dance”, no matter if ballet, folk, or contemporary, there are common elements. Similarly, the different genres follow similar basic staging tools.

For instance, folk dances on stage are quite different from the ones performed for self-entertainment in daily life. Dance steps, rhythms and timing change according to the context. If the choreographer’s intention in using folk material is creating meanings beyond the usual nationalistic discourses, then dramaturgical research gains high importance. Within the Boğaziçi Performing Arts Ensemble (BGST) dedicated to combining traditional dance with contemporary stagings, collective discussions and readings contribute much to the development of an alternative to the nationalistic, touristic or commercial forms of spectacle habitually promoted by official cultural politics. The result is a “dance spectacle”, a complex structure embodying multiple social, cultural and artistic aspects that can and need to be analysed alike … as “performance”.

Always more or less arbitrary, it is not the classification, then, that matters for critical appreciation. As all dance genres are historically defined, the boundaries between them are ambiguous and always shifting. That’s why dance criticism wouldn’t have to distinguish genres but dramaturgical, artistic or choreographic strategies.

 Lyndsey Winship: Barbara Kraus / Lieblingsperformance

Version 1

Improvisation is about the thrill of being alive. Or the boredom. or the embarrassment, or the awkwardness, or whatever it is we think we feel as our hearts beat and the blood runs through our veins. And it's about sharing the vitality of that unpredictable existence with the other bodies in the same room.
The skill of improvisation is to draw seemingly random characters, ideas and actions together with an invisible thread, or to steer uncontrollable events in a particular direction, but Barbara Kraus' performance can be just as exciting when it goes off course as when the alchemy falls into place. The skill of improvisation is to draw seemingly random characters, ideas and actions together with an invisible thread, or to steer uncontrollable events in a particular direction, but Barbara Kraus' performance can be just as exciting when it goes off course as when the alchemy falls into place.
The skill of improvisation is to draw seemingly random characters, ideas and actions together with an invisible thread, or to steer uncontrollable events in a particular direction, but Barbara Kraus' performance can be just as exciting when it goes off course as when the alchemy falls into place.
Because imperfection and failure are just as real as laughter and storytelling and songs and structures and amid the waffle and fantasy can be sudden piercing moments of insight, perhaps as unexpected to Kraus herself as they are to us.
But there's a charm and a truth in the simplicity of the situation. Perching on top of Nadia Lauro's installation of fur-covered mountains, Kraus sings tunelessly about the facts of existence: we breathe in and we breathe out, we wake up and we go to bed and then one day we don't wake up anymore.
And maybe that's really all we really need to know.

Version 2

She stole my shoes. Barbara Kraus took one curious look at my feet and slipped the shoes right off them. She held them up in front of her face. 'Please don't sniff them,' was all I could think, but of course she did, and grimaced. But then she danced in them, criss-crossing the room in a childish skip, and what began as a cheeky gesture became the seed for a revealing monologue about the joy of movement, the pressure of the dance industry and the realities of growing up
This combination of comedy, unexpected insight and audience interaction is typical of Kraus' approach to improvisation. And it feels like even Kraus doesn't always know where it's going to turn next. Her strength is her complete commitment to her characters, whether it's the overbearing chatterbox who bombards English guests in German and vice versa, or her take on Iggy Pop. She is taken over by them, in voice, posture and action.
As long as she is caught inside the bubble, so are the audience, but as soon as real life seeps in too far - Kraus checking the time on her phone, or unsuccessfully trying to persuade audience members to join her on stage - it starts to deflate. She drags a young man from the audience to dance to an Iggy Pop tune, complete with wig and sunglasses, but what Kraus probably hopes will be the climax of the performance turns into a painful three minutes that sends such a promising performance spiralling to a flat finish.


