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"Amelia, a revolutionary work by choreographer
Édouard Lock,
has the potential to change dance as we know it today."
THE MARRIAGE OF
BALLET and MODERN DANCE:
Édouard Lock's
revolutionary Amelia may change dance as we know it
By:
Paul-James Dwyer
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Although I admit that, in
the past, I was not a fan of his choreography or style, my opinion
of his art has changed forever after seeing this 95-minute piece,
staged at Toronto's Hummingbird Centre on February 10, 2004. In former
productions, his work struck me as totally horizontal and thematically
obsessed with sex, violence, ennui, and the frenetic pace and casual
aspect of human relationships in an urban post-modern world. But Lock
has reinvented himself with two major innovations. First, he put this
new production en pointe, adding a vertical dimension that fills in
a major gap in his own dance æsthetic. Long vertical sequences
unravelled in a luxurious and well-grounded fashion, unheard of in
his former artistic output. Second, with the female dancers of the
company in pointe shoes, his undisputed muse, Louise Lecavalier, chose
not to join this production. This is a departure of significant proportions
- the two have been considered inseparable in the public's perception.
Since the project started with a full year of development in the studio,
and is booked to tour for two more years (ending this summer in Asia),
Lecavalier's absence constitutes a clear break in their artistic collaboration.
The vacuum has been filled by other dancers who all shine. Two of
them, Andrea Boardman and Billy Smith, displayed pure genius.
Amelia - not only visually
exquisite but a poetic masterpiece - vaults Lock, as a choreographer,
into the front row of today's dance creators. In my mind, the
marriage of modern dance and the ballet has
never been totally successful on stage. (Off stage, we all accept
as a matter of course that modern technique can extend a ballet
dancer's career, and the cross-benefits to both disciplines
in technique are now universally accepted, for the purposes
of developing employment possibilities and opening up artistic
and creative potential in young dancers.) Amelia has finally
consummated the union of ballet and modern. The harmony, lyricism,
restraint, verticality of pointe work,
classicism, proportion and balance of ballet wedded to the horizontally
frenetic pace, sexually charged atmosphere, truly contemporary
zeitgeist, highly detailed gestural work and unique hyperkinetic
artistic vision of Lock's former work, predict a future
of unlimited horizons, should this choreographer choose to continue
on his current artistic path.
Isadora Duncan revolutionized ballet
back at the outset of the 20th
century, when she appeared in Russia in 1904. Now, 100 years
later, I believe, Lock has replicated the
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same shift. Both ballet and modern
dance have been regurgitating the same themes and movement ideas
for the last 50-odd years. The hermeneutic circle or development
cycle that Duncan initiated has slowed down to stall. George
Balanchine and Martha Graham, the greatest choreographers after
Duncan, in ballet and modern dance respectively, now seem rather
dated. Society has moved on. Lock is spinning the dial again.
His new work is just what the dance world has been waiting for.
The reverberations from this project will be felt for years
to come. That it has been filmed and
will be available shortly on DVD can only accelerate the process.
If Lock continues to develop new work en pointe, he could forge
a new hybrid art form, one that has absorbed the past but that
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speaks directly to today's
hyper-paced, technological, speed-of-light world. More important,
this new art form might also pave the way to the future in dance.
A cursory examination of the audience members at the Hummingbird
Centre only confirmed my point. A sold-out audience of 3,300, it
contained a wide cross-section of all levels of society.
Definitely not a ballet audience, it was not exclusively a modern-dance
audience, whose own audience demographics have sharply diminished
in recent years.
Lock believes he has successfully eschewed
the narrative in Amelia, as he stated in an interview prior to the
Toronto performance. However, his choreographic images - labyrinthine,
shrouded in mystery and delivered at break-neck speed - can be decoded
and read. Lock is utilizing movements and gestures taken from the
modern urban arena as metaphors for human illusions and passions,
and these he transforms into dance. The basis of his art is his
singular and semaphoric
vision of human interaction and communication, applied with great
skill to encompass all the complexities of basic human expression.
The audience read the performance like a book, for as Lock wrote
in the programme, "It is no longer a question of understanding
the world, but of recognizing it."
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His vision of women is, however,
disturbing - cold and distant,
complicated by multiple sexual partners. Passive faces show
little
expression. They might veer close for a hesitant and momentary
intimacy, but no joy or sorrow or any reaction to the passion
of their male partners was evident on their doll-like faces.
