PRESS REVIEWS
The Independent, 19.2.2007
Jenny Gilbert
Beware of falling dancers
At first you have to doubt what you're seeing. A man has just hurled a brick across the stage, a distance of some 20 metres, and if it doesn't actually decapitate someone then it's sure to make a hole in the floor. By some miracle it just misses a woman's head as she darts away and someone else dashes forward to catch it, only to send it flying back in a great arching trajectory whose end point looks certain to be where a man is obliviously putting on his jacket. A hundredth of a second before the thing fells him, he is shoved clear by another body which charges from the wings with the force of an InterCity train. Soon the air is thick with flying missiles, the floor a frenzy of ducking and sprinting and catching and chucking. Think what Andrew Flintoff could do with fielders such as these.
Physical risk is a fact of many dancers' lives, the difference between success and a broken neck a question of timing and trust. But don't we all enter that territory when we jaywalk on a busy street or cheat the closing doors on the tube? Wim Vandekeybus is fascinated by the fragility of human life, and its obverse, the body's resilience. Twenty years ago he was part of the Flemish New Wave that abandoned the formalities of modern dance for something more raw and instinctive. His latest piece, Spiegel, now on a UK tour, is a refashioning of key themes from two decades of work created with his company, Ultima Vez.
Its members don't resemble dancers so much as featherweight wrestlers. Three women in skimpy silk dresses and little boots hurl themselves with a fury across horizontal empty space, crash-landing on all fours and rolling away like a clutch of dropped pencils. Later, the same women appear as rigid objects, borne in the arms of men who handle them as if they were logs. As each man reaches the front of the stage, he drops his load, flump, on the floor. The further the women-objects have to fall, the more visible the impact, but still they don't flinch.
There is a great deal to make the spectator flinch in this show - you almost feel the bruises vicariously. At one point, men stamp about with work boots. narrowly missing bodies that lie on the floor. As if asleep, the bodies flip or twitch clear of injury at the last possible moment, only to position themselves unwittingly in the path of the next boot-fall. You're conscious of the softness of flesh, the brittleness of bone, the sheer wonder of the survival instinct.
But it's not all destructive violence. As if to remind us that yin will always have its yang, Vandekeybus also sets his cast gentler tasks - duetting with a wisp of smoke, say, or keeping an airborne feather aloft. Suddenly, after all that heavy falling, the women assume the power of vertical take-off, popping into the men's arms like Champagne corks before winding themselves, string-like, round their torsos. If proof were needed that almost any activity can be the stuff of theatre, then here is that proof, by turns terrifying and assuaging, visceral and meditative. And if Spiegel delivered powerfully in the big spaces of Sadler's Wells, how much more impressive will it be in smaller theatres.
There is more rough stuff across town at the Peacock Theatre, where the Korean Yegan Production Company has taken up residence with its martial arts show, Jump. They might equally have called it "Flip", "Kick", or "Running up Walls", because that's about all there is to it. It's essentially a showcase for the art of tae-kwon do, jollied up with some hoary vaudeville gags, a spoof of Crouching Tiger and a very silly plot.
Imagine British TV's My Family played out in suburban Seoul. Mum splits kitchen tiles with her karate chops. Daughter fends off unwelcome suitors with a volley of kicks to the head. Uncle is permanently drunk but does multiple back flips, and grandpa uses his walking stick for pole vaults.
Like any sitcom, Jump goes heavy on the comedy stereotypes. Mum is a sex maniac, and Dad never runs faster than when she's on the prowl. The boyfriend is a Clark Kent geek in glasses, but without them he's a snarling, sexed-up hunk. When a character gets knocked on the head, as happens with increasingly predictable frequency, the "bong" is followed by a tweeting of birds. Yet there's a kind of innocent charm in this crude cultural hybrid, and even if it doesn't make you laugh you can't dislike it. Things look up, plot-wise, in the second half with the arrival of a couple of bungling burglars, one of them far too fat, surely, to spring somersaults, but no. The finale is stupendous. They literally do run up the sitting-room walls. The injunction "Don't try this at home" was never more apt.
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Sheffield Star, 12.2.2007
John Highfield
IT means mirror, which is entirely appropriate for an extraordinary piece of dance that reflects on 20 years of Ultima Vez.
