Holland Dance: tradition and history in strong contemporary interpretations

This year, the Holland Dance Festival had to constantly maneuver around the various obstacles (early closing time of the theaters, limited room occupancy) and setbacks due to Covid (infections and the loss of main guest Carlos Acosta), after which storm Eunice caused some cancellations as an encore. However, the last of the 60 performances were finally able to be played to full houses, with ticket sales reaching around 15,000 and the tour of the wits having been brought to a successful conclusion in spite of everything.

A nice line in this year’s festival was the look at the past, with performances that in one way or another refer to dance history and tradition. Closing with the revival of rarely performed choreographies by the queen of minimal dance, Lucinda Childs.

The refined forty-plus dance veterans of DanceOn, an international company, draw in the viewer Works in Silence along in their repetitive patterns of sitting, lying, standing, walking, skipping, pivoting and turning. Deceptively simple-looking movement themes, in fact maddeningly complex due to the constantly changing spatial direction and grouping and rhythms, are executed flawlessly. Only the sound of breath and feet offers some support – no wonder that the audience in the sixties and seventies was taken by surprise, or outraged by this radical but light-footed exercise.

In Life: a love letter to Merce Cunningham the juggling dancers and dancing jugglers of London’s Gandini Juggling honor another icon of American modern dance. The isolations, diagonal lines, long-held balances and hulls that move like a lever: everything is there. But then combined with juggling tricks with balls, rings (wonderful!) and skittles. A wonderful find, which remarkably enough underlines Cunningham’s ideas about dance as purely physical action, without story or psychology. For example, if from a balance position a leg is carefully inserted through a stopped ring.

Of course you can also reinterpret. That’s what Marco Goecke, Marie Chouinard, Hofesh Shechter and Cayetano Soto do in Swan Lakes† Artistic director Eric Gauthier of Gauthier Dance from Stuttgart asked these contemporary trendsetters to shed light on the nineteenth-century ‘ballet of ballets’ in twenty minutes. Everyone chose their own angle, with the most original result by far Le chant du cygne: le lac from Choinard. Against the background of a sea of ​​flames, the Canadian enfant terrible at age (66) has eight dancers crawl onto the stage and drape themselves laboriously over a plinth. With one ballet spitz taped to one hand, the other to one foot, they step about like unhappy dolls with floppy wings. Their stiffly protruding tutu draws attention, increasingly emphatically, to their bodies in ‘nude’ underwear. Until they have had enough of being viewed as an object of sex and turn to the audience with piercing fingers and contorted faces and bam!, in unison shout a diatribe against rape violence: “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t because of my clothes, the rapist are you!” No further explanation, and especially with the feminist iconoclaste Chouinard.

The other three works are fine, but much less surprising. Swan Cake van Shechter even looks easygoing.

The bronze warrior beheaded

The curious hybrid performance A taste of Ted by Jérôme Brabant and Maud Pizon/Compagnie l’Octagonale is limping on quite a few thoughts: is it a lecture performance, a reconstruction or a parody of works by the American dance pioneer Ted Shawn? At the beginning of the last century, with his wife Ruth St. Denis and without scruples about ‘cultural appropriation’, he injected choreographies with (authentic or otherwise) elements from Asian, African and American Indian dances. That could be very interesting, but because of the mediocre (‘humorous’) presentation and fun-loving pianist, the duo misses the point.

The French company (LA)HORDE/Ballet de Marseille delves even further into history. In Marry me in Bassiani they hark back to traditional Georgian dances, which took on a socio-political charge in that country due to Soviet repression and were used in 2018 as a protest against the police raid on the popular Bassiani club in Tbilisi. Performed by a group of former dancers of the Georgian national ballet, the piece initially looks like a kind of ‘Pina Bausch in Georgia’: a wedding, festive clothing, the guests trickle in, greetings, dancing. Until the bride is carried behind like a kind of Marianne to an equestrian statue, where she beheads the bronze warrior, the ruler. Then it goes wild, more and more intense, with wild jumps and dizzying spin combinations.

That’s how current age-old folkloric dance can be. Tribute.