Further dancefloor action

So I went to see Ballett Frankfurt perform Kammer/Kammer last night at Sadler’s Wells. My quick, initial reaction is that this was not a typical dance thing at all. Innovative use of video, with videographers on stage and flat–screen TVs around the audience. Often, the dance would be going on behind pieces of the set, so the only clear view you could get of the live performance was via the screens. That sounds a bit pointless and crap, but it was very well done and actually quite cool in practice. Overall the piece was more like theatre than dance — lots of speech and storyline. It seemed to be two intermingled plays about homosexual obsession. One involving Catherine Deneuve, for some reason. All in all, I’d say it was clever, looked cool, but didn’t completely work for me. The fact that it was “dance” and there were a few people dancing about at times, meant that they attempted to get away with things that they couldn’t have in a “straight play” — I felt that, in the end, they left the story and some of the ideas truncated. But, for me, the dance element did not do enough to take over in developing those ideas. The piece had gone too far into being narrative theatre and didn’t quite seem to work out as narrative theatre. Interesting and visually striking, nonetheless.

Times/Times

Dance Insider

Guardian/Guardian

Labels: contemporary dance