This new show is both a celebration and a journey for choreographer Wim Vanderkeybus and his company, revisiting some of his most acclaimed works and compressing them into 90 minutes of truly unforgettable theatre. By linking those pieces from the past, he creates a work that not only comments on developments in contemporary dance but also creates a striking, raunchy, punchy story of human growth and change.
From the primitive simple beat of the opening sequence through to the horrifying, almost cinematic melodrama of the meat hook climax – surely inspired by visions of Tobe Hooper's greatest screen excesses – it's a work that seizes hold of the imagination, creating images that linger long after the evening has ended.
Some passages are thrilling for their pure theatricality – the thrilling building block sequence is a masterpiece in the way it leaves the audience on the edge of its seats.
At other times, it can be moving, comic and profoundly disturbing, a dissection in dance of what makes men and women tick, creating passages that are raw, passionate and tantalisingly ambiguous.
At every moment Vanderkeybus makes great demands on his company – this is the sort of modern dance that can only be truly successful with complete precision.
And as he creates a linear thread that draws us towards a stunning climax, he puts his company into some of the most memorable poses you'll see in dance this year.
By the time we reach the climax and a moment when the cast seem to almost literally shed their skins to reveal the workings of the soul, you'll feel both drained and exhilarated.
This is as good as contemporary dance can get…thanks to Danceworks for bringing it to Sheffield.
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Financial Times , 13.2.2007
Jonathan Gray
A creative force in European contemporary dance and physical theatre, Wim Vandekeybus celebrates 20 years of invention in his new show Spiegel, seen for the first time in Britain at Sadler’s Wells on Friday night. Vandekeybus came to prominence dancing as one of the two naked kings in Jan Fabre’s 1985 The Power of Theatrical Madness, and subsequently founded his own company, Ultima Vez, in Madrid the following year. Exploring the darker side of the human psyche in similar fashion to his near contemporary, DV8’s Lloyd Newson, Vandekeybus’s dances combine startling and often extreme imagery with highly physical and dangerous looking movement that is almost as exhausting for the audience to watch as it is for the dancers to perform.
Spiegel incorporates a selection of dances from previous Ultima Vez shows, almost in a “greatest hits” format, and although the production feels all of a piece, it shows us that Vandekeybus’s consistently bleak, raw and brutal vision of the world has hardly changed with time. This is a world with very little humour or tenderness. The excellent cast of nine dancers roll on the floor, jump with psychotic intent into the air or into each other’s arms, hang upside down from a suspended chair, throw bricks at each other with abandon and support each other at acute angles to the floor with all the tensions of straining tectonic plates. They look disturbed and indifferent to each other, and with this stressed vocabulary Vandekeybus suggests a society at breaking point. The physical prowess of the performers is exciting, but frightening to watch. While witnessing the dancing, your stomach churns as it would at a particularly disturbing and gruesome slasher film.
As Spiegel nears its conclusion, moving towards ever darker and more macabre imagery, the dancers hang their bodies above the stage on suspended hooks like meat in a butcher’s shop. They mime the carving up of each other’s flesh, and then strip naked in front of a livid red backdrop. Although I was utterly admiring of the dedication of the dancers, this unsettling and sometimes seemingly misogynistic vision of humanity was often hard to watch.
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Evening Standard, 12.2.2007
Sarah Frater
The heart leaps as the bricks fly
You can't quite believe what you're seeing. On the Sadler's Wells stage two men with the insouciant swagger of Jay Kay are throwing stones at each other.
Well, not exactly stones, more like breeze blocks. They hurl them at full force across the stage, the thrust and effort visible in the throw, and the force of momentum clear in the catch.
It's genuinely risky, a risk doubled when the bricks almost scalp the heads of female dancers who are ferociously running by.
It's often said that Wim Vandekeybus brings real danger to the stage, pushing his dancers to their physical limits, having them strain and fall, and then duck incoming house bricks, then run a relay race with them, then throw them randomly across the stage for anyone, anywhere to catch.
This combat-as-choreography approach was thrillingly, unsettlingly clear during the 90-minute Spiegel, a retrospective of Ultima Vez excerpts from the past 20 years.
Clearer still was his ingenuity and humour, both of which you easily forget amid his choreographic battlefield.
Who would think of choreographing with bricks? Who would think of following it with a dancer gently blowing a tiny white feather across the stage, never letting its gossamer fronds tickle the floor.
The improbability of the elements, the weight and float, the contrast and release, remind you that Vandekeybus is not only showing how the body moves, but how the heart leaps.
