Ceci n'est pas un blog

Last night I went to see a contemporary dance performance called: I Have a Secret to Tell You (Please) Leave with Me

The performers, with Zero Visibility Corp., were incredible. They are a professional troupe who have premiered their work as far away as New York and Portugal. They were all amazing athletes and dancers but it was a very challenging work. The program describes it thusly:
In this performance a woman stands alone amongst the men. Who is she and in what way is she viewed? Is she a feminine object that pleases the on lookers, a lonely, melancholy figure, or an equal human being – similar and dissimilar both at the same time?

But the music alone was clearly difficult for some as it was mostly static and feedback with heavy beats and high pitched electronic noises throughout. The visual voacabulary that choreographer Ina Christel Johannessen created was jerky and filled with sublimated rage and pain that would escalate into scenes of apparent combat, sickness, desperate panic. There was a large pommel horse like prop and a map that various characters refered to but generally this performance was more abstract and less sexual than many modern dance pieces.

There was no simple story line or easy to interpret scenes but I found myself, despite the description above, seeing the horse as a metaphor for drugs and addiction and the various fights and combats as both interventions and enablements. It was interesting to look for the patterns of when the dancers seemed to be aware of each other ... this came and went throughout the piece and was clearly intentional: were they isolated because each was in a different place or because these people weren't able to see each other - emotionally isolated, or something else. Was the map a sign of people who've lost their way, in more than one sense, or of people making a plan, or was the map just a map? Despite being a continuous 90 minutes plus, the performance had a clear conscious evolution and natural divisions into scenes and acts.

The audience was mostly regulars and probably mostly attended the college where the the performance was held, many people seemed to know each other. But there were also parents with their 10 year old son, a mother and college aged daughter, and so on. The house was packed. The only odd thing to me about the venue was that the 8:00 start time meant opening the doors after 8:00 and starting around 8:20 rather than opening the doors at 20 to and starting at 8:00. The performers seemed surprised when I walked in and tried to sit down before 8:00 while they were stretching and working out small details.

I'm very glad I went.

BTW: This was part of a trilogy of dances and the pictures here are from the brochure and are scenes from I Have a Secret to Tell You (Please) Leave with Me.