One of the favourite pastimes for the Parisians is going to the theatre. So I was really quite excited to find a dance performance that would pose no problem to my language barrier, unlike a play or an opera.
Jan Fabre's production "Prometheus Landscape II" is a pure theatrical spectacle. There are a lot of smoke, sweat, sand and fire extinguisher on the set and at centre stage was a man tied up and suspended mid air for the entire show. The man was Prometheus who stole fire from the gods, gave it to humans and was then sentenced to have his liver consumed by a vulture for eternity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA93gzOuRM.
As much as I enjoyed the theatricality of the show, the dancing part was so watered down that the performance could have been executed by actors instead of dancers. I was disappointed not because it was avant-garde and differed from what I would expect from a dance performance, it was the indulgence in the repetitive use of philosophical texts read out to provide clues on Fabre's psyche that bothers me. An interesting question comes to mind - what is the role of the text in dance and how far should it be taken before it becomes theatre! Or perhaps we have arrived at an era of multi-disciplinarity that the distinction between them is no longer meaningful.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please comment freely but keep it polite by not doing spam.