Berna Kurt: LES ASISTANTES. UTOPIA ON THE STAGE
“Utopian illusion of living together without sacrificing individual freedom” (excerpt from the leaflet)
A group of female performers, dancing all together or sometimes alone, trying to play in harmony some musical instruments; preparing tle leaflets of the performance; kidding with them; criticising the critics’ or dancers’ harsh attitude towards the dancers…. so on.
The idea of living together is a challenging one. It’s an issue for anybody thinking about or trying to “change the world”. Dichotomy between individual and the society is an issue for most people acting in a political and collective way.
On stage, they read some parts of the text they gave to the audience before the performance. It’s difficult to get their intention from the text. They share somr thoughts with us; they take some positions but it’s not easy to communicate. Some people leave the room.
After the performance, you have to think about to get the whole picture; it’s not easy. You remember their modest but intense gestures, their way of moving together in harmony. You want to believe in the possibility of living together…

Ingrid Türk-Chlapek: Lieblingsperformance
When I interviewed Barbara Kraus, she pointed out that she explores new paths in her work with the risk to fail. Will her approach be visible in the live realisation?
Indeed, Kraus encounters strange situations. New for her is the space she performs in, the installation of Nadia Lauro, unknown of course to last night’s public. Kraus succeeds in keeping their concentration more than eighty minutes. While jumping in different roles, like fantastic Sethi, working class Johnny or Iggy Pop, she continuously reacts to the audience. She dances in the shoes of a female spectator, beats a man with two pillows and caresses the hand of a scared lady smoothly saying: “Don’t worry, it’s just a performance.” Verbalization of her thoughts and feelings connects her and us continuously to the present. Out of that she might have mistrusted her inner watch, thus she checks her real watch twice during the performance and although announcing the performance’s end several times, stops acting only while the audience starts to leave the room by themselves. It seems kind of a foggy end, which melts away a shaped whole of this amazing, fragile improvisation.

Lyndsey Winship: Orpheus and Eurydice

Haven't you always thought Orpheus was a fool for looking back at Eurydice? 'Don't look back!' we shout in our heads every time.
Choreographer Marie Chouinard knows it, and in her own take on the ancient myth she moves past just telling the story to investigating its potency. With 11 dancers dressed in loincloths, nipple covers, fur hats and boots, she sets up her scene and then hones in on elements of the story.
When it comes to the incident in question, Chouinard gives us a taste of Orpheus' temptation, sending out a dancer far into the audience to cause havoc in the stalls, and goading the front rows: 'Don’t look back!'
She also delves into the underworld and conjures up its Bacchanalia, where beings bask in their urges and there's sex everywhere, but maybe not freedom, as she shows us that Hades' inhabitants are slaves to their impulses.
There is a cornucopia of images and references, from the bells, horns, lyres and snakes, to the dancers filing along the front of the stage, contorting as they go, like characters carved on the side of a Greek urn or fresco.
Chouinard's work may lose some of its own potency as it progresses, but there's plenty here to enjoy.


Berna Kurt: Human Writes
The organizational group of the last International Istanbul Theater Festival did host theatre actors, directors and companies from all over the world including choreographer William Forsythe. His project named “Human Writes” was dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Dancers in the project – including Turkish ones – put their efforts in “not being able to write” some letters, words and sentences from the Declaration of Human Rights on tables covered with coal dust. They also invited the audience to take part in choreography.
But it can not be said that their physical effort fulfilled their dramaturgical choices. The audience did not really participate in it. People just watched and tried to think about it but of course by forgetting what was going on in the south-eastern part of Anatolia. During the performance, nothing happened to remember it! They were people like Europeans discussing the serious political and economical problems and of course violation of human rights in Turkey.
It’s a dramaturgical choice. Certainly he has a right to choose that one; but it must be clearly prononunced.


Ingrid Türk-Chlapek: Orpheus and Eurydice
Marie Chouinard, Canadian citizen, starts as a choreographer in 1978: 30 years of creativity is the result: first with solos, since 1990 with pieces for her company.
Chouinard chooses the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to question dance as a ritual. The stage remembers to a visual art installation. It seems that nobody ever would have to clean it: No smell, no rubbish, almost nothing to touch. The costumes bring up associations to the orient. The dancers wear either underwear-trousers or trousers of the workday. The clothing of the upper bodies consists of spots on the dancers’ nipples. Chouinard’s dance language focuses on the extremities shaping the space with their stretch and showing the spine as a structure of bones capable to bend like gum.
Although the dance performance did not cover the audience with inputs it remains a kind of over-saturation after the applause: Marie Chouinard focused the sand not the desert.

First let me say something general about the various talks taking place at the project space- Kunsthalle Wien, during this festival.

The fact that they are happening is great. No matter what the topic of the day is.

It’s a fantastic opportunity to meet people in an intense and time limited frame, where everyones voice can be heard.