Almost a strategy of refusal. Indeed, a series of female images
on a spear-shaped screen (bomb or male member?) that descended
into the centre stage area showed a doll with no emotion at
all, no interior life, a self-absorbed robotic machine with
wide open eyes. This beautifully disconcerting vision of women
was thankfully mitigated by the dance artistry of the 44-year-old
Boardman, who formerly danced with Les Grands Ballets Canadiens
de Montréal. The depth, humanity and energy of her
art was riveting; indeed, she out-performed the other three
female dancers who were half her age. With her small, bird-like
body, even the slightest movement of her neck spoke volumes.
Tangible sadness was communicated with her repeated but unsuccessful
attempts to truly connect with her numerous partners. Repeatedly,
she crossed the stage in a search of what was for her the
unattainable, with a determination and upright stance that
became for me a leitmotif of today's Western urban female.
True artistic greatness.
The male in Lock's cosmology is equally complicated. He spins
women to bring them to life, expressing a deep respect for
them at the same
time. He never parks long enough to settle down with one woman;
the clock is ticking, time is of the essence! The four men
periodically
made wave motions with the entire length of their bodies when
in
close proximity to their female partners, which was obviously
orgiastic. Lock's male dancers always wear simple dark suits;
they are inseparable from any young man on the street and
the mundane is
their exclusive territory. Passion is expressed only in the
body, not
the face, and hints of rage, potential violence and an inner
spiritual vacuum that matched that of the females. They move
through life, yes, but the coming and going was all. In one
major section of the work, performed to the excruciatingly
intense hum of an electronic soundscape, two men danced a
homoerotic duet - a sensitive but obviously momentary assignation.
Constantly sizing each other up,
keeping a measured distance from each other until they finally
converged, they mimicked the formality of a baroque dance
duet or the
floor pattern of a Spanish dance - or was it the wary dance
of two
cockerels?
Again, Smith stood out brilliantly in the stellar cast.
While dancing the same choreography
as the other three males in the company, he invests it with
a lyricism and calm majesty that is totally
satisfying to watch. Each line of movement travelling down
his limbs
and terminating at the tips of his fingers or toes is released,
only to be revived in a wave motion that is born again into
an eternally merging past and future. The completion and pleasure
his movements give the
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viewer is Dionysian or ecstatic, as never-ending
waves of movement are repeated, transformed and disappear, only
to be born again. Smith was the only male in the company to dance
en pointe, making it look like it was a natural masculine possibility
and taken for granted as part of dance today. Outside of the pink
colour of the shoes, there was nothing epicene in his pointe work.
The lighting was designed to cloak most of the stage in deep mystery,
with small areas in tightly focussed light, adding to the intensity.
The set consisted of veils of pierced material that covered the
entire apron area of the stage, with floor-length panels in both
wings. These were raised and lowered periodically throughout the
piece, adding to the poetic ambiguity of the work. Constructed of
a firm material, the veils evoked a spider's web, a lace curtain,
the water currents in a fish bowl or the visual patterning experienced
under the influence of hallucinogenics. Four musicians (piano, cello,
violin, soprano) performed a commissioned score by New York composer
David Lang. It utilized the vintage, heroin-addled lyrics by Lou
Reed from the legendary early '70s rock band The Velvet Underground.
All the players except the pianist appeared at different points
all over the stage, framing dancers or acting as solo accompanists,
helping transform the stage
area into an arena of life. In addition, two Quebec composers, Normand-Pierre
Bilodeau and Alain Thibault, supplied deeply powerful and beautiful
electronic works. <end>
[top]
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TABLE OF CONTENTS: SUMMER
2004 ISSUE [top]
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- Merci, Maurice Bejart
by Silvia Poletti
- House in Retrospect
by Michael Crabb
- Electic Ballerina: Karole Armitage
by Silvia Poletti
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Departments
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- Commentaries from Vancouver, Winnipeg,
Montreal, Toronto, New York, San Fransico, Britain, Denmark, France
and Russia
- Reviews of Ballet Victoria, Daniel
Leveille, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Houston Ballet, Dance for
Life Gala, La Scalla Ballet, Royal New Zealand Ballet
- DVD Review: Recordings of Kabuki
- classical Japanese dance
by Paula Citron
- Book Reviews
by Elizabeth Godley & Paul-James Dwyer
- Notebook
by Michael Crabb
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