“5 Soldiers”
Rosie Kay Dance Company
Kunsthaus Tacheles
23 April 2011
The audience enters a space which appears remarkably clean and well-funded in distinction to the grafittied exterior and a bathroom with no working soap dispensers (though there was a bottle of dish soap on one of the sinks). Somehow a ,33 liter bottle of beer was still €3, but I think the bartender calculated a generous tip into the price. I chose a seat on the front row for leg room, because it was easiest to get to, and because I’m finding you really can’t be too close to these black-box productions. The seats were plastic and cupped. I noticed at some point I’d slumped so far down in my chair that I must have looked like a kid who didn’t want to be called on in class. I thought of my tight lower back that keeps me from folding far into hamstring stretches, how sitting like this exacerbates my tendency to slump and allows my lower back to remain inflexible.
We entered to see dancers were dressed in army fatigues messing with their gear and engaging in brief flurries of exercises. While watching one of them do sit ups, I thought that this was the beginning of a show. Dance is Pilates-informed; we never do sit-ups, never let our rectal sheathes “pop out,” but instead do slow exercises which build “core muscles” which draw the abdomen instead in. Another did push-ups with widened arms. Again in my experience, dance classes usually involve “triceps pushups” if any at all, where the hands are placed beneath the armpits.
I found myself tempted by a kind of binary I usually eschew (and really hate): dance is graceful, manly men are not. To dress this binary up a bit more, the sensibility required for dance seems to run counter to the desensitivity inculcated for military life: not just stab and kill, but the idea that you would have your soldiers, whom you would apparently want to keep healthy, run for miles in combat boots. The male dancers in 5 Soldiers maintained manly and straight composure throughout the piece. Their grunting and screaming were convincing. They also choreographed sexual scenarios before the sole female character in order to entice or intimidate her, which I found completely reflective of the homo-philia exercised in locker rooms and bars by patently homophobic, proudly heterosexual men. I mention this in part because I’ve come to loathe watching men who seem very not at home with playing manly men. It’s less the indignation of a black man watching a white man trying to be black than the incredulity of someone of another ethnicity watching the same effort.
The presence of a female soldier was a powerful component in the dynamic. That she was very attractive opened me up on different levels as a spectator. She did boy push-up like a girl: lowering her head a bit to give the sensation of going all the way down to the floor. And it was through watching her that I realized that these weren’t real fatigues, but costumes. The cloth looked thin around her behind, which showed curvature rather than being pressed down by uncomplimentary, one-size fits all dungarees. A standout for me in terms of a masterful handling of an aesthetically volatile subject was an incredibly well engineered night scene. The female dancer powdered all of her visible body, the sweet fragrance slowly wafted towards me, evocative of femininity in general, of every woman I’ve ever wanted or just femininity, the lightness that is everywhere in the room and nowhere to be seen. The four men approached her like something of a mob (though I remember thinking I wish it were more so, like the three men of the firing squad who’ve morphed into a multi-legged monster in Goya’s “The Executions of the Third of May). There was a great use of comic relief—relief in sense of contrast to bring out certain features (like a bas relief), not just a holiday. This was when one of the soldiers started clowning and showing off for her a bit more. The Goya-monster was dismantled, and had turned into a harmless man-child. However out of this clowning (and clowns are terrifying, as any child knows!) came a new monster, more aggressive, more determined. Rape, even its possibility, is terribly difficult to treat as an artistic subject without treading too close to voyeurism or victimization. For me this scene was a real testament to Kay’s maturity and artistry.
Another memorable aspect of the performance was the younger man’s body language as they were walking on a patrol. He was so anxious to see everything that he didn’t allow himself to blink. His neck was hinged back and locked into position. I know this feeling. The constriction in the chest because I’m taking short quick breaths that don’t descend far down into my lungs, always ready to flinch and tighten. Hearing your own breath, but trying to open your ears because your life depends on your aural sense. Trying to keep cool, but scared shitless.
Sound crescendos, then an explosive flash of light towards the audience. The boy lies on the ground, then goes into spasms. Moaning, as I recall, but not screaming. This hit me on a level that wasn’t so much empathizing, certainly not with the person on stage (whom I didn’t think to be in any pain), though I did feel a modicum of empathy for the Private Ryan character who went down. What it was more effective as was a kind of searing quality. The idea that when people are blown up, they do something much like this. The others gathered around him, put his legs in a sling. Much of that empathy was lost by over efforting in the final scene. He was trying to walk on his stumps and falling, loudly on a stage whose percussive qualities we’d all come to know through the 10 minutes of drill formations in the beginning. He’d fall and land harder than he needed, his hands gnarled, his arms stiff. It was as if he’d lost supporting reflexes, or they’d be slowed, but that doesn’t seem to me to be an effect of losing limbs. I started to feel as if I was being taken for a ride, and the scene seemed to go on longer than it needed. The lights dimmed as he struggled and fell. Someone began clapping loudly, somewhat slowly behind me, before the lights had gone all the way down. It seemed very rude to me, impatient with the piece, and perhaps a bit sarcastic. I imagined a portly man with a moustache, but I think there were only two women in their late 20’s who could have been the culprits. At any rate, the reception in Berlin was cool: they only brought them back out twice. Berlin doesn’t like dance or expression in their post-Expressionistic dance, and this British import committed both sins.
0 comments:
Post a Comment