Wim Vandekeybus was part of the Flemish New Wave in the 1980s that abandoned the academic refinements of modern dance and gave us the nonchalance of skateboarders and the impact of military assault.
This, and the bed-sit chic, is not everyone's cup of tea, but Spiegel (meaning "mirror") reveals the energy and strength of the body, as well as its gentleness, and the inherent mystery of it being our home.
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The Times , 13.2.2007
Donald Hutera at Sadler’s Wells
Twenty years ago Wim Vandekeybus’s company Ulitma Vez (Spanish for “the last time”) muscled its way onto the international dance scene. With its breathless running, rolling and hurtling bodies hurling bricks, the young Flemish choreographer’s danger-courting physical language immediately caught fire. So pervasive was its influence on other dance-makers that some wag even coined a term for it: Euro-crash.
Vandekeybus has been working steadily ever since. His latest production, Spiegel (German for “mirror”), is a sort of choreographic Frankenstein’s monster sewn together from a half-dozen shows created during his company’s first 15 years. It tours the UK until March 17.
The 90-minute performance contains some classic episodes. It starts strongly with a potentially vicious game of hopscotch. A stomping man alarms a woman peacefully curled up on stage. Floor-bound, she dodges his threatening feet. Others appear, echoing their roles. Soon everyone is lying flat and sliding around like fast, determined slugs. Eventually they pair up, pushing hard into each other until bodies are practically parallel to the floor. Ominous rumbles underscore the almighty struggle.
Repeatedly Vandekeybus makes us acutely aware of gravity, whether of flesh or a feather, and speed. A man unceremoniously dumps three limp women onto the stage before hoisting himself onto a chair hanging upside-down on a chain. Hair and limbs flying, the women rise, stagger, fall and roll as if compelled by unseen forces. They’re replaced by a male quintet whose rough tactility exposes the competitive aggressions inside laddish behaviour. Then come the bricks. Some dancers use them as stepping stones. What thrills the audience is the seemingly reckless expertise with which they’re caught when thrown across the stage. Or catapulted overhead by performers rescued from serious injury in the nick of time.
Vendekeybus’s anniversary remix doesn’t quite sustain itself, but it’s full of strong images and actions. That his high-impact tactics have retained power and vitality is in no small part thanks to the remarkable trust between nine lightning-quick dancers. Halved oranges are used as a metaphor for finding one’s soulmate. A man writes in the air with a joss stick. After some accelerated, brutish tango-jive duets the evening climaxes in a somewhat forced state of ensemble emergency. Hearts are mimetically ripped out and throats cut against a membrane-red back wall, like a war-torn Valentine’s Day.
Read online
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The Guardian , 12.2.2007
Judith Mackrell
Twenty years ago, with the premiere of What the Body Does Not Remember, Wim Vandekeybus brought into focus a whole new genre of modern dance. Referred to by sceptics as "Eurocrash" and as "Flemish new wave" by the more respectful, this was choreography that viewed the body as an emotional battlefield, and performance as a kind of extreme sport. Combat rolls, breakneck sprints and savagely wrestled duets became the defining vocabulary of a new generation.
In his latest work, Spiegel, Vandekeybus casts a backward look over his long and influential career, weaving together material from six different productions. As a retrospective, it is hardly a cosy exercise in nostalgia. The show opens with one of the most unnerving images Vandekeybus ever created: a group of dancers lying prone on the floor are forced into flinching, twitching self-defence by their partners, who trample a violent war dance around their vulnerable limbs.
It would be wrong, however, to portray Vandekeybus's world as one giant Lord of the Flies-style playground. A fragment from the fine 1999 work In Spite of Wishing and Wanting is a delicately nuanced portrait of a man imagining himself into the skittish, fabulously powerful body of a horse. A combative male quintet comes inflected with a folksy lilt, which captures something sweetly and unguardedly exuberant about the men's relationships.
Yet there are also strict limits to the choreography, which this 90-minute retrospective can't help but expose. It becomes clear, for instance, that Vandekeybus doesn't write particularly inventively for women - in one section they are merely dead flesh, to be dumped callously on to the floor. The male-female duets tend to reduce to a basic, angry grapple; and overall there is a default, monochrome rhythm to which much of the dancing reverts.
