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 “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