Wednesday, March 3, 2010

"Do Animals Cry", a Dance Theatre Performance at Fleck Dance Theatre in Toronto


Do Animals Cry
by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods
with Joris camelin, Alexander Jenkins, Adam Linder, Anja Müller, Kotomi Nishiwaki, Frank Willens.



I wrote in twitter:

"unbearable long and tedious dance about a single crazy-unhappy family exposed in chaotic movements and common actions. Hate it or love it."

Two hours watching dance performed in a monotonous contemporary movement style, kind of mini physical actions interconnected by a internal story (I guess) without any link to harmony or musical rhythm, accompanied by some musical extracts that only remarked the monotony of the style and with a very poor lighting work.

At the beginning I was there fresh, watching, laughing, living their movements even with reflexes in my own body provoked by those movements (True!), but after several scenes and time passed my mind started to be tired, my easy-biginnig relation with the performance gone away and what happened after it was almost unbearable, the worst thing a spectator can experiment watching any performance, tediousness.

I really was there! I was watching fascinated those strange but concrete movements of our common life, movements recalling my family as they asked spectators to do before the performance; watching and feeling that kind of stress, of violence only because those movement were chosen among thousand and then joined edited with unbearable cruelty... But too much it is too much, not talking about that cruelty, not about that violence, not about recalling my life as a family child, not, it was too much of the style, of the music, of the continuous and long process of living a family in this tiring way during two hours.

In one moment I was seeing an approach to Pina Bausch, telling those things like she used to do it, but everything broke up when scene by scene my patience as spectator became tiredness.

The work was amazing, as a dance itself; loved the dancers's work as a group and their individuality on stage, creating characters, speaking, feeling, but simply a could not love the whole work when a general stage direction provoked that more of one half of the spectators were yawing every two minutes and looking their watches.

I didn't learn much watching a family who looked crazy and unhappy (as usually British depict any of their families in art), however I enjoyed several moments, images and movements: I loved how one of the children ran in circles during 5 minutes; another son seated on a chair over one small dog-family house; a crazy party were some spoke singing sentences of sociability while others dancing were dying of sociability (actually getting drunk and being rebellious); and I won't forget that girl becoming adult showing her impudence to her parents.

As I finished my twitter-140-word-sentence you can love this amazing dance theatre production, but I can not, I hated it.









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