Alessandro Sciarroni's FOLK-S: will you still love me tomorrow?, on at The Dance Centre through this evening in a co-presentation with the PuSh Festival and the Italian Cultural Centre, is at once a practice-based experiment in dance ethnography and a durational work of conceptual choreography. Part of a larger project investigating time, tradition and the role of the popular in contemporary dance, Sciarroni and his fellow performers (Marco D'Agostin, Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, Francesca Foscarini, Matteo Ramponi, and Francesco Vecchi) taught themselves the Schuhplattler, a folk dance performed in Bavaria, the Austrian Tyrol, and the German-speaking part of northern Italy; it involves men dressed in lederhosen slapping their shoes and thighs, historically for the purposes of attracting a female mate. With the blessing of the professional Schuplattler groups to whom the team showed their efforts, Sciarroni then set about building a formal structure in which the dance was purposefully stripped of its cultural and geographical associations, becoming a task-based display of pure technique and real-time composition. He also added the following stipulation: the dance is to continue until there is either no one left in the audience or there are no more dancers on stage.
As the audience enters the Faris studio, the six dancers are in a circle, already pounding out a percussive rhythm with their feet. Only Sciarroni is dressed in lederhosen and wearing a Tyrolean wool hat; the others wear regular shorts and shirts. Additionally, all the dancers but Sciarroni have their eyes covered with a strip of white tape for this opening section. For it is sound, more than any other sensory element, that becomes the measure of whether or not the dancers remain in unison over the course of the piece, as well as the gauge of their initially ecstatic and gradually flagging energy levels. Subtle variations in spatial groupings, rhythm, and of course the sequence of steps and slaps are introduced over the course of the piece, with the dancers calling out various signals to each other and also pausing occasionally to rest or regroup. Sciarroni grabs an accordion at one point, but he doesn't produce any music from it, merely opens and closes its bellows, simulating the dancers' gulping exhalations and inhalations of breath. By ruthlessly stripping the dance of its traditional cultural associations in this way, Sciarroni makes the mechanics of its execution all about the presentness of the dancers, and also of us in the audience. That is, in FOLK-S not only are we witness to how the contract between the dancers is being negotiated in the moment (from who takes the lead in initiating a sequence to the level of difficulty of a sequence to who decides when they've had enough), but we are also invited to reflect on what we are bringing (in terms of energy and attention and kinetic response) to the space.
People did leave at different points during the performance last night, but most of us stayed, willing the dancers to go on despite their exhaustion. In this Sciarroni's piece is less a testament to how art survives over time than it is a pulsating, full-throttle encounter with the very art of survival.
P
Showing posts with label Italian Cultural Centre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italian Cultural Centre. Show all posts
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Sunday, January 22, 2017
PuSh 2017: Macbeth
For me, one of the most anticipated shows at this year's PuSh Festival was Macbeth, a radical re-interpretation of Verdi's opera of Shakespeare's Scottish play from South Africa's Third World Bunfight. A co-presentation with the Vancouver Opera and the Italian Cultural Centre, director and designer Brett Bailey has set his adaptation of the story of the original House of Cards couple in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with Verdi's score having likewise been radically reworked for just 12 on-stage musicians by the Belgian composer Fabrizio Cassol. Given the DRC's colonial history, I couldn't help commenting on the irony of Cassol's nationality to Richard, although that's not the only transnational jolt of surprise/confusion one receives from this production.
Bailey's Macbeth is not the first work for the stage to set a well-known Western dramatic classic in the DRC. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined is a loose version of Brecht's Mother Courage that uses the history of the populous Central African country to comment on the ravages of war--particularly, in the case of Nottage, for women. Both Bailey and Nottage see in the DRC's ongoing civil wars, which have been fuelled by the country's rich mineral deposits, extra-territorial commercial interests, the bitter legacy of colonialism, and state corruption and poor infrastructure, an allegory of ambition, greed and personal betrayal. In Bailey's case, his Macbeth (a terrific Owen Metsileng) is initially just a soldier trying to do his job; however, when he and his buddy Banquo (the commanding baritone Otto Maidi) come across three witches in the jungle who prophesy Macbeth's ascent to power, the wheels of fate begin to turn. It's one of Bailey's savvy innovations to have the "witches" in this version of the story coerced into telling what they know about Macbeth by an armed captor, at once suggesting that this is all being manipulated by outside agents attached to the multinational mining corporation Hexagon about which we hear later and pointing to the fact that kidnapping and sexual enslavement, alongside rape and genital mutilation, have been some of the most grievous (and internationally ignored) consequences of the decades-long ethnic conflict in the DRC.