I joined the “New York Not Nostalgia” talk a bit later and unfortunately missed the presentation of the invited guests: DD Dovillier, Ori Flomin, David Zambrano, Trajal Harrell, Penny ARCADE and Jennifer Lacey. Gradually the discussion shifted into a generation issue. I think it’s never a good move to turn a complex topic into a generational division. It is true that the working situation in repertory companies has changed over the years. Ori Flomin gave a good example for it. He remembered joining the Stepen Petronio Company as a young dancer and being introduced to the new movement language over a long period of time. He spoke about the importance of deepening the dancers understanding towards the unfamiliar repertory before going on stage with the material. Every dancer, of every generation will always prefer having appropriate working conditions. We know that is no the situation in most of the repertory companies today. Therefore, simplified, the questions should be: How did we get this far in terms of having to deal with quantity before quality. How can we change this? I believe that some of the guests present at the talk have a certain amount of power to change the circumstances they are lamenting about. But I got the bad feeling that this obstacle was accepted as a matter of fact and out of our hands. Surely it isn’t helpful to create a generational division. I can see a tendency in dance to create artificial borders instead of uniting the community. I’m not convinced that this is contributing to the art form. But it has been sort of a tradition in dance to weaken the already fragile construct of a dance community from the inside. I don’t understand the endless discussions of ballet dancers versus contemporary and modern dancers, amateurs versus professionals and vice versa. Not to mention all the unconstructive talks about unfair distribution of finances between the institutions and freelance artists. As if the dance community wasn’t suffering from sufficient outside attacks. Let’s not forget that we are living, working and loving the same art form.

Nathalie Nad-Abonji

Moravia Naranjo is a Vienna-based, Venezuelan-born choreographer, who will be performing her latest work, 'skin, voice and memories of someone else...' as part of ImPulsTanz on 5-8 August.

Tell us a little about your piece, 'skin, voice and memories of someone else...'

It is not a concert, but I will be singing all the way through [songs by Lillian Allen, Miriam Makeba, Billie Holiday and others]. The performance is about exile and displacement. I have a connection with these feelings and the songs I have chosen are connected to those ideas too. They all talk about being in a place that is hard, and say: don't stay there. They talk from the soul.

So is it autobiographical?

It is not an autobiography. I have been very welcome here [in Vienna] so I feel at home. I moved here because I fell in love with a guy so nobody pushed me, I am not suffering and I don't feel out of context. I don't have a tragic experience.

But I've lived outside Venezuela for seven years and I've realised how difficult it can be for people to live outside their own culture. And I realise that it can happen in your own country, you can be outside of the system, disappointed by the system.

It's not autobiographical, but all the work I do is very personal, and in this case it's my personal connection with these singers and these songs.

Why is music such an inspiration, and why did you decide to sing?

In my process as a dancer I knew long ago that the voice formed part of our body, and as a dancer I was always training my body but not using my voice. I was interested to see how I could work with that. I made a solo about what the body had to say and when I watched the solo on video I realised that this body said too little - I thought it was very mute.

Music goes direct to your emotions, words go to the brain; there are different channels of access. I like feelings and emotions. Emotion does not mean drama for me. A drama is one thing but to travel through emotions is another.

Can you describe where your movement comes from?

It's a kind of body release, through sensations and inner spaces. It's about connecting my inner spaces with the audience so the idea can travel - what I do is make a bridge with energy. I go deeper and deeper into the body and emotions, until everything is integrated. Some people have called me minimalist, but I don't agree with that.

How does your work fit in with the Austrian dance scene?

I get influences from the place I live, but I also influence the place I live. I think the background we have always makes a difference. I have a different experience, a different humour, a different taste. My emotions go through my body differently. You can feel that this is not the work of a woman who has grown up in Europe.

You worked with Benoit Lachambre on the piece - how did that come about?

I did two group pieces with him and then I asked him to make a solo for me. But then I had this idea [for 'skin, voice...']. It appeared and was so clear. I told him and he said, 'I like it very much, but it's not my concept, and it's not my experience.' So he said he would help me to make it.

What was it like working with him?

We're very different. When I have an idea, [she takes up props to demonstrate] I take this, and this, and this, [she arranges a coffee cup and sugar and spoon on the table] and I have everything. But Benoit says, 'I am not excited about that,' so then... [she grabs a book, a biscuit, a menu, a napkin, everything within reach to represent Lachambre's flurry of ideas]. He's an extreme guy. But it was the perfect combination.

