William Forsythe is credited with changing the way we think about ballet, but he has also changed the way we think about theatre.
The director of Ballett Frankfurt shifts and splices our perception of what can happen on stage, synthesising dance with speech and film, and asking what they might show.
In other words, he doesn't do your basic dancedrama with linear narrative and tidy solution.
Instead he does things like Kammer/Kammer, an evening-length production that counterpoints two separate love stories, as well as the means of their telling.
It is a densely textured piece with snatches of dance, a lot of speech, and long stretches of live filming that fragment the stage space and dislocate your perspective, your view one minute, theirs the next.
Kammer is German for chamber or small room, and it describes both where the drama unfolds and the design of the set. Moveable partitions divide the stage into secret places, mainly bedrooms, and much of what happens is hidden from view.
Well, not hidden exactly. Fixed and roving cameras capture the action and relay it on to screens positioned around the stage. You witness all sorts, although you don't know if these are real or premonitory.
For Kammer/Kammer Forsythe uses two texts, Douglas A. Martin's novel, Outline Of My Lover, and Anne Carson's essay, Irony Is Not Enough. Martin's nameless Boy is a rock star's lover, while Carson's Catherine Deneuve is, well, Catherine Deneuve as a classics professor eyeing a female student.
Both, you would think, would enjoy life. In fact, they live in the shadows and Kammer/Kammer tracks the emotional havoc that ensues.
Dana Caspersen, aka Mrs William Forsythe, dominates the piece as the creepily poised, terrifyingly controlled Deneuve. Is this the Dana show, you sometimes wonder. Antony Rizzi is the self-analysing Boy, a Woody Allen-style neurotic. The dancing is hard and fast and takes place on and across beds, the dancers a tumble of bodies that fall and rebound.
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Kammer/Kammer is moving and inventive. It is also annoying and baffling, but it is never less than expertly done. Traditionalists will hate it, although that usually means you are on to a good thing. It is also the last time you will see Ballett Frankfurt with Forsythe as its director. The Frankfurt politicians, who bankroll the troupe, want tutus and tiaras, so catch this while you can.
