fri 29/03/2024

Pénombre, Rosalba Torres Guerrero & Lucas Racasse, Sadler's Wells | reviews, news & interviews

Pénombre, Rosalba Torres Guerrero & Lucas Racasse, Sadler's Wells

Pénombre, Rosalba Torres Guerrero & Lucas Racasse, Sadler's Wells

A dance vision has all the occluded focus of a dream

Pénombre, penumbra: "The partially shaded region around the shadow of an opaque body, when the light source is larger than a point source and only part of its light is cut off (contrasted with the full shadow or umbra)." Pénombre, penumbra: "An area where shade blends with light; a shadowy area." Pénombre, penumbra: "A faint intimation of something undesirable; a peripheral region of uncertain extent; a group of things only partially belonging to some central thing." So even as we start, we are already in the shadows.

With Ballets C de la B, you never quite know what you are going to get. The Belgian company was, famously, started on a dare: founder Alain Platel (then a teacher) hated a Béjart performance he saw, and was taunted, "Do better yourself then." He decided he would and, as you do, he set up his own company. His own choreography can be fun, showboaty, stimulating and annoying. He has also nurtured such stellar performance and choreographic talents as Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (now performing in the main theatre at Sadler's Wells).

penombre_perfFor this evening the Swiss-Franco-Spanish dancer Rosalba Torres Guerrero has teamed up with French video artist Lucas Racasse in her first outing as choreographer (she is also the solo performer, with film appearances by Uiko Watanabe) (pictured right). The attempt here is to integrate not merely dance and film, but also the place where life and death intersects, where dawn and dusk, waking and sleeping all meet. Quite a tall order.


Torres Guerrero appears, naked except for a pair of flesh-coloured pants: she seems to be still dreaming, still sleeping; with her is what the programme describes as a "textile sculpture" (designed by Sara Judice de Menezes), but which unfortunately resembles nothing so much as an ambulant toupée as Torres Guerrero crawls under it, manipulating it, hiding, being hidden. She is a formidable physical presence (she danced with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker’s Rosas), and some of the slow unfolding movements have an austere beauty. There are also moments of Magritte-ish surreal dislocations, when the sculpture/costume appears to become a dog finished off by her human legs, or is worn on her head as a shaman’s animist totem.

Ernst_KikiTwo of the most remarkable moments are filmic, when projections, first of Watanabe, curled, foetus-like, float across Torres Guerrero’s back, then up her front, along her belly, until she snatches it and extinguishes it. The very final image, too, has the dancer standing still, as a second body is projected on her own, her second pair of hands grasping at her throat, touching her breast; the second pair of breasts lifts, moves, merges in a haunting, more than somewhat creepy image – part Gray’s Anatomy textbook, part Max Ernst Kiki de Montparnasse (pictured left).

But for the most part, much of what occurs seems to have the same sorts of meanings as dreams do – when you say the next morning, "Oh, I dreamed of you, and you were a duck, but you weren’t really a duck, and then you turned into a castle." Whatever emotional responses the dreamer had when asleep generally fail to be conveyed to the listener: dream language is entirely personal, locked in, and requires a leap of imaginative transformation to convey it to others. This failure to leap is what makes so much Surrealist art so dull.

Torres Guerrero’s dancing draws on a repeated vocabulary of gestures which clearly have great meaning for her and for those involved, but it is impossible even to guess at what they might signify – they appear in a vacuum of dream-expression, and simply expire from lack of air, lack of any cues for the audience to pin them on.

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