Moments of silence, intonations of different languages, and very energetic soundtrack-style pop music meet a characteristic, movable set and it creates a really film-like atmosphere on stage. A dark, film-like atmosphere without a film-like structure, because parallel things happen, and there are only a few “dramatical premier-plans”, which help us focusing on the important figures or events. Events and characters are cut out. Literally cut out from the space of the performance, by the scene, which consist of black panels, a line pole and different metal wires, steel cables stretched by the dancers and actors themselves. These flexible, movable wires divide the space into small pieces and constantly changing territories so most of the performers have to move fast and carefully so as not to bump into these cables, while dancing, jumping, walking, running from one corner of the stage to another. Wires and cables are functioning as the physical version of a choreographic idea – lines which lead movements. These scenes and the extreme sport-like “pas de deuxs” with jumps and elevations, the duets where women’s body are used like weapons are very physical, pure and simple. But these extremely strong physical effects are disappearing, becoming effortless between the short stories of narrative. Between the monologues about sexual habits and revolutionary speeches by the blond girl, between grotesque hospital scenes, confessions to somebody called Pablo, who is not there, crazy masks, hierarchical and cruel games. The ironic and self-reflected gesture of stopping the performance for a moment pretending like it was just a rehearsal, or film-shooting does not induce a revulsion in the story or the atmosphere. We get the possibility of an ironic reading of the whole performance, but it does not changes anything. From the auditorium the piece looks like a pseudo-logical structure of a personal nightmare, to which is hard to connect.

Power in choreography. Presence on stage. Intensity in movements. These are the things that really come to my mind in connection with Wim Vandekeybus and Ultima Vez. In general. And now exactly these things are missing from the performance “Menske”. The piece is like a promising last-minute journey to the suburban areas of Nowhere Town, to where I cannot buy a return ticket. Actually I do not want to buy a one-way ticket either. Or you know what? It is more like that big poster, part of the scenery in the front stage which picture two corridors. It seems interesting, but you can go in. You bump into walls, you stay out, and you realize that important dimensions are missing.  

 “Menske” by Ultima Vez
Trash bags full of tears

These silly little human beings. Always sleepless and not taking a moment to rest. Everyone is trying hard to climb up the same ladder to be on the top and to gain, what? Life is running fast. Thinking about motivation is a luxury that these creatures do not have. Instead, they chase the others with fog machines, kill each other with pointed feet or throw around rubbish sacks which are attached to steel wires. In it’s new piece “Menske”, Ultima Vez seems to want to tell us, that the stage is a spider web where everyone needs to act strong and selfish in order to not be eaten.

The moments of enlightenment, when an inner voice tells to sit down and to take a rest, are short. It is the best time for a new beginning and to reconsider the choices that were made earlier. But those inhabitants of a hamster wheel stay paralysed, unable to decide which way to go. A man is sitting half naked on a chair in front of a projection of two corridors that could show him a way out of this labyrinth, while distorted birds and painful knives of his memories and experiences are forming a procession.

Wim Vandekeybus creates an apocalyptic version of the world for his nine dancers. This can’t be a place for a fallen angel philososhising with the mysterious “Pablo”, forced to deal with this rotten pack of human beings.

These animal-movers master their bodies as perfect arms of self- destruction:

While spiraling around themselves and having short duets with abrupt freezes, they form a homogenic society that has their instruments mostly tensed to their fullest, as if they were hoping for a savior that forces them to stop.

But there is no exit, no moment to take a breath, these auto-controlled creatures stay trapped in the roles that they have studied too well with their master. Scene after scene. Although the choreographer exhausts all the known stage tricks and tools such as screaming, talking in different languages, showing female naked breasts, spraying short, meaningful sentences “dead to the idiots” on the backside of movable walls and using all kind of props, still no enlightenment strikes this place till the darkness releases us and them.

Nathalie Nad-Abonji

Why show the world as an even more superficial place? Especially when you have all the creative power in your hands to make something different. It all starts with the end of the world, a blinking cold neon-light and a small human-being, a „Menske“ as in the title of Wim Vandekeybus latest piece, offering a lot of half-poetic phrases of destruction. This time Vandekeybus Ultima Vez ensemble consists of actors and dancers alike, text and languages taking up more time and space. 