To the legions of Vandekeybus fans this will be irrelevant, given the sheer physical blast unleashed by Spiegel. But another problem created by this retrospective format is that Vandekeybus is forced to present his material out of context. Unless you are a Eurocrash junkie, the energy expended feels, by the end, both relentless, and a little bit pointless. It is not just the dancers who are put through an assault course.
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De Morgen, 03.10.2006
‘Spiegel’ by Wim Vandekeybus
THE TWENTY YEARS OF THE TENDER AND VIOLENT BODY
Brussels — Twenty years ago, Wim Vandekeybus held a dance workshop in Madrid. The result, What the Body Does Not Remember, was the starting shot for Ultima Vez, his company. It was an exceptional moment: with that piece, Vandekeybus wrote instant dance history. In Spiegel he looks back at the route since then.
By Pieter T’Jonck (translated by Heidi Ehrhart)
What surprised the world in 1987 was ‘the dangerous and combative landscape’ of the The Body, as the Bessie Award report put it so nicely. Apart from Jan Fabre, no one had ever done what Vandekeybus did: introducing real danger to the stage. Everyone who was there remembers the scene which has been revived in Spiegel. Dancers who race around the stage throw stones at each other. In the nick of time they always manage to avoid an accident. Yet it’s no circus. Here Vandekeybus explores a concept of dance, or movement art, that no one else has. Bodies ‘think’ before our brains go into action. Even stronger, if the dancers would rely on their brains, that would mean disaster. Thus: ‘they do not remember’.
Complex, without chaos
Instinctive movement doesn’t only exist with physical danger. More dangerous than falling stones are people. In Stamping, laying dancers are barely spared from deadly injury inflicted by stamping ones because they roll away at the last moment. With this scene Spiegel begins. It’s not a coincidence. Since his second performance, Les porteuses de mauvaises nouvelles, what Vandekeybus presented again and again was a violent confrontation between people. In Girls, a scene from Immer das Selbe gelogen, a man lugs a lifeless woman to the stage in his arms and just drops her. In Air, from “Inasmuch as Life is borrowed…” a man pounds mercilessly on a woman’s chest. Neither scene shows the reason or emotion, but instead the hard confrontation, with concrete facts: you can’t carry a 50 kilo body endlessly; in a fight the one who hits hardest wins.
But why do people fight? Why are they aggressive, and, especially, erotic with each other? And how can you show that literally without creating chaos? Vandekeybus has already wrestled with that question for twenty years. Sometimes he works out complex stories – Sonic Boom is a masterly example - and sometimes he takes refuge in film. With one constant: tenderness, or desire, and violence flow together in one movement. Spiegel bursts with memorable images: Sheepskin solo, Oranges or Blood, for example.
Own voice
Spiegel is thus a plain man’s guide to Vandekeybus. But even if you have followed the work all these years, it strikes you how with his present ensemble he can call up the strength of the earlier work in its pure form. And that is, regardless of the extraordinary quality of the present ensemble, more than remarkable. Here is someone at work who has never forgotten, or lost, their own voice.
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La Libre Belgique, 03.10.2006
WIM’S FANTASTIC ENERGY
The performance Spiegel retraces twenty years of history of Ultima Vez
Wim Vandekeybus is a bomb in the world of dance
By Guy Duplat (translated by Heidi Ehrhart)
To celebrate the 20 year anniversary of his company, Wim Vandekeybus has taken the risk of assembling extracts from seven of his earlier performances. What will today’s public think about work that was revolutionary at the time? Every year Pina Bausch revives several pieces from her repertory in order to teach the history of the company to her new dancers, and it’s always a pleasure to sometimes see an older piece and sometimes a creation.
Wim Vandekeybus’ two most recent performances, (Sonic Boom and Puur) were less convincing than the fantastic Blush. What would Spiegel be like? The answer is simple: it’s fantastic. It’s to be seen urgently by all those who have forgotten that Wim Vandekeybus is dance in its pure state, violent, athletic, exhausting, a sensual and warlike combat.
