November 12, 2008
BAM Next Wave Festival
La La La Human Steps: Amjad
Cello music.
Three circular screens descend from the ceiling and on them are projected a video-art series of white silk, white spherical orbs, yellowish lineaments and fibers, and dark red craggy folds.
I know I’m here to see an adaptation of Swan Lake and Sleeping Beauty by Canadian ballet company, La La La Human Steps, so I am already prepped with image associations; through the yellow lines I can see the outline of birdlike feet, the inside of an egg, and in the crimson, the bloody mass that also signifies new life. There is something erotic to the spinning white orb-egg and the way in which they multiply, forming chains, forming pearls, forming circles. Spliced in between the images of potency—nourishing blood and food—a piece of white silk, impossibly clean washes over the outside of the shell. Strength, femininity, pain, multiplicity, violence. They begin as images and are repeated through movement.
La La La Human Steps is known for its virtuosic attack-style dancing. They dance at warp speed and execute horizontal pirouettes; they seem to nearly miss dealing each other lethal blows as their arms and legs fly out and are drawn back in just in time to miss a head, a neck, a groin. Despite astonishing physical capacity and coordination, I found myself falling asleep in my chair as even the most frenzied movement became monotone. The music, scores from two ballet classics, is made strange by reorganization, and by the minimalist performance of the results onstage by a pianist and group of four string musicians. Likewise, the costumes, spidery black sheer tights under too-high-cut leotards, strip the dancing bare of previous expectations of romantic ballet.
Over the course of the 1 hour and 45 minute performance, I found myself alternately bored, outraged, but sometimes also impressed with the dancers as they flew through a series of solos, duets, and group numbers. They danced like robots dramatically undermining the humanity they advertise in their name, and with it, dampening my sense of admiration for the dancers’ skill. They mimicked stylized ballet runs with their bony arms held rigidly behind their backs until they found their next coordinates on the stage and proceeded to pop, snap, and bend like anorexic goth Barbies in fast-forward motion…then they skittered to their next coordinate. Through these crossings they blended in with one another. Aside from the fact that one dancer was frighteningly thin and one was a head taller than everyone else, they seemed identical in appearance and function in the choreography for the majority of the piece and in addition to being interchangeable, exhibited very little agency in their duets with the male dancers. As their male partners spun the girls’ hips around, their bodies followed like finely-tuned machines but nothing more. I saw no soul and sorely longed for the dancers to show me something real.
Disillusioned and unable to keep my eyes open, I took deep breaths to reanimate myself and finally reached for the second half of an enormous cookie I was going to save for later. Craving the sugar buzz to get through the rest of the performance, I chomped into it and irrationally told myself that I was affirming my own realness, joy de vivre and giving the rhetorical finger to the oppression, maniacism and starvation I saw happening in front of me…so there!
The middle section of Amjad departed from what I found to be a discordant beginning. Rather than clipping along at a breakneck but predictably even double-time speed, the movement in the second part of the piece was peppered with haunting stills, with dancers moving in contracting opposition to another couple that continued on the previous frequency. The music changed to washy, watery, electronically mixed sounds that hearkened to nature but remained abstract. I understood none of the narrative that was being constructed by the woman in the white dress, and her pas de trios with a slender shirtless man on pointe shoes, but I appreciated finally having something besides a blur of limbs to contemplate.
Unfortunately, in many senses, the concluding section was much like the first, recycling costumes, movement (oh the incessant flapping of Swan Lake arms…taken to an absurd degree) and music. More flurried of two-footed spins, more snapping and rebounding of ballerinas from their pelvises, more spidery anorexic goth alien Barbies posing in what should have been come-hither positions in egg shaped pools of light on the ground. It ended with booming eggs and a dead alien Barbie swan…and darkness.
Oh La La. (La Human Steps)
I thank Édouard Lock for his minimalism, for this feat of athleticism, and for pushing the envelope in terms of speed, agility, and bodily extremes of all kinds. He succeeded in transforming his female dancers into birds—fragile, skittish, and flickering, as well as challenged the audience’s perception of time both in the speed of the movement (did I see an 105 minute ballet or one four times as long which I fast-forwarded in my mind?) and the duration of the work without intermission. He has also provided me with an unexpected reaffirmation of why I love dance and what dance I love. I was saddened by the strictures put on the dancers’ bodies, by the premiums placed on speed and accuracy over affect and meaning. I felt that the dancers were moving so fast that I could scarcely see them move at all. I could scarcely see them.
Armed with very little previous knowledge of the company or the recent developments in contemporary ballet, I can only offer my subjective experience. I welcome opinions, experiences, and feedback from anyone interested.
Good Night!