Bailey also hits a high note, quite literally, with his casting of the magnificent mezzo-soprano Nobulumko Mngxekeza as Lady Macbeth. With her red gloves and pumps, her skin-tight leopard-print dresses, her righteous indignation, and her cajoling of her husband to "be a man" and get on with killing General Duncan, she is a fearsome version of Taraji Henson's Cookie Lyon, from TV's Empire (another Shakespeare adaptation). The lower range of Mngxekeza's voice is especially captivating; it insinuates its way into your own body and the shiver that accompanies it viscerally telegraphs that this is not a woman to be crossed. At the same time, Mngxekeza displays amazing vulnerability during her aria about the blood that nevertheless remains on her hands. Watching and hearing all of this in the intimate setting of the Vancouver Playhouse was an added treat.
There is so much else to admire about this production, including the virtuosic playing by members of the VO Orchestra, and especially the genius conducting by Premil Petrovic, who has been with the production since its premiere in Cape Town in 2014. Bailey's staging also moves fluidly, in its physical score, between scenes of simple Broadway-style choreography, overt pantomime, and a heartbreaking dumb show of grief to accompany the description of the massacre of Macduff's family and village that doubles as an after-image of too many real-life scenes from the DRC, and the continent of Africa as whole. Finally, there are the photographic, text-based, video and animated projections by Roger Williams. Most of these illustrate and supplement the performance in an integral way (for example, the bits of text that fill in parts of Shakespeare's story that have had to be compressed, or that provide additional context for the transposition of that story to the DRC); however, half a dozen of the slides relate to an additional narrative frame that Bailey has appended to his staging that left me a bit mystified.
I refer to the fact that we are told at the outset that the performers on stage are part of a company from the DRC that inherited the found story we are about to hear and that, subsequently, we get illustrated slides filling us in on the fictitious stories of their displacement, orphaning, conscription as child soldiers, and so on. I question the need for such theatrical subterfuge. Why present a South African cast as playing Congolese refugees playing transposed members of warring Scottish clans? Does that somehow make the story more authentic? Or does it assuage certain directorial anxieties about a white South African having the right to tell a story about the DRC in the first place? At the very least, the decision struck me as potentially (and I'm assuming unintentionally) reinforcing two problematic thoughts in the largely Western audiences to which the piece has toured: that all black performers are interchangeable; and that this is the story not just of the DRC, but of all of Africa.
P
Bailey's Macbeth is not the first work for the stage to set a well-known Western dramatic classic in the DRC. Lynn Nottage's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined is a loose version of Brecht's Mother Courage that uses the history of the populous Central African country to comment on the ravages of war--particularly, in the case of Nottage, for women. Both Bailey and Nottage see in the DRC's ongoing civil wars, which have been fuelled by the country's rich mineral deposits, extra-territorial commercial interests, the bitter legacy of colonialism, and state corruption and poor infrastructure, an allegory of ambition, greed and personal betrayal. In Bailey's case, his Macbeth (a terrific Owen Metsileng) is initially just a soldier trying to do his job; however, when he and his buddy Banquo (the commanding baritone Otto Maidi) come across three witches in the jungle who prophesy Macbeth's ascent to power, the wheels of fate begin to turn. It's one of Bailey's savvy innovations to have the "witches" in this version of the story coerced into telling what they know about Macbeth by an armed captor, at once suggesting that this is all being manipulated by outside agents attached to the multinational mining corporation Hexagon about which we hear later and pointing to the fact that kidnapping and sexual enslavement, alongside rape and genital mutilation, have been some of the most grievous (and internationally ignored) consequences of the decades-long ethnic conflict in the DRC.
