dance of surprises
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Matthew Bourne (choreographer) Early Adventures / performed at Beverly Hill’s Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, May 17-21, 2017 / I attended with Thérèse Bachand the matinee on May 20, 2017.
The three ballets of Early Adventures, reconceived works from
the late 1980 and early 1990s, often toy with some of the same gestures,
surprising and sexualizing sequences which might otherwise have been “cute” or
simply “sweet.” Yes, there are dazzling heterosexual couples spinning through
the three pieces, but the marvel of his works is that at any moment the proper
British characters might slip into bawdy and outright randy behavior, like the
bad boys and girls of the first work here performed, “Watch with Mother” from
1991, based on Joyce Grenfell’s “Nursery School Sketches” (probably forgotten
by most Americans, Grenfell, who died in 1979, is still a well-loved monologist
and performer in Britain).
Bourne’s 1991 masterpiece, “Town and Country”
followed. This multi-segmented piece includes nearly everything, including
satiric views of wealthy British couples, two of whom (João Carolino and Mari
Kamata) take somewhat strip-tease-like
balletic baths attended—or we might say, “overattended”—by a valet and maid.
Two British dandies (Fitzpatrick and Edwin Ray) lovingly restrain themselves
while satisfying each other’s sexual needs during an outdoor picnic.
In another scene, Bourne duplicates the
famed railway restaurant scene from David Lean’s Brief Encounter, playfully satirizing the long and languid stares
of the couple(s) that can never result in more than a good-bye kiss.
The raunchiest pieces of Bourne’s
repertoire, however, are saved for the last French-based series of dances, The Infernal Galop: A French Dance with
English Subtitles. Here the rather up-tight British can go whole hog in
their imaginations of French lowlife behavior.
To the strains of Edith Piaf, Charles
Trenet, Tino Rossi, and Mistinguett, streetwalkers prowl the Paris wharves, a
merman is serenaded by three sailors, and after an adventurous quartet of
toughs converge at a street pissoir, two of the group proceed to engage in
rough sex that keeps getting interrupted a band of street carolers. The piece
ends, how else?, in a kind of satirical version of Offenbach’s can-can. In
short, Paris is presented as rough and tough, alluring and gay as any Baedeker
guide might wish to imagine it.
Bourne
is a great narrativist, who can convey character, class, and sex in just a few
bends and rolls of the body, and his dancers in this production represent a
wide range of personal eccentricities. No one in Bourne’s dances, he suggests,
is precisely what they seem, as men and women wind through each other’s arms
and legs as if they were performing a kind of Schnitzler-like ballet of “hands
around.” The very energy of it is a lovely thing to watch.
Los Angeles, May
21, 2017
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