The stage seems a battleground of civilisation and ideas. But we are soon told by a severe blond mistress in riding and climbing gear and mood that we see a city under construction, the new Dubai, not built on sand but on fog. And there is much heavy fog produced during the evening. Life and human beings seem to be hanging and depending on strong cables around a lamppost. Their diagonal expanding in space dominates the movement of the dancers in the first part of the performance. It becomes a means for being thrown out of centre, ducking under and lightly coming up again, typical moves from Ultima Vez repertory. The blond mistress not only coordinates the three-dimensional spider´s web but also dictates the thoughts and dreams of the people. Of course there are some powerful duets to come but they are used in exchange for the feelings of the audience - like the plastic bags full of rubbish are used at one point by a dancer/cleaning lady to get some tenderness from a man in a suit. After the leading Lady has had a troubled night´s rest the stage gets reduced to the foreground by a wall-picture showing two empty corridors of some run-down institution again following diagonal lines. At this point there is no way out any more. The man in the suit seems to be suffering, uselessly, so better for him to take off the suit and join the freak-clan clinging to a cowboy-doctor´s attention.  

Vandekeybus having inscribed himself in the memory of the Viennese Dance Festival audience with his breath-taking “Blush” choreography but also the frog in the mixer is capable of tormenting men and beast alike. While his protective love-hate dance fights still guarantee an impressive show, at the end - this time - they also verbally turn into something like an Ultima Vez shadow posing. Even the sunset is happening in neon-light. And after an overpowering show down including machine-gun fusillades and helicopter noise - not to mention the almost rock/pop opera like music - the end comes quietly but surely.

Gala Abend at the Burgtheater. In William Forsythes Steptext Ekaterina Kondaurova, Anton Pimonow, Michail Lobuchin and Islom Baimuradow dance to Partita Nr. 2 BWV1004 in d-Moll by Johann Sebastian Bach. Then Angelin Preljocaj shows the first duet of his succes Le Parc – pas de deux. Manuel Legris and Laëtitia Pujol do their job on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts Klavierkonzert Nr. 14 Es-Dur, KV449 – Andantino. Try to recall my ballet history classes. The second piece by Forsythe: Approximata Sonata. On the music of Thom Willems, the dancers Antony Rizzi and Leslie Heylman seem to be mocking a bit with ballet. Sweat comes out of my pores. Chesterfield sigarette during first break. Afterwards Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and her company Rosas do a classic: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune of Claude Debussy. Kosi Hidama, Kaya Kolodziejczyk, Mark Lorimer, Zsuzsa Rozsavölyi and Sue-Yeon Youn – one of them reminds me of someone I know. During Preljocaj's second duet, performed on Mozarts Klavierkonzert Nr. 23 A-Dur, Kv 288 – Adagio, I watch the architecture of the Burgtheater and some of the other spectators. Compagnie Marie Chouinard closes the evening with Le Sacre du Printemps (Stravinsky). Liliana Barros, Kimberly de Jong, Mark Eden-Towle, Masaharu Imazu, Carla Maruca, Lucie Mongrain, Carol Prieur, Manuel Roque, Dorotea Saykaly, James Viveiros and Won Myeong Won make me feel like a stranger.

Burgtheater. First break. Mmmm, I want to go, but I force myself to stay. We had two okay pieces by Forsythe but what was this weird Preljocaj doing in between? Forsythe doesn't abandon the movement repertoire of ballet, but he turns it into a language of his own. Less cruely sky-high and with an ironical wink here and there – certainly in the last piece, with Antony Rizzi in a sleeveless shirt. Sometimes Rizzi's movements seem to mock with ballet: he slips on purpose, sighs ostentatiously, and so on. Then there's Preljocaj. This guy really puts me on another planet. We get a love duet against a vague pink and blue backdrop. The dancers wear costumes of two centuries ago, maybe three. The both are in love.

I cannot understand why voice and countervoice, why the 'traditional' Preljocaj and the 'critical' Forsythe get as much applause. With movies and books allright, they can fit in one bookcase - but with live art? How can the 'romantic' costume dance survive next to its 'criticism'? And in reverse: what's the meaning of Rizzi's sighs next to all this virtuosity and polite negotiation about “your place or my place?” As if we could live in two eras at the same time! What is the meaning, what is the sense of an evening like this: a melancholy chit-chat with the dead?

