• Photo:  Danny Willems
    Photo: Danny Willems
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Ultima Vez: What the Body Does not Remember -
Adelaide Festival -
Dunstan Playhouse, 10 March -

A unifying element in this intriguing work is the reliance on split-second timing for effect. It is the same element that jugglers and trapeze artists use to keep us on the edge of our seats, the same element in dangerous acts where a wrong move or too-slow reflex can be the difference between life and death. In What the Body Does not Remember it similarly intrigues, delights and threatens us with disaster.

What the Body Does not Remember was Vanderkeybus’s first work for this company when he formed it back in 1987. It begins with two male dancers coming on stage and lying down. A woman sits at a desk centre back behind them. She slides and slams her hands on the desk; the sound is amplified, and the two men’s bodies toss and roll in response, though they never look at her. The effect is sinister, as if they are being manipulated by her, objects of her torture. It is as if the sound is attached to their bodies.

The mood becomes much lighter with the following scene, in which a lone dancer enters the stage carrying white oblong blocks on which to place his feet as he walks. He is gradually joined by the rest of the nine member ensemble, all carrying their own blocks of various sizes. Soon they are swapping blocks, balancing on blocks, throwing blocks across the stage to each other while running around the stage and catching them just in the nick of time. It is like an enormous juggling act.

The blocks are whisked away and the dancers begin a lengthy scene in which they parade continuously in a diagonal line across the stage, like passers-by in life, putting on suit jackets and taking them off, swapping them, stealing them, replacing them on someone else. Next they are carrying towels, bright blocks of colour; they are twisted over the head, folded into squares, draped over the shoulders. It makes compelling viewing – a beautifully complex embroidery of movement out of the repetition of simple actions with ordinary items.

The next scene returns to a more sinister mood. Unwanted male attention is brushed off, avoided, repulsed by the women with quick flicks of their body and hair. This is followed by a sweet scene in which three dancers each keep a single white feather afloat with their breath, another kind of balancing act, Next a man sits in a chair, but he is the mirror of those who try to imitate him, in a strange reversal of order. The work closes with a long scene with half the dancers jumping and violently slamming their feet into the floor, narrowly missing the bodies of their partners rolling around beneath them.

Though What the Body Does not Remember has many dark moments, it also has a delightful absurdism, reminiscent at times of the surrealism of Magritte. Though the work is more movement theatre than dance, the patterns of movement are undoubtedly choreographed and cleverly crafted. The whole work is like a complicated but well-oiled mechanism of many moving parts, in which the reflex movement and the sudden slip are only a second apart. Or possibly the same thing.

- KAREN VAN  ULZEN

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