Cherkaoui/Dawson

Last Saturday I again spent to much time surfing aimlessly on the Internet. At about six I hadn’t done anything yet, not any of the things I had planned to do. I had to decide whether I was going to prepare dinner or whether I was going to do something fun. I checked to Web for a show in one of the nearby theatres and I found one. The week before I had already seen this performance advertised, but there weren’t any first category seats available. Now there were. So without having eaten I went to the city and bought a ticket for the new pieces of Cherkaoui and Dawson performed by the Dutch National Ballet. In this theatre they always have a thirty minute introduction to the show, which is something very necessary to modern dance. The first piece was performed with a live orchestra and added piano. The dances constructed and reconstructed a labyrinthine set with ever changing and movable rubber bands hanging from the ceiling. They represented a moth like movement in exploring this labyrinth and its possibilities in going back and forth in the adventure that is this labyrinth. Very exciting. This king of modern dance focuses much less on the individual performances but much more on the experience as a whole. Music, dance, choreography, set. The choreographer has to bring everything together.

The second piece was danced without orchestra. This was logical since the music used was of a trance like nature and had to be perfectly synchronised with the computerised light effects. Here, too, the focus wasn’t on the dancers, but more on the images the choreographer wanted to to transfer. The passing of time. Dancers dance, and on a screen in the background a video is played of these same dancers dancing the same dance, but delayed by a couple of seconds. In that image another image is set in the background, again with these same dancers, and now delayed by minutes. Images in images in images and two dancers dancing live. Time lapse.

The show was preceded by a short speech about government cutbacks on subsidised arts. They filled the entire stage with performances protesting against the government. Wearing black with a white cross to symbolise the crossing out of art as a result of these cuts. A very powerful image.