As we enter the space inside an industrial building in Utrecht, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, performer and co-creator of Eros, together with her five dancer-sisters, hand us all a small piece of chocolate mixed with dried hibiscus, rose and blue lotus – good, we hear, for opening the pelvic area, the heart and the mind. Regrettably, neither these properties nor the smell of burnt palosanto are enough to allow for an actual connection between audience, performers and piece in this self-proclaimed contemporary ritual.
On the ground, illuminated by an overhead circle of golden light, the women wear comfy, yellow-to-earthy costumes, a chromatic warmth replicated by the deep-yellow benches along three sides, where we sit. On the fourth ‘wall’, drummers Frank Rosaly and Katherina Bornefeld are already in action. On their score – its build-up the most interesting dimension of this performance – the women crawl on the floor, initiating movement from the pelvis and in connection with the ground. They open, stretch, fold and unfold, exploring a continuum of sinuous movement. They slowly come together, hold each other tight, form a line mid-stage. Images emerge, their bodies forming a network, a mass, a community. Passionately, they hint at sorority, birthing, care, love.
The length of their exploration puts the focus – as in other, very successful works by Schweigman such as Wiek – on the actuality of their experience. It seems to aim for a trance-like experience, but the reality of the event is too often combined with formal fragments of dramatised choreography, killing every possibility for a transcendental experience on either side of the floor. One of the dancers struggles, bouncing violently on the floor; later, she is freed thanks to the circular energy coming from her sisters. Then they all act happy, and they hug – a shallow representation of archetypal feminine energy and old magic.
There are ways to deploy shamanistic and other somatic practices to bring back the communal, Dionysiac energy of dance to western stages, but Eros failed in its emancipatory and transformative purpose – chocolate or not.
