wytchcroft (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wytchcroft) wrote2012-10-15 03:50 am
wytchcroft) wrote2012-10-15 03:50 am
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la la la i'm not listening (but actually i might be)
so i was thinking about dance and how it often strikes me as human language, body language, the body singing and shouting and stalling and squawking and expressing and refusing to express and all the wonderful and frustrating contradictions and frictions and fictions it can weave - and basically wondering why it is i don't respond to the contemporary work of la la la human steps in the way i used to.
the more recent work of Edouard Lock is undeniably beautiful (and exquisitely performed - in their way the soloists are as fierce on it as ever), and yet...
what has happened?
is it just me that sees a glassy kind of narcissism in the very introverted and tastefully rendered pieces?
is it just my fear of the bourgeois that causes me to regret the neo-classicist reworking of the Lou Reed piece Waiting for the Man, used in the film of Amelia? Music that strikes me as designed to impress documentary makers.
The use of traditional motifs such as the marionette v. svengali may after all be genuinely reflective and expressive of Lock's own experience...
...but it is shuttered, and there's a certain kind of preciousness that is suffocating.
i miss the robust physicality of Louise Lecavalier, even if the early Steps pieces are a little dated, especially musically, there was a kind of muscularity there, not just in the dancers but in their dialogue, it was rude and noisy and seemed to be taking place near the roar of traffic always - but the vigour was a joy; the anxiety and frustration of the dancer-to-dancer bodily conversations seemed genuine, urgent, mutual and real. There was life, humour and horror both.
Bodies may have been bruised by collisions and faces turned this way and that like so many slamming subway doors but it felt real. Three dimensional and adult.
The more recent reversion to the diminutive and graceful in the figures and choreography - along with (in the case of Amelia) the breathy 'lost girl' voice in the music, all evoke the eternal child-woman archetype that i find a little uncomfortable, a little predictable and a whole lot repressed.
This, again, may well be the point - the song itself is about waiting for a drug after all - and the Copelia mannequin romantic is pining for an embrace from her shadowy partner that might just be death.
But it will be a beautiful, solitary demise played out in a bedroom mirror. it will be the dreamland of cirque soleil not the auto-mobile pile up crunch of Arkaos.
Maybe it is all just a choice of aesthetics. So far, my jury is still out.
see also Amjad and the latest previewed work to which i had a similar reaction.
the more recent work of Edouard Lock is undeniably beautiful (and exquisitely performed - in their way the soloists are as fierce on it as ever), and yet...
what has happened?
is it just me that sees a glassy kind of narcissism in the very introverted and tastefully rendered pieces?
is it just my fear of the bourgeois that causes me to regret the neo-classicist reworking of the Lou Reed piece Waiting for the Man, used in the film of Amelia? Music that strikes me as designed to impress documentary makers.
The use of traditional motifs such as the marionette v. svengali may after all be genuinely reflective and expressive of Lock's own experience...
...but it is shuttered, and there's a certain kind of preciousness that is suffocating.
i miss the robust physicality of Louise Lecavalier, even if the early Steps pieces are a little dated, especially musically, there was a kind of muscularity there, not just in the dancers but in their dialogue, it was rude and noisy and seemed to be taking place near the roar of traffic always - but the vigour was a joy; the anxiety and frustration of the dancer-to-dancer bodily conversations seemed genuine, urgent, mutual and real. There was life, humour and horror both.
Bodies may have been bruised by collisions and faces turned this way and that like so many slamming subway doors but it felt real. Three dimensional and adult.
The more recent reversion to the diminutive and graceful in the figures and choreography - along with (in the case of Amelia) the breathy 'lost girl' voice in the music, all evoke the eternal child-woman archetype that i find a little uncomfortable, a little predictable and a whole lot repressed.
This, again, may well be the point - the song itself is about waiting for a drug after all - and the Copelia mannequin romantic is pining for an embrace from her shadowy partner that might just be death.
But it will be a beautiful, solitary demise played out in a bedroom mirror. it will be the dreamland of cirque soleil not the auto-mobile pile up crunch of Arkaos.
Maybe it is all just a choice of aesthetics. So far, my jury is still out.
see also Amjad and the latest previewed work to which i had a similar reaction.