Royal Ballet: Electric Counterpoint BouncE Streetdance Company: Insane in the Brain
The Royal Opera House, London
Peacock Theatre, London
March 24, 2008
Royal Ballet in Christopher Wheeldon's Electric Counterpoint. Photo courtesy of Sadler's Wells.
Christopher Wheeldon’s spectacular and well-deserved reputation could lead you to believe that he is infallible, never putting a foot wrong. The press, and possibly the public too, await every premiere with eager anticipation, drawing hope and excitement from their enjoyment of his earllier work. His fluency with neoclassical movement and his sympathetic response to 20th-century music lend most of his ballets the polished luster that characterizes contemporary buildings and electronic devices, so the dances fit the sleek sensibility we experience all the time, and we feel right at home with them.
Though his latest creation for the Royal Ballet, Electric Counterpoint, again meets all the modern criteria for elegance and cool detachment, it also pushes sleekness to the edge of slickness, separating the dancers from their expressivity.
The designer Jean-Marc Puissant has filled most of the Covent Garden stage with a zigzagging white wall pierced by four evenly spaced doors, which both limits and extends the performing space. Appearing in turn, Sarah Lamb, Zenaida Yanowsky, Edward Watson and Eric Underwood dance in what’s left of the stage to the sound of their own voices talking about their own dancing. Behind each soloist dances his projected image--that’s how the stage gets extended--to which the live artist constantly refers, coming close enough to touch it or moving with it in unison or counterpoint.
After the ruminative solos and the introspective monologues--part confession, part speculation--the artists pair up for pas de deux and then all four come together in an intricately arranged ensemble. As the partnering permutations multiply, Bach’s solo piano music gives way to Steve Reich’s guitar composition Electric Counterpoint, in which a single musician, spotlit in the pit, plays an electric guitar over 11 tracks of his own playing. Now we’ve got dancers dancing with each other and themselves and a musician accompanying 11 overlaid recordings of himself, all supposedly orchestrated to investigate identity, multimedia, and the private and public meanings of performance.
Wheeldon’s comments on these subjects make for fascinating program notes, but the actual choreography seldom measured up to his ideas about it, occupying less space and commanding less attention than the film projections created by the Ballet Boyz, Michael Nunn and William Trevitt. As if they had nothing to display but their bodies, the dancers seemed totally self-absorbed, often facing and focused on the projections, and except for Wheeldon’s theories about physical juxtaposition and rhythmical complexity, little connected their movement to the music.
I couldn’t find many connections myself, and for long moments I didn’t even notice the dancers, who had to hold their own in space while their projected images cavorted behind them, leaping in slow motion, effortlessly replicated side by side in an angular fresco or cut down to a geometric pattern of legs and feet.
Cleverly conceived and stylishly executed, the ballet has the trendy aura of a fashion show, a glossy impersonal production that puts elaborate fantasies about human behavior--often intelligible only to their creator--where its heart might be.
By contrast, the whiplash energy and theatrical lunacy of the Swedish street-dance collective BouncE plugged us straight into its intentions and the rollercoaster excitement of live action. Having already established itself in London with visits to the Peacock Theatre and the Roundhouse, the company returned to the Peacock for the U.K. premiere of Insane in the Brain, a choreographed version of Dale Wasserman’s play One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, based on Ken Kesey’s wacky novel of the same name.
Written in 1962 as an anti-establishment satire, the story concerns a cheerful conman who talks his way into a state mental hospital rather than going to jail. Once there, he challenges the authority of Nurse Ratched, the ward supervisor, and briefly coaxes the inmates out of their psychological misery before the treatment meant to calm the patients renders him as passive and helpless as they are.
Without ever having read the book or seen the play or movie, you could have learned most of that from this production, which defines character, narrative, conflict and emotion entirely through movement. Jointly choreographed by the nine remarkable performers and set to a slew of toe-tapping hits by Missy Elliott, Dizzee Rascal, Gotan Project and Cypress Hill, it grabbed my attention instantly and held onto it easily for ninety minutes, flipping exuberantly from one extraordinary sequence to another without pausing for breath.
BouncE Streetdance Company in Insane in the Brain. Photo courtesy of Sadler's Wells.
Some people think the loose-limbed hip-hop vocabulary is always the same, an unpredictable smash-up of disjointed phrases and dislocated limbs. But by shaping it imaginatively and hitching it to dramatic confrontations, BouncE has stretched its already outrageous boundaries and reinvented it to dazzling effect. Without explanation or confusion, the company swung us from Nurse Ratched’s strictly regimented ballet class, which opened with a somersaulting canon of patients donning socks, to a chilling electric shock treatment for three inmates, suspended high above the stage against a tilted wall, who jerked crazily on elastic ropes. McMurphy, the outsider, lured one patient out of his wheelchair for a stunning, stumbling duet on crutches; the entire ward got high and let loose in an storm of disco and Flashdance references.
When the inmates escaped into the streets, the performers disappeared for a much-needed rest, and we got to watch the movie their characters might have seen, a silent hip-hop caper of madcap tramps and middle-class gentry that looked like the Marx Brothers’ version of an Ibsen play. Best of all, in a short nighttime scene, four of the dancers slithered and bounced on their iron cots in an eerie evocation of fitful sleep and uneasy dreams, each of them caught mid-jump, mid-air, in the perfectly timed flash of a downspot.
All this exhilarating invention drew us into the story’s mad reality, guiding us unerringly through the characters’ joy, fun, fear and poignant isolation, and the filmed material enhanced the live performance while serving a practical purpose. If only film were always used this wisely in dance and this well.
