Infamous Offspring, by Wim Vandekeybus for Ultima Vez. Photo © Wim Vandekeybus

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ImPulsTanz 2024 #2: shock and awe

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Infamous Offspring, by Wim Vandekeybus for Ultima Vez. Photo © Wim Vandekeybus
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Surface impressions and deeper impacts felt at Vienna’s annual cornucopia of performances

Watching many shows over a relatively short period of time will likely result in some personal revelations – that is one of the appeals of dance festivals. This year, while I was exploring the vast offer of Vienna’s ImPulsTanz, watching the performances, movies and exhibitions of newcomers, old masters and current stars, I often found myself wondering about the nature of impact and impression.

We are living in a time of information and sensory overload – I once read that nowadays, in the course of a single day, a young person is exposed to as much information as their parents’ generation was in the course of a month, or someone living in the Middle Ages was in their entire lifetime. No wonder theatremakers can feel the need to be more and more loud and shocking in order to stand out – or to be noticed at all. At the same time, they are becoming more conscious of the audience’s sensitivities, providing trigger warnings to make sure they are not offended or, if they are, it’s by their own choice. Naturally, trigger warnings abounded at ImPulsTanz too: from loud music to strobe lightning, from nudity to explicit contents, the selection was wide and varied.


Frostbite by Estonian-Latvian duo Jette Loona Hermanis and Anna Ansone

Being offended is easy; deciding – as spectators or critics – whether a performance with substantial shock value actually contains any substance, or is just a shiny façade to earn quick attention, is a bit harder. In the case of Frostbite by Estonian-Latvian duo Jette Loona Hermanis and Anna Ansone, I decided it was the latter. Amidst the never-ending heatwave of this year’s Central European summer, a show titled FrostBite seemed more than appealing. Well, as they say, be careful what you wish for. Its creators call it ‘a performative act on infantile games, nurture and role-play within an aestheticised universe’. Both the scenery and the performers (not unlike Barbies who have had a little too much plastic surgery) are designed to look excessively weird and somewhat repulsive, and their actions (which include breastfeeding a textile snake by a man, injecting stuff into each other’s mouths and smearing each other with suspicious-looking materials) get more and more surreal as the show progresses. But strangeness and outrage for their own sake quickly get tiresome, and in the end this FrostBite is only enough to give you a few chills, but no permanent marks.


Generations, by Melanie Maar and Lindsay Packer

Melanie Maar is an Austrian artist who has recently returned to Vienna after living in New York for three decades. In Generations, she collaborates with light artist Lindsay Packer – and what could be a better location for a play with lights and bodies than a dark chamber? Dunkelkammer, the upstairs, semicircular studio space of the Vienna Volkstheater, literally takes centre stage in this piece. Maar is so fascinated by the genius loci that she begins with a little speech on the history of the space, and of her experiences in it during the creation process, before unceremoniously diving into her duet with Packer and her equipment. What follows reminds me a lot of childhood games: playing with shadows on the wall, experimenting with coloured lights, dressing up – and sometimes dressing down. But this rather free-flowing collection of experiments ends as abruptly as it started, and in the end it feels more like a work-in-progress or a studio visit to Maar and Packer’s visual world than a polished performance.


Liwia Bargieł-Kiełbowicz, Łukasz Przytarski and musicians in Dances for Lucia Długoszewski by Weronika Pelczyńska and Elizabeth Ward. Photo © yakoone
Liwia Bargieł-Kiełbowicz, Łukasz Przytarski and musicians in Dances for Lucia Długoszewski by Weronika Pelczyńska and Elizabeth Ward. Photo © yakoone

Dances for Lucia Długoszewski is a collaboration between the music ensemble Klangforum Wien and two choreographers, Weronika Pelczyńska and Elizabeth Ward. The ensemble has recently made a recording of the works of the Polish-American composer, a pupil of John Cage and Edgar Varèse who had a close artistic (and private) relationship with Erik Hawkins, the first male dancer in Martha Graham’s company, providing the music for many of his pieces over 40 years. Each of the choreographers is in charge of one half of the evening, which results in a probably unintentionally stark contrast. For the first half, Polish dancemaker Pelczyńska places the musicians in the middle of the stage, so that the two dancers are forced to move around and among them. Music and dance become equal and inseparable: not only do the dancers embody the rhythm and the sound in a lively and spirited way, often moving along a straight horizontal line as if they were notes on a piece of sheet music, but the movements of the musicians (even their entering and leaving of the stage) are also choreographed. This symbiotic relationship reaches its highlight in an amusing scene where the conductor’s and the female dancer’s movements are synchronised, until they finally both intrude into each other’s ‘jobs’. Both the musicians and the dancers (the excellent Liwia Bargieł-Kiełbowicz and Łukasz Przytarski) show a lot of wit in this part of the show.