The nine dancers, all of whom are excellent, are exhausted after almost two hours of mad dance in a performance so well constructed that you hardly notice where the scenes join. Twenty years ago, Wim Vandekeybus dropped a bomb on the world of dance. It’s still exploding today, to our great pleasure. Spiegel begins with a famous scene taken from What the Body Does Not Remember. While some of the dancers roll on the floor, others jump and stamp their feet, each time threatening to severely trample the dancers on the floor, who are only saved by slipping out from under the furious feet at the last minute. The stamping makes a music like primitive drums. This violent and obsessive scene sets the tone for the next. The two hours go by in this rhythm, without any idle time or talk. Of course we also rediscover the famous scene of the throwing of the stones which also comes from What the Body Does Not Remember. Each in turn, the dancers throw bricks in the air which risk falling on the head of another dancer, who is saved at the last second by the acrobatic jump of a third dancer. This one twirls, clutches, glides, always at the limit of an accident. The beauty can be wild and aggravated by the danger. But there are also more tender moments, such as when Wim Vandekeybus renders homage to Pina Bausch by dressing his dancers in formal wear in the way that the choreographer from Wuppertal has the habit to, and by a dance to find the ideal match, which will be made by joining the two halves of an orange. Later, pairs form, the dancers leaning on one another like wrestlers. They push, pant, perspire. Their hugs are a combat. A chair hung upside down from the grill of the KVS is occupied one by one by the dancers who pull themselves up on it and perch, head down. Later, the bodies will be deposited on huge hooks. The music by Arno, David Byrne, Thierry De Mey, Marc Ribot and Peter Vermeersch follow each other seamlessly as if they always belonged to the same performance. The public goes out thrilled by all this generous energy, and with modesty, Wim Vandekeybus makes a little dance on the stage as he receives the public’s much deserved homage.
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Le Soir, 03.10.2006
Dance / At the KVS, Wim Vandekeybus revisits his choreographic career
A VIBRANT FACE TO FACE
By Jean-Marie Wynants (translated by Heidi Ehrhart)
Spiegel brings together twenty years of creation in a masterful performance of strength and vitality.
The stone flies above the stage, then plunges at full speed downwards. A male dancer stretches his arms, grabs it and continues on his way before throwing it again. Another now catches it and it’s his turn to throw it, in this infernal circle which remains a great moment in the twenty years of creation by Wim Vandekeybus. We rediscover this masterly scene in Spiegel, the new performance by the Flemish choreographer, which is made up of extracts of previous shows, assembled and reworked in order to question the language invented by Ultima Vez. A sort of face to face, with himself.
For all those who discover the universe of Wim Vandekeybus for the first time, Spiegel will be like a wallop. The rolls, the jumps, the fights, the throwing of bricks (in fact now blocks which are a bit more manageable), the bodies suspended in mid air have lost nothing of their vital energy, their force at the edge of rupture. For those who have followed the career of the choreographer and his ensemble, Spiegel allows one to relive some great moments, but also to observe the real coherence of the physical work within Ultima Vez.
Wim Vandekeybus reminded us himself: at the beginning he had no choreographic baggage. He thus started on the ground, and rose up gradually. Spiegel begins the same way. Bodies roll on the ground while the feet of other dancers thunder down a few centimetres from them, like menaces from above. Basic movements, not yet very elaborate, but already perfectly coordinated, mastered. And then, the interaction of bodies. They avoid each other, brush against each other, the movement of one determining the movement of the other. Very quickly these relations become more complex. The bodies right themselves, leaning on each other in improbable balance.
Thus another constant appears in Vandekeybus’ universe: this interdependence of bodies which sometimes appear to help each other, then appear to fight. Like certain martial arts, one uses the force and weight of the other to get an advantage, create balance or pull the other towards a fall.
Soon the bodies open, the arms are stretched. Then the hands take the relay, aerial, in the middle of new confrontation. The bodies turn, whirl, throw themselves on the other, avoid each other by a few centimetres, support each other to jump over obstacles, oppose each other in permanent tension. Until the moment when they all find themselves suspended in the air like pieces of meat in a butcher’s storeroom.
At the back of the stage is a curtain which is the same red as the blood which one can only be rid of by abandoning all human effects, before leaving for new adventures, naked as the day they were born,
Even if one recognizes scenes from previous shows, Spiegel manages to make one forget the ‘collage’ side of the performance and forms a compact, tight, coherent whole. A whole in which one often has the impression one sees Wim Vandekeybus himself, even though he isn’t on stage. But one finds him back in the particular bearing of the Ultima Vez dancers. Such as in the sequence when they come to the edge of the stage, facing the audience, legs spread, solidly planted on the ground, arms hanging, hands turned towards the public, chin raised and with a challenging look. A look which addresses in the first place the self, facing this pitiless mirror: the audience of a theatre.
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