The abyss, the womb, the fathomless depths of sea and space. These are the settings for Wayne McGregor’s new “Deepstaria,” in which nine dancers float and spin, buckle and collapse, regenerate and reform, in a protean display of technical virtuosity and human fragility.
“Deepstaria” had its premiere on Saturday night as the opener of the 44th Montpellier Danse festival, one of the most important events on the European dance scene.
This year’s festival, which runs through July 6, is the last directed by Jean-Paul Montanari, who has been shaping Montpellier Danse since 1983, nearly the entirety of its history. (The festival was founded in 1981.) For his final turn, he has done something unusual for Montpellier: programmed almost entirely new or recently created work. Although it is difficult to think about the beauties of dance when “faced with the horrors of the world,” he writes in the program, artists live to make work: “A festival without creation isn’t a festival, it’s a catalog.” (There is no word yet on Montanari’s successor.)
And while “Deepstaria,” named after a translucent-skinned jellyfish, takes us into other worlds through effects of sound, design and light, its focus is deeply, touchingly, human, underlining Montanari’s suggestion that creation is a form of resistance to the horrors around us.
The work opens with a man and woman moving in a space of depthless, inky blackness. The effect comes from a back panel coated in Vantablack, the darkest material ever created, which reflects almost no light and makes dimensions disappear into a featureless void. A low electronic hum is permeated by foley sound effects: knocking, clicking, creaking, scratching. The pair dance together, bodies curving, heads ducking, legs circling, then give way to others, who sweep across the stage alone or in pairs, dressed in the briefest of black briefs and bras.
The movement here is hyperkinetic and complex, combining the precarious off-balance extensions and dynamic extremes that William Forsythe brought to ballet technique with the fluid, fissured, morphing shapes peculiar to McGregor.
In many McGregor pieces, the effect of all this detail can be dulling; after a while it’s just a blur of bodies. But his work for ballet companies — he has been resident choreographer of the Royal Ballet since 2006 — tends to be more legible. (His “Woolf Works,” created for the Royal in 2015, opens this week in New York as part of American Ballet Theater’s season at the Metropolitan Opera House.)
“Deepstaria,” the best work I’ve seen by McGregor for his own company, seems to draw from this balletic clarity. Its first section offers wheeling, dipping solos, duos and trios from the uniformly superb dancers, and a beautiful double pas de deux, in which the couples move in and out of sync, punctuated by blackouts. (The inventive lighting is by Theresa Baumgartner.)
A second section opens with gentler, diffused lighting cocooning two men (Salvatore De Simone and Jasiah Marshall, both gorgeous), dressed in transparent white tops and trousers. Their long, tender duo, to calm, slow sound, is full of dynamic contrasts: high, balletic extensions, melting collapses, sharp jumps, delicate picky steps.
The men leave the stage hand-in-hand; we are back in a human world of emotion and connection, underscored by the pounding heartbeat sounds of the score as dancers crisscross the stage with clean, balletic jumps, and two women move in a cone of reddish light with slow, uncertain grace. The lights dim and the sound of breathing fills the air, the lights flaring with each breath. Mortality and vulnerability loom.
When the lights come up again, we’re underwater (or perhaps in amniotic fluid), in a hazy blue-lighted universe where dancers in short gauzy tunics form anemone-like flowering shapes with their hands and wrists. (The wordless singing sound here feels sentimental: The soundscape, created by Nicolas Becker and LEXX, uses artificial intelligence to recompose itself at each performance to create a “live” music effect.)
That movement expands to full-body swaying, curving, back-bending groupings. But by the end of “Deepstaria,” McGregor has moved back into kinetic overdrive, amplified by flickering lights that create a rain-like effect. It’s beautiful and it’s too much. Relief comes with a final, lyrical, tentative solo from Rebecca Bassett-Graham, before she walks toward the black depths of the stage.
Like many McGregor works, “Deepstaria” can feel overloaded. But there is something deeply touching here in the presentation of the human body — so small and frail amid the voids beyond our knowledge and imaginative grasp, yet also so ingenious, resolute and brave.
Also on the opening weekend came a recent work from the Berlin-based, South African choreographer Robyn Orlin, “how in salts desert is it possible to blossom,” which uses the talents of the Garage Dance Ensemble and the uKhoiKhoi musical duo, from a small town in the semidesert region of the Northern Cape. (The title comes from the magnificent display of wildflowers that bloom there every spring.)
The music, and in particular the singing of Anelisa Stuurman, is wonderful, every dancer feels individual, and vivid video (by Eric Perroys) accents the show. It’s rambunctious and charming, evoking the warmth, humor and resilience of its Coloured (a multiracial classification used in the country) inhabitants. It’s also far less sharply pointed than most of Orlin’s work, and for an audience unaware of the legacies of apartheid for the Coloured population, less resonant.
The premiere of Saburo Teshigawara’s “Voice of Desert” on Saturday almost didn’t happen when rain threatened the performance at the open-air Agora Theater. It stopped in time, but the reminder of the elements felt curiously apt. Teshigawara’s work feels like part of nature; the movement of his body — and those of his dancers — is less about physical shape than a habitation and shifting of the space.
Teshigawara, who at 70 still performs, can move with flowing liquidity and Chaplinesque jerkiness; the tendrilly, drifting movement of his close collaborator Rihoko Sato feels as if born on wind or water. Three more performers creep along a back wall or move with manic intensity. Extracts from Bach’s “Chaconne in D minor,” and from Ravel’s “In G Major,” are interwoven with electronic hums and the sounds of wind.
Nothing happens, everything happens. The mind can drift like the bodies over a landscape of physical and mental sensation. It was a fine end to the first weekend of a fine festival beginning.
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