The choreographer of the evening’s second half, Elizabeth Ward, who was born in the US but has been living in Vienna for many years, takes a completely opposing approach. She starts with a monologue about similarities between her own and Długoszewski’s biography, and in her following choreographic sequence relies on Długoszewski’s theory that dance and music can be entirely separate. In her set of solos, duets and trios she works with postmodernist, simple and repetitive movement patterns that often feel languid and have the effect of quickly lulling the audience. Perhaps this more impressionist, meditative approach could work better in a different setting, but after Pelczyńska’s inventive take that makes the music so alive, it just feels like the evening is dragging on too long.


3S by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Photo © Filip Van Roe
3S by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui. Photo © Filip Van Roe

Many of Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s earlier works are among the formative experiences of my spectator’s life. But lately, the shows of his I have had the chance to see often have felt like fainter replicas of those masterpieces, reusing or reinventing good – and sometimes less good – ideas. 3S (standing for three solos) is no exception. It’s a product of pandemic times, when group works were impossible to create, so Cherkaoui invited three of his longtime collaborators to develop three highly personal solos based on the problems and disasters of the respective dancer’s home country. One of the main elements of the set that connects the three etudes is a screen, which, for the second time after Cherkaoui’s Nomad, feels illustrative and distracting – unnecessary for a choreographer who can tell anything and everything by the language of movement. He does achieve that in the last solo, originally created with Nicola Leahey and performed in Vienna by Christina Guieb, which tells of the abuse of ancient forests in Australia and the tragedy of an Aboriginal activist. Its silent lyricism, its heart-wrenching dramatic power almost makes up for the confused dramaturgy and the didacticism of the preceding two sequences (created with Kazutomi ‘Tsuki’ Kozuki from Japan and Jean Michel Sinisterra Munoz from Colombia). Almost, but not quite.


Trailer for DuEls, directed by Jonas Åkerlund, with choreography by Erna Ómarsdóttir and Damien Jalet

Another thing about dance festivals: after some time you don’t necessarily remember details, only an overall impression. For example, my lingering impression of the 2018 Ice Hot Nordic Dance Platform in Iceland is that I saw some wild things – many thanks to Erna Ómarsdóttir, artistic director of Iceland Dance Company. Ómarsdóttir has collaborated with French-Belgian star choreographer Damien Jalet several times – including on a show called DuEls for the Norwegian company Nagelhus Schia Productions, realised in the inner and outer spaces of Oslo’s Vigeland Museum. ImPulsTanz showed a movie adaptation of DuEls by Swedish director Jonas Åkerlund, whose trademark visual world is best known from music videos of the likes of Madonna and Lady Gaga. The film pays tribute to both Gustav Vigeland’s massive and eerie sculptures and to the unique circular arrangement of the museum rooms that house them. It features Erna Ómarsdóttir’s creepy and weird heavy metal-lady persona as a sort of narrator character, as well as old and new, often mythologically-inspired pieces by both choreographers adapted to the museum space. These include Jalet’s first solo choreography, Venari, and his Les Medusés, a scene that also found its way to the movie Suspiria. It’s quite a mystery how so many different inputs and such different and distinctive artistic worlds blend together so organically, but they do, resulting in a beautiful and haunting, fever-dream experience.


Infamous Offspring by Wim Vandekeybus for Ultima Vez

Mythology is also a starting point (not for the first time) for Wim Vandekeybus and his company Ultima Vez. This time it’s the Greeks: in Infamous Offspring, a bunch of warring god-siblings populate the stage, while their parents, Zeus and Hera (played by British actors Daniel Copeland and Lucy Black) communicate with them from the heights of Olympus – or this time from a screen hung above the stage (a fine example of the inventive use of onstage screening). The divine offspring mock, betray and fight with each other just like other siblings do; except, being gods, their actions have much more severe consequences than those of humans – both for each other and for the world. The biggest strength of Vandekeybus’ carefully crafted and disturbing epic is its fantastic cast: each and every performer is unique, but equally captivating. It’s not often that I get genuinely scared in a theatre hall, but this time I was rather relieved that there were a few rows between me and those raging gods. (Adrian Thömmes in the role of Ares gave me the biggest creeps.) If you ever get to see this performance, I highly recommend sitting in the front, to be as close as possible to the insane and very tangible energy of the performers. And then, to complete the fascinating ensemble, there’s Israel Galván in the role of the blind prophet Tiresias. He only appears on film, but every time he does, he drags us into his own universe. Painted silver and standing in the middle of a table covered with a cloth, his lower body remains invisible. A dancer who usually creates most of the magic with his legendary feet now cannot use his feet at all (see the parallel to the sightless seer?), yet becomes not one bit less magical. It’s not even all the rhythm and noise he creates with his many props on the table; the magic is on his face, in his alert, all-telling eyes.

Amidst all the ‘explicit content’ presented at ImPulsTanz, my most powerful experience ended up being a show on Greek mythology. It made me wonder: perhaps the most explicit contents of human history haven’t really changed for millennia. And perhaps we don’t even need shock value to go really deep: we only need a bunch of very talented creators and performers. ●


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Vienna, Austria
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www.impulstanz.com
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