Editta Braun company’s ‘Close up’ (Christiana Bissett)

My highlight of the evening, festival and most likely one of the best dance works I will see in 2016 was Editta Braun company’s ‘Close up’. The work starts powerfuly as a writhing pile of rubble throbs to the time of AyseDeniz’s charged piano performance. Any imaginings of what lies underneath, perhaps informed by  five children and it, are surpassed. As bodiless limbs emerge from the pile, seemingly unhindered by the rigidity enforced by the rest of the skeleton, this skillful re-writing of the the female body builds a steady momentum.

editta braun company & AyseDeniz: CLOSE UP

Gold glossed nails suggest a sci fi feel and the creeping toes over the lid of the piano took on the feel of playful alien lifeforms. Backs, bums and barnets dance themselves into endless shapes and forms, and despite the three naked female bodies on stage, sexualisation is completely surpassed, these bodies re-write themselves. Humour breaks the hypnotic spell as the classical notes inspired by  Chopin and Rachmaninoff slide into a chirpy “billy jean’ and the bodies bop along. This skillful break in tension allows us as audience to take a little distance, to compare the difference in how we normally approach the female body, to remind ourselves that the lines and curves we follow normally in dance work are a social understanding of the body.

The uniformity of the dancers is challenged with individual tweaks to each performer’s movements. It prompts me to think of group identities and herd mentalities, how much our relationships with movement, our bodies, and much of our daily existence is based on copying, mimicking and fitting in. Moments of intimacy and rivalry are established even in this abstract form and are strongly moving too.

 

The third performance in a series by the company, this was the work’s UK debut. It reminded of high standards of international touring work and prompted me to ask why venues at home aren’t receiving more of this crucial standard of work. As the audience applauds, the curtain call allows us a glimpse for the first time at the dancers faces, an almost uncomfortable difference from the featureless creatures on stage. We leave the space as though returning from a parallel universe.

Close Up

 

AyseDeniz and Editta Braun (AUS)

images: Andy Catlin

words: Gwyneth Paltrow/Ellen Degeneres

Sequential Dramaturgy: Gareth K Vile

My Top Five Manipulate Moments

Coming in at number five, we have the invitation by a bewigged Cupid to the audience to ‘come and have a feel of the puppets’ (Bestiares). Only moments earlier, when the performers took their bow, I turned to Elliot Roberts and asked ‘where are the other two?’ before realising that Hades and Persephone were, in fact, the foamy objects on the stage and not, in fact, real people.

At number four, it’s Paper Doll Militia’s name. Sure, they are great at the aerial action, swinging on silks and spinning through the air, but the mash-up of hardcore action and gentle childhood toy makes their name one of the most evocative tags since cabaret-punk or progressive rock. But unlike the latter, they delivered on the promise.

An odd entry at number three: not getting tickets to Grit. I might have been sorry to miss the show – a moving reflection on war and childhood, but it is wonderful that a Scottish based company are selling out at a festival that has plenty of international presence. 

In at two, there’s Lonely Bones in the Tilt your Thinking compilation of animated shorts. I have always wanted to know what would happen if Nick Cave made a feature with David Lynch, and Rosto’s disorientating journey through multiple animation techniques, leering ghosts and vague occultists felt like a jam between a group of surrealists and the cast of the grand guignol.

But coming out at the top of the charts, it has to be the monstrous moment of monolithic mayhem when Planet Luvos went underwater and the five dancers became twisted creatures with hands for legs and bottoms for eyes. Neither horrific nor soothing, the contortions went beyond being impressive to staking out new ground for manipulation of the human body.

Planet Luvos (review by Loic G. Lalande)

Blue, it’s going to be blue.

Black and blue of the still empty stage waiting for the last piece of the festival to unfold.

A pile of hundreds of little blue blocks, three blue buckets hanging to the ceiling high above, blue smoke.

Ding dong, welcome to Planet Luvos.

In 70 minutes, I am going to leave the theatre in a very curious state: bumpy emotions, strange feelings and the knowledge that this work is unique. Yes, find me another dance piece where the emphasis of the choreographer is strongly – and radically – on the backs, feet and bottoms of the performers’ body.

Good luck, the only reference I have for such a different work is by Les Gens d‘Uterpan company.

Planet Luvos features a cast of five female performers in a very strong and physically demanding work by Editta Braun company. Far beyond regular patterns of dance performances, a very precise choreography unfolds with a narrative, a purpose, a statement: this is a human devolution – from the absurdity and the slavery of the machine to the peace and unity of primitive states.

There are clearly two distinct parts in the piece. First: earthlings, boiler suits, dance movements and physicality subtly inviting to focus on irregular dancers’ body parts whilst keeping  within the canon of choreography with lines into spaces, geometric disposition of the dancers, and a quite common fluidity of movement and expression. Through an echo of Orwell’s 1984, the narrative drifts to mammals ape like vocabulary with the dancers hunting and gathering pieces of a painting, too small for such a large stage –  but I can still guess it’s some sort of a wave. Pleasant, but the strong impression from the start of the piece has faded slightly, until…

Now a pile of blue blocks is scattered all over the stage, in a feline circular move by a soloist. She dances in what the soundtrack strongly suggests is the sea. It’s a feature of Planet Luvos to have this very present soundtrack that stirs emotions and imagery, slightly too grossly at times and reducing the scope for imagination.

