Personal body

Contemporary dance festival has ended

The small “Personal Affair” festival brought together chamber works that would have been guaranteed to be lost on the large theater stage of the annual winter festival “Tsekh”. And here is a modest (ten rows) boardwalk amphitheater for the public, the artists work right under their noses. If a dancer needs to leave the stage during a performance, she walks through the same passage along which the audience entered the hall; latecomers crowd in, and she moves forward, brushing them with her shoulders. For those who do not like what is happening on stage at all, it is impossible even to leave unnoticed; the gesture turns out to be radical: stand up, lift everyone sitting on the steps and, almost colliding with the artists, leave the hall. The viewer is forced to decide whether it is “ours” or “not ours”. And the viewer is determined.

Basically, the audience is still its own - there are many dancers and sympathizers (the Tsekha summer school is taking place at the same time; judging by the costumes, the people came straight from classes). But sometimes demonstrative exits from the hall still happened.

First of all, at the performance “No Change, or Freedom is a Psychokinetic Art” by the American Didi Dorvillier. Black wires were scattered in complex patterns on the white floor, and several microphone stands were broken and tilted. Busily, like a housewife starting to clean, moving in complete silence through the littered space, the dancer casually kicks a blue plastic bucket, drops the microphone stand and gets tangled in the wires. Unraveling, she pulls her pants down to her ankles, rolls her dress up to her chest, and lies down on the floor. Next came a ten-minute fidgeting of a naked lady on the floor - sex with an invisible partner was simulated, with quite physiological details. That's when the people began to leave - the girls resolutely pulled out their companions by the hands. Many did not wait for the “comic” part - when the lady trotted across the stage with her trousers almost tied with her legs.

The audience also fled from the performance of the American couple Heather Cravas and Antonia Livingstone (“Fair Stephen”): a tough, angular blonde and a flowing, languid brunette came out wearing false beards, shouted at each other “Fuck!”, took off their beards, stuck them in their pants, creating characteristic bulges, and began to walk around the stage, so carefully, a step forward - a turn - a step forward - a turn, with a tiny shift to the side. The small area was just enough for thirty-five minutes - monotonous, measured, calm. Some of the spectators fell asleep, others went home.

But there were also completely different, absolutely wonderful pages in the “Personal File”. The Dutch duo Keren Levy and Hugo Dehaes (“Like a Couple”) composed a play on the theme of what a woman can do to a man if they really are a couple. She can lay him on the floor, bend his legs as she does - not him - sit comfortably and triumphantly on his side in a split - one heel on his ear, the other near his heels. It can hang on his neck, stretch out its legs on both sides of his body and freeze like that - like a rather big Christmas tree toy. A couple may run into a run, fall, roll, but with an amazing feeling of internal connection, they, fallen, as if an invisible force will gather them again and press their shoulders to each other. All this without any pathos and with an obvious grin (“I’m not henpecked, I just love her”).

And one more duet - Russian, from Kostroma. Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev - “Hair”. The brunette dancer in the spotlight twirls a hairdryer in his hands, turning it on from time to time; the dancer, shaved head, froze, slouched in the semi-darkness. Next is a fifteen-minute variation on the theme of suffering due to missing hair; quite clown-like (with putting a roach into a jar of water and peering into the glass - either making a potion, or waiting for the effect of living water: maybe the fish will swim?). Hair with hair is an important matter, but in instant contacts, quickly flashing support, a simple sign is drawn: this is not about baldness and hair, it is about mutual understanding, building relationships in general. And it is no coincidence that when in the finale one dancer puts on a luxurious wig and begins to defiantly dry it with a hairdryer, the second doomedly sits down to trim his own hair - there must be balance in each pair.

“We represent an unknown world, a world of the future, and not a world growing out of the past,” says Didi Dorvillier in a memorandum specially distributed before the performance. “Personal Affair,” certainly aimed at the future, showed one simple thing: in the future, a sense of proportion, mutual understanding and humor will still be valued. Not a bad result for the festival.

Anna GORDEEVA