http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=r8ekL6ptrsM&feature=related
La La La Human Steps is a dance company formed from a sucessful sereis of performances in a small theatre in St-Henri and at the Kitchen in New York.
Its unique chroeographic language, which has evolved over its 23 year history, has earned the copmpany international acclaim and popularity. Critics rave about the complexity of moves, the alteration of balletic structures and the potent mix of references and forms of visual and audio culture. All these things are intertwined to mkae us question the emotive and narrative power of the body in dance.
It was this company whose production, Amjad, I went to see last Saturday. It was my first viewing of a ballet and I was unsure how impressed I would be. Before a short analytsis I can safely say I have caught the ballet bug.
I was expecting ballet to have a similar dynamic to Opera. To be a discipline which is codified and whose rules need to be consummed and then deconstructed. A discilpine which, in other words, requires a detached cognitive analysis to allow you into its deep emotive powers. I was wrong. The effect of the performance was far more direct than this, far less ‘cultured’.
Barring five minutes, where I was irritable, I was utterly captivated. At points I had watery eyes, and despite being a highly emotional person I can’t say that often happens when ‘consumming’ art.
I have a habit of focusing too much on specifics, so I will avoid an extensive and descriptive monologue on what I can remember of the show. I am more interest in why it had such an impact.
I think it is fundamentally about the relationship between music and the body moving. Music is the purest, in emotive terms, of the arts. It is the one which can be most abstract, which is capable of tapping straight into us.
The movement of the body seems to have such an impact upon us because we are selfish and egotistical creatures. We see in the moving body a refelxion of our general self. We can therefore relate to it. What becomes most poiniant is when the exteror form is capable of evoking our inner self. Without being crude its what we all do when we converse in the most animalistic of acts, copulation. We express ourselves through the interaction of bodies.
It was the complex and original interaction of these facets that made the production so moving. The music was excellent throughout. At points there was silence and at other points a lush and dense build up towards intense and fevered highs. A pianist was occumpanied by strings and the occasional itnereaction of recorded sounds and beats.
The dancers performed various scenes all of which had mini narratives. The sexual, tender and violent nauture of relationships was a common theme. There was not a noticable grand narrative though. The dnacers did not need such a literal strucutre to justify there performance. In the modernist tradition it could exist on its own terms.
Most of the moves seemed to be what could be deemed classical ballet. Yet these were often performed at double pace and interacted with some more intuative flicks and turns.
The sheer athleticism of the figures was impressive enough. Yet it was the manner in which body and music became one which really affects the viewer. The rhythm and melodies of the music were matched by a array of bodily moves from the soft and fluid to the direct and pointed.
The ability for these people to speak so eloquentally about various emotions through the movement of their body through space was what touched me. The spin of one figure across the torse and thorough the arms of another. The weightless lift, the tip toed walk, the floating across the stage like a leaf in the wind.
The technical and physcial difficultity was contradicted by the effortless ease with which it all appeared to be carried out. As bodies glided between each other you were less mesmerised and hypnotised. They seemed to speak to us in muscial and poetic tongues. The slight twist of a form like the fluttering of a singers voice.
I am tailing off. I lack the critical ability or technical knowledge to comment on the production in any great depth. Yet an apprecaition, that unappreciated term, of ballet does not appear to require such formal training. It functions on a level which instinctively has the abiltiy to tap into our deepest consciouness. It respnates with our inner most thoguhts becasue its very form is so purely ‘human’. We see a transformation of our selves into a beautiful, emotive and powerful form. We cannot help but be moved.