Bailey also hits a high note, quite literally, with his casting of the magnificent mezzo-soprano Nobulumko Mngxekeza as Lady Macbeth. With her red gloves and pumps, her skin-tight leopard-print dresses, her righteous indignation, and her cajoling of her husband to "be a man" and get on with killing General Duncan, she is a fearsome version of Taraji Henson's Cookie Lyon, from TV's Empire (another Shakespeare adaptation). The lower range of Mngxekeza's voice is especially captivating; it insinuates its way into your own body and the shiver that accompanies it viscerally telegraphs that this is not a woman to be crossed. At the same time, Mngxekeza displays amazing vulnerability during her aria about the blood that nevertheless remains on her hands. Watching and hearing all of this in the intimate setting of the Vancouver Playhouse was an added treat.
There is so much else to admire about this production, including the virtuosic playing by members of the VO Orchestra, and especially the genius conducting by Premil Petrovic, who has been with the production since its premiere in Cape Town in 2014. Bailey's staging also moves fluidly, in its physical score, between scenes of simple Broadway-style choreography, overt pantomime, and a heartbreaking dumb show of grief to accompany the description of the massacre of Macduff's family and village that doubles as an after-image of too many real-life scenes from the DRC, and the continent of Africa as whole. Finally, there are the photographic, text-based, video and animated projections by Roger Williams. Most of these illustrate and supplement the performance in an integral way (for example, the bits of text that fill in parts of Shakespeare's story that have had to be compressed, or that provide additional context for the transposition of that story to the DRC); however, half a dozen of the slides relate to an additional narrative frame that Bailey has appended to his staging that left me a bit mystified.
I refer to the fact that we are told at the outset that the performers on stage are part of a company from the DRC that inherited the found story we are about to hear and that, subsequently, we get illustrated slides filling us in on the fictitious stories of their displacement, orphaning, conscription as child soldiers, and so on. I question the need for such theatrical subterfuge. Why present a South African cast as playing Congolese refugees playing transposed members of warring Scottish clans? Does that somehow make the story more authentic? Or does it assuage certain directorial anxieties about a white South African having the right to tell a story about the DRC in the first place? At the very least, the decision struck me as potentially (and I'm assuming unintentionally) reinforcing two problematic thoughts in the largely Western audiences to which the piece has toured: that all black performers are interchangeable; and that this is the story not just of the DRC, but of all of Africa.
P
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Isabella Rossellini's Green Porno at the Playhouse
We all have our indelible Isabella Rossellini film memory: as the wounded nightclub singer Dorothy Vallens in David Lynch's Blue Velvet; as Laura, the uncomprehending wife of Jeff Bridges's plane crash survivor in Fearless; as glass leg-wearing beer heiress Lady Helen Port-Huntley in Guy Maddin's The Saddest Music in the World. Last night many of us shared these memories as we gathered at the Vancouver Playhouse to take in the live stage version of Rossellini's Green Porno, a one-woman show about the sex lives of animals that was being presented by the PuSh Festival in partnership with Vancouver's Italian Cultural Centre.
Green Porno is based on the wildly successful series of short films that Rossellini began making for Robert Redford's Sundance television station in 2008 (and now widely available on the web). As Rossellini tells us early on in the show, growing up in Rome the child of film royalty (she is the daughter of the legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini) she always harboured a love of animals and nature, studying biology at university. When, however, she began modelling for cosmetics giant Lancome and then making films, she put this passion aside. It was reawakened when she re-enrolled in university later in her career, and Green Porno, which is modelled as a lecture-performance, suggests not just that Rossellini is an excellent student, but would also make an amazing professor--the kind of lecturer who could combine her natural charisma with a knack for conveying scientific material in an hilariously accessible way, all accompanied by an abundant and sophisticated use of media technology.