 “I can’t sleep.” Monotonously one female dancer repeats this sentence, trying to escape into relaxing dreams. She fails. Instead of finding recreation she rolls her body on the ground, restless, somehow desperate.

Wim Vandekeybus and his Ultima Vez show us in Menske the consequences of changing values. Lifelong identity is not available anymore. Vandekeybus is one of the distinguished Belgium contemporary choreographers, playing in the international dance league for years, well known even outside the dance community. Since 1986, thus for 22 years, he is creating dance pieces regularly. Since then he maintains a high artistic standard and has never be seen in a creative stagnation. What is the secret of that fluent force to build up performances worth seeing?

Vandekeybus questions his topics clearly and finds answers out of different artistic approaches. In Menske moving walls visualize that change of values. Ten actor/dancers “live” on a grey stage, open until the firewalls. Their houses are black walls on wheels. Instead of a fountain in the middle of the village, a mast for electricity, symbol of our dependence on energy, is erected. The walls shape the space: shortening it up to a small horizontal path or deepening it to an edge in the diagonal. There is a lot of text within the dance piece, spoken by different actor/dancers. They address their speeches to absent persons, trying to hide with this strategy their emptiness in fake dialogues. While talking they are occupied by daily works. Text and employment evoke a depressive atmosphere. What a big change when language is replaced by music (composed by the Belgium pop artist Daan): Suddenly the bodies of the dancers move, take space, express their vitality. Then the dancers run, jump, lean against one another, with high muscle tension, always oscillating between short breaks and explosive speed.

But it wouldn’t be Wim Vandekeybus if the piece could be read as easily as it is described above. Vandekeybus weaves a complex net of suggestions and possibilities to associate and grasp meaning. This complexity seems to be one secret of fluent creativity. There are lots of references, for instance to Pina Bausch when a red umbrella emerges out of a pile of rubbish. At this point “I can’t sleep” can also be read as a call for help to deal with that enormous amount of input. It is worth to stand the offer but after watching Menske “it’s time to rest”.

In a recreated microcosm - a half lightened scene with a pylon from which are hanging electric cables, symbol of human complex connections - ten people tried to find themselves in an apocalyptic world. A world of “rubbish” with which people is more in touch than with their neighbors.

Monologues at the beginning of the piece showed how big is the gap separating them and how it is difficult to make communication possible in that alienated world. An alienated world peopled by solitude and anxiety. While a man talked to an imaginary Pablo, a woman celebrated the construction of a new city.

Vandekeybus has used a progressive approach in his choreography pushing dancers beyond their limits. After performing in solo, each dancer turned up with another one and formed a duo, tried to find and throw each other.

The sequence driven by the powerful music pulse of the Belgian pop artist, Daan, with helicopters flyover noise is the meat of Menske. The stage became a battlefield, women’s arms and legs became guns, and fire became flash light.
Photographer, actor and filmmaker, Vandekeybus showed at the end of his piece possible connection with his disciplines. Change is continuing to occur until the end. Two narrow corridors replaced temporarily the world of rubbish. Masked people were coming to be part of the motionless landscape which greatly increased anxiety and fear... 

A man climbs in a huge lamp post to switch on the light. The symbolic figure of the lamplighter used to be a surveiling figure, checking out the streets during the night, but in this context his primary task is to 'unveil'. He shows the truth that is hidden in the shade. The scenery of Menske depicts a dumping ground on the outskirts of a city. It's a forgotten spot, neglected by power and covered by graffiti, a space of possibility and criticism – the space art often pretends to occupy. In Menske Wim Vandekeybus seems to take some distance from the virtuoso feats of physical strength with which he became famous. His most recent piece can be read as a dark political narrative in which the unfinished and the raw comes to the fore.

Different points of view are spread over different characters. The nervously lisping madman in white pyjamas is the first one on stage. He doesn't have any control over his own body and seems to be a mirror of the chaos that surrounds him. All he basically does is stagger from one side to another mumbling words that often make no sense. The contrast couldn't be bigger when a blonde on stiletto heels, utterly selfconfident, walks the stage as if it were hers. She's an urbanist proposing, or rather 'imposing' with a lot of fervor her new plans for the city. No doubt about who's in power. She is the one drawing the lines, setting the borders. Only at night feelings of guilt and doubt visit her and prevent her from sleeping.