The four other bodies enter the back of the stage, in a staggering line of larvae slugging their way and shedding their skins. Part two has begun; visual, intense, imaginative and sensual floor work.

Only feet, legs, bottoms and backs of the bodies. The human specie has disappeared, literally. So have my regular patterns of thoughts. The imagination enters an aquatic inviting space with a succession of creatures highlighted by the shapes, the move or the line of a body part, the subtle, slow and calculated motions… A protean bestiary where the bold and the intense mix with peaceful and harmonious emotions. The discreet light work stresses the intention and the invitation back into a primitive, cellular state.

The piece ends, the three blue buckets are still hanging to the ceiling high above. I am hanging a bit as well, somewhere possibly higher and lighter.

Blue, it was going to be blue.

Planet Luvos is well worth visiting.

Luvos and the Body (Marie Yan)

I’m still thinking about what I saw last night. For sure, the promise of a show featuring almost fully naked performers attracted my curiosity as much as my suspicion, considering the often unnecessary use of nakedness that I have encountered in other shows.

At first, I am enraptured by the opening of the piece: obscure figures in a dim light scrub what could have been the deck of a boat, suggested by the wooden-cracking sounds in the background. But as soon as the light comes up, a different story starts. Five women in bodysuits are crawling their way on stage. They eventually get undressed, except for a nude coloured underwear, and simultaneously, are not to show their faces again to the audience as they start bringing to life a strange new environment inhabited by living forms shaped by their anonymous squirming bodies.

Planet Luvos is clearly the result of a hard and uncompromising work: a courageous exploration of the possibilities of what a body, as a raw material can evoke. The performance delivered by the five dancers of Editta Braun’s company is stunning and each scene is disturbingly eye-catching. But – and this  keeps bothering me – I felt uncomfortable watching most of the piece, not to mention slightly bored, but the first feeling couldn’t probably come without the other and the reason for my uneasiness.

It’s nothing to do with prudery. It’s probably more to do with the process of having five female dancers first being characters and then becoming dishumanised bodies without the process seeming to be a political statement. Can a piece be politically neutral when five female dancers are, not only undressed, but also have their identity veiled to create pictures of seamless harmony? Is it not what happens everyday in advertising and that art should fight against? Undoubtedly, an artist as recognised as Editta Braun is fully aware of these issues and dance and creation in themselves are already a critic of the reification of the human body, but, still, the impression lingers that, as it is, the piece stages a brutal process of humans, women, losing their identities for the sake of aestheticism.

I wonder what would have been my reaction if the dancers have had theirs faces dissimulated from the very beginning. I’d like to have appreciated this company’s piece as much as I respect the work behind a production of such visual perfection, but I can’t ignore the feeling that the piece may have not weighed enough its political subtext.

Luving the Alien

Editta Braun’s company is returning to manipulate with another entry in their Luvos series: Planet Luvos takes up where Luvos (seen at manipulate 2012) left off: what seems to be the last woman on earth is confronted by the next stages of evolution in a world mysterious and uterine.

 

I was delighted to receive an interview with Editta Braun via her dramaturg: Gerda Poschmann-Richenau performs one of the most important unsung roles in theatre-making. While some British companies haven’t quite worked out how a dramaturg might operate in their productions, international companies see them as crucial: the lack of theatrical flab in Planet Luvos is a sign of an active dramaturg at work.

 

Editta Braun has been working her distinctive seam of physical theatre since the 1980s. Inspired by the legendary dance-theatre of Pina Bausch, and fitting in the same tradition of choreographers who admit no boundaries or rules, Braun has become famous for the energy of her creativity – since 1989, the company has produced a show per year and toured the world – and the broad collaborations, which often engage African and Asian artists mixing their work with a central European aesthetic.

 

Braun acknowledges that it is hard to pin down her style: there are no artists that she recognises as working in a similar way. The Luvos shows follow a distinctive and unique process. ‘The world of Luvos is a very particular one, following its own laws that only (female) dancers who have known this specific experience are able to understand,’ she says. ‘As a choreographer, I have built and am still building up experiences from one Luvos-project to the next one, this allowing me to plunge even deeper and to create images that are visibly – at least for me – new, as if drawing pictures with the bodies, shaping the space.’

Nevertheless, and appropriately given the production’s interest in natural selection, the work has evolved into its latest incarnation. ‘Planet LUVOS confronts for the first time a human being (an upstanding female dancer, recognizable as a human being) with the strange creatures of the Luvos-world, thus making way for a kind of “dialogue” between the human world and the different one.’

 

Apart from opening up this new dialogue, Planet Luvos has a new ambience. Braunn continues: ‘What’s crucial besides the specific body language is Thierry Zaboitzeff’s composition that locates this Planet Luvos in a new way – somewhere underwater.’