The films that make up Rossellini's original Green Porno series are all focused around sexual reproduction in the animal world. They are so fun to watch because they combine strange facts about the abundant diversity of conjugality across species with a DIY production aesthetic, with Rossellini dressed up in felt, cardboard, or papier-mache costumes (as, for example, an earthworm, or a hamster, or a duck), speaking directly to the camera against a flat, two-dimensional backdrop. A similar aesthetic governs the live theatrical show, with Rossellini making use of a series of crude props she withdraws from the lectern positioned centre stage to illustrate several of her points, before tossing them aside. She also makes two costume changes--first removing her long black shift and donning a fake moustache and tie to make a point about animal transgenderism, and later donning a big furry hamster costume, replete with outsize whiskers. The latter is the same costume she wears in the film clip that precedes this reveal, in which she notes whereas among hamsters it is common for mothers to eat the weakest of their young in order to preserve their energy and attention for the heartiest among their broods, among humans infanticide is morally reprehensible and punishable by imprisonment.
Because the above is delivered with such winking charm, we are wont to gloss over the explicitly feminist point Rossellini is making (and she is particularly adept at skewering stereotypes about female sexual passivity and the so-called maternal instinct throughout the show). Indeed one of the rich rewards of this show for me is just how slyly political it is, with discussions of animal homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and polyamory putting the lie to the claim, among segments of the human population, that such things are simply "against nature." As Rossellini points out in a way that is both intellectually well-informed and humourously entertaining (not least in her dig against Noah and his arc), animal (and plant) biodiversity is vastly accommodating of all kinds of sexual behaviour and gender identities.
Would that it were the same among us.
P.
Green Porno is based on the wildly successful series of short films that Rossellini began making for Robert Redford's Sundance television station in 2008 (and now widely available on the web). As Rossellini tells us early on in the show, growing up in Rome the child of film royalty (she is the daughter of the legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman and Italian neo-realist director Roberto Rossellini) she always harboured a love of animals and nature, studying biology at university. When, however, she began modelling for cosmetics giant Lancome and then making films, she put this passion aside. It was reawakened when she re-enrolled in university later in her career, and Green Porno, which is modelled as a lecture-performance, suggests not just that Rossellini is an excellent student, but would also make an amazing professor--the kind of lecturer who could combine her natural charisma with a knack for conveying scientific material in an hilariously accessible way, all accompanied by an abundant and sophisticated use of media technology.
The films that make up Rossellini's original Green Porno series are all focused around sexual reproduction in the animal world. They are so fun to watch because they combine strange facts about the abundant diversity of conjugality across species with a DIY production aesthetic, with Rossellini dressed up in felt, cardboard, or papier-mache costumes (as, for example, an earthworm, or a hamster, or a duck), speaking directly to the camera against a flat, two-dimensional backdrop. A similar aesthetic governs the live theatrical show, with Rossellini making use of a series of crude props she withdraws from the lectern positioned centre stage to illustrate several of her points, before tossing them aside. She also makes two costume changes--first removing her long black shift and donning a fake moustache and tie to make a point about animal transgenderism, and later donning a big furry hamster costume, replete with outsize whiskers. The latter is the same costume she wears in the film clip that precedes this reveal, in which she notes whereas among hamsters it is common for mothers to eat the weakest of their young in order to preserve their energy and attention for the heartiest among their broods, among humans infanticide is morally reprehensible and punishable by imprisonment.
Because the above is delivered with such winking charm, we are wont to gloss over the explicitly feminist point Rossellini is making (and she is particularly adept at skewering stereotypes about female sexual passivity and the so-called maternal instinct throughout the show). Indeed one of the rich rewards of this show for me is just how slyly political it is, with discussions of animal homosexuality, bisexuality, transgenderism, and polyamory putting the lie to the claim, among segments of the human population, that such things are simply "against nature." As Rossellini points out in a way that is both intellectually well-informed and humourously entertaining (not least in her dig against Noah and his arc), animal (and plant) biodiversity is vastly accommodating of all kinds of sexual behaviour and gender identities.
Would that it were the same among us.
P.
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