Am Theater Bremen – and one had to think about that for a moment on this premiere weekend of Claire Croizé’s beautiful rock concert choreography, while her dance for the Bremen company “Unusual Symptoms” developed its enchanting musical and poetic-fantastic qualities – worked on this stage forty years ago Reinhild Hoffmann years ago and brought out, among other things, her “Solo mit Sofa”, in which the dancer’s evening dress seemed inextricably linked to the upholstered furniture: strange and interesting at the same time.
The socially critical processing of everyday objects and their displacement and alienated theatrical use was a topos in many dance theater pieces of that generation of choreographers, and it is a relief to note that this complicated but often banal use seems to have been almost completely abandoned today. Dance probably owes this to the great French conceptual choreographer Jérôme Bel, who came after Pina Bausch and Reinhild Hoffmann and in the first of his many funny pieces, in “Nom donné par l’auteur”, first illuminated the imagery of dance theater with a flashlight , then dried with a hair dryer and finally let it disappear in the vacuum cleaner.
Dance around the fire of the stage spotlights
Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker keeps her dance free of props, but the geometric paths on which her dances trace the musical movements of the most diverse centuries run along the old traces of free, modern dance, from whose potential for excitement she draws. Croizé studied with Keersmaeker and she admires Bausch. But for “Fabula” she names Greek mythology as an inspiration – what you can see is a play with gold, red and blue costumes, in which sometimes just taking off a jacket changes the habitus of the character.
Croizé wants to show a theatrical play, but that resonates with the movements instead of pressing them heavily into the ground of meaning. The Belgian band “Zwerm” (swarm) placed around the stage and drummer Karen Willems drive the dancing banter, their ballads, their rock songs, their introverted but charismatic singing style sensitively embrace the choreography.
Claire Croizé’s rock concert choreography “Fabula”, performed by the Bremen company “Unusual Symptoms”
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Picture: Jörg Landsberg
The intellectual aspect of this music is dampened by the down-to-earth dancers, who deliberately keep it simple, even when they come up from a lying position into a handstand or hold a headstand with outstretched arms. They dance around a bunch of spotlights on the stage as if around a fire, with outstretched arms they walk barefoot like children playing airplanes. They gallop like the court jester imitating a horse to amuse the king. They hurl all their energy from their arms to the front of the stage before joining in processions and stepping dances. They are warriors, riders, hobbits, they slide prone and push through the audience as if the dance must spill out and flow in everywhere – as music can. What a concert.
Less than fifty kilometers away, at the Oldenburger Tanztage on the same weekend, “Système Castafiore”, a company based in Grasse, France, founded by Karl Biscuit and Marcia Barcellos in 1989, performed. He composes and arranges the music and makes the wonderful videos, she choreographs and directs the events. Her universe is populated with a dance that comes from the comic, the cartoon, the circus, the acrobatics, a dance that creates the comic and magical variations of the mundane through its timing alone.
“Théorie des Prodiges”, “Theory of Miracles”, is more painterly, poetic, and scientific than “Récit”, it is conceived a bit like an illustrated lecture about the origin of our world and the meaning of life. But the fallen angel flying and dancing on an invisible rope is as enchantingly beautiful as an entire evening of Ariane Mnouchkine’s theater, the alien-like appearances of other chapters are as fantastic as the best Star Wars episodes. What a wonderful effort, what a wealth of cultural and historical relationships. You don’t need a great theory of the Système Castafiore. We just want more manifestations of the same in ever new variations: Encore!