In the midst of the chaos, all of a sudden the attention is drawn to a girl dancing on her own. Soon the space on stage is constantly being remodelled by long cables that resemble the ones mountaineers need for climbing. Here they're used horizontally, making up a huge moving cobweb in wich the girl gets stuck. Society sets its own borders, but can transgress these as well. The dancers who join the girl on stage eventually find a way, by jumping or by rolling, to liberate themselves somehow from the restraints, to master space.

Especially one character in Menske makes things go wrong. It's the classical character with which the artist (out of feelings of guilt) likes to mirror himself (and the public): the desillusioned intellectual, paralyzed by doubt. A man is reading aloud in Italian from the letters he's writing to a certain Pablo. The complete lack of humour or healthy irony makes this pretentious personage, who's looking out of his window at the 'crowd', very difficult to listen to. His writing desk reminds of a center where they used to connect phone calls. Apparently he is trying to make connections, to make sense out of the chaos. But in the end he gives up, violently pulling the cables out of the sockets - destroying all connections. Only dance seems to be able to give (non-verbal) answers, to cross borders, to master space. In Menske dance presents itself as a transgressive practice. All the different languages spoken on stage emphasize the mobility and the cosmopolitanism of dance.

There's also something with the rythm of Menske, with this constant draw towards extatic and seemingly liberating moments. In the final scene men are dragging women as if they were machine guns. The loud pumping pop music swells and mingles with the sound of helicopters. There's a lot of white smoke, running and the feel of urgency. I get the impression that all these things are happening just to prevent me from seeing that nothing is there. Behind the smoke screen there's an empty stage. In this transgressive space of dance many perspectives are pulled together and end up meaning nothing. Differences are flattened. In a moment full of pathos a ladder descends from heaven and the dansers fight to get on top of it. Still this deus ex machina doesn't provide any rescue. Menske ends abruptly with a false note. In their last piece Wim Vandekeybus and his dancers are 'performing urgency', but this doesn't turn Menske into an 'urgent performance'.

"A thought cannot be caught," says one character in Wim Vandekeybus' Menske, and Vandekeybus' audience must know what he means. Thoughts, ideas, images and words comes streaming from the stage, in fragments and glimpses, as if the director has cast his net through the scene and swept up individual moments and details while the rest slips away through the holes.

From this fragmented vision we can piece together an almost post-apocalyptic world, where some kind of shift or trauma has taken place. People may look normal enough, but their behaviour tells otherwise: the woman constantly getting dressed and undressed; the jaded man listing society's faults in dispatches to the mysterious Pablo; the bedraggled businessman shoving his hand down a girl's knickers, and her letting him.

The company's starting point for this piece was the idea of seismic change – do we have the capacity to adapt? And Menske gives us a clear answer: no. Even those who take control end up broken, as played out by actor/dancer Kylie Walters, a lone dominatrix in her yellow stilettos and one of the strongest actors in the ensemble.

There is an idea of duality in the action and the movement. Duets are confrontational yet the partners are totally dependent on each other; a man plays out two sides of the same conversation. It seems it's impossible for people to divorce their new selves from the old. There's also a constant circularity, from the telephone wires pulled in circles round their pole, to the corkscrewing flight of the dancers hurling themselves in the air, to the toy aeroplane that loops-the-loop and comes back every time – there's no escape from where you began.

Menske's vision leads to madness as the scene takes a surreal sidestep worthy of David Lynch, arriving in the strip-lit corridors of a run-down hospital. An eerie drone hangs in the air with quiet menace, the mundane becomes maddening and our players finally lose their grip. It's a dim, dystopic reflection, where people exist side-by-side but never really engage with one another, their mysteries remain unsolved and redemption is far away.

Vendekeybus is a master of surface drama, punctuating his scenes with bursts of full-throttle movement, driven by the music's shuddering riffs, strobing lights, copious dry ice and audacious use of sets and props. But the human drama doesn't throw a kick to the stomach in quite the same way. The huge, rich set pieces come from nowhere and burn themselves on our imaginations like pictures on a Polaroid, but without the depth of motive, reason or human connection behind them, the danger is they'll fade just as quickly.