Edinburgh Festival
Aug. 28th, 2007 09:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningI have been to my usual quota of Festival shows, although I can't help feeling they haven't been up to my usual standard. Most of the things I go to I go to because I expect them to be good, and I'm not often disappointed. It is true that I have sat through a few turkeys - but it is a very few. (I think the Pina Bausch "dance" performance Nelken - "carnations" - is the one that really sticks in my throat: it was sold to me as being the best dance show around. I sat there for more than an hour, waiting for it to get better, and then the curtain came down. As far as I was concerned, it had no redeeming features. Not even any nudity.)
The first show I went to this year was On Danse by Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu - being French, I assume the title is translated as one dances. This was a fascinating mixture of video and dance - and the dance was a fascinating mixture of classical, modern, street (body popping, acrobatics), African, mime... I must have missed something out, too, because it had just about everything thrown in.
The video was really interesting. Throughout the show, projected onto the back drop, were rather wonderful computer generated images. The company was established as a collaboration between a chorographer and a video artist. The video was as much a part of the show as the live dancers, and there was a lot of interaction between the two. The dancers carried video elephants, balancing on string; they held up pyramids of giant nudes; they were chased across the stage by video lions and video rabbits - giant rabbits. The way the real and the video interacted was very well done - the performance was very cleverly staged, so that it appeared that apes crawled over the dancers.
But the cleverness may also have been the shows undoing. There was such a mixture of styles, so much going on at any one time, that it was dizzying, and I was sure I was missing something: wherever I looked, I thought something more interesting might be going on elsewhere on the stage.
In the ensemble pieces, the dance styles clashed - they lacked coherence. I craved simplicity. And it came: my favourite piece involved a dancer walking across the stage, and then through the auditorium, trailing a long line of horse-shaped helium balloons, which obediently followed him in orderly circles. It showed up the over-rich diet of the rest of the show.
The low point for me were the several spoken word sections. This was a dance show. Why were they talking to me? Doubly irritating is that they were telling me they were bad dancers. I could see they weren't. They may have been not as good as some of the others, but they weren't bad. And it annoyed me that they were telling me they were. And I really didn't want to know what drove them to dance - don't tell me, show me.
This was such an over-rich, busy performance that it waned quickly. Once the novelty of so many styles, so much imaginative video, so much to look at, had died off, it became boring. After an hour, I wanted it to end; I had another thirty minutes to wait. If it had stopped at forty five minutes, they'd have left me wanting more. As it was, I couldn't leave fast enough, which I think is rather sad.
Still, the giant nude trampolining looked fun.
A week later, I went to my next dance piece - the Royal Flanders Ballet, performing William Forsythe's ballet, Impressing the Czar. Dating from the late 1980s, this was danced to a soundtrack of Beethoven, treated Beethoven, and mechanical sounds. The dancing was exquisite - it was really beautiful to look at. The dance also mixed up styles, but they were all performed from a classical perspective, albeit with a modern twist.
The first half was also very busy - beautiful, but busy. And it had spoken word in it - two of the dancers, narrating their position and warbling on about Mr Peanut, a character on television. That jarred, obviously.
So did the music - well, some of the music. The Beethoven was lovely, though loud; but the treated sounds didn't fit - and why bastardise Beethoven? Did Forsythe really think he could improve on the original?
The second half was sparser - both the dancing, and the set - a bare stage with only white light. And the music was reduced to chords of noises set against a rhythm. The dancing was excellent - solo, duet and ensemble dances were wonderful, and exciting. True, I have no idea what it was about - the second half seemed much more abstract than the first, but I have no idea what the first half was about, either.
But the noise got to me, and half an hour into the second half, I had had enough. I left. I can't remember when I last walked out of a piece of dance - and it is true that had I not been close to the aisle - there was only one person between me and a walk to the cool air outside - I would have stayed in my seat; but I didn't. I got up and walked out. (Of course, I may have missed something amazing. But rather I missed it than I suffered a headache, frankly.)
[Indeed, reading reviews, it turned out I missed a whole other piece, a third part to the performance. But it really was time to leave.]
Finally, last Wednesday I went to the theatre. I don't often go to the theatre; I used to go a lot (indeed, I have spent a lot of my life working in [amateur] theatre), but I rarely go now. Usually, it is because I am lazy. And then I read about things, and I think “I must go!”, only to miss the final performance. But the Wooster Group are famous - at least, they are in my world; so I made an effort to see them. They were performing La Didone. It was only when I read a review in the paper ahead of the performance that I realised quite what the performance would entail: a mashing together of an opera of the story of Dido and Aeneas with an acting out of a 1965 B-movie, “Planet of the Vampires”. My heart sank. It rose when I saw the set - lots of scaffolding, white light, and screens - my kind of non-set.
It opened with some of the opera (I don't know much about opera, so I can't tell you much - I only worked out who the main characters were - Dido, Aeneas, and Iarbas), and then some cod-astronauts walked onto the stage. The action in the opera was played out against the B-movie - the actors on stage mimicking the movie on screens. It was very clever - the mimicking of the movie was quite precise, and the opera slotted together well. Occasionally, there was a cross-over between the two - the astronauts became the opera chorus, and Dido had a few lines of dialogue in the movie, too.
It was very high tech - there were surtitles for both the Italian opera and the American B-movie, and the movie played out on several tv screens whilst the actors mimicked it on stage. At times the actors were spookily in time with the movie - their hands dipping behind a monitor of hands manipulating the meteor reflector, for instance. And it was very enjoyable - there was a lot of humour.
But I couldn't get passed the idea that someone had thought this was a good idea - but they hadn't quite thought why. I didn't know what it was for - why mixing the two genres together would make for a good play.
The B-movie seemed mainly ironic - it felt like a 6th form play where the idea was much more interesting than the execution. The opera sounded gorgeous - to my untrained ears, all the cast (opera performers and astronauts) could sing - but the opera might have gained by being taken seriously.
So for me, ultimately, it didn't work - a fun, but rather pointless, experiment.
The first show I went to this year was On Danse by Compagnie Montalvo-Hervieu - being French, I assume the title is translated as one dances. This was a fascinating mixture of video and dance - and the dance was a fascinating mixture of classical, modern, street (body popping, acrobatics), African, mime... I must have missed something out, too, because it had just about everything thrown in.
The video was really interesting. Throughout the show, projected onto the back drop, were rather wonderful computer generated images. The company was established as a collaboration between a chorographer and a video artist. The video was as much a part of the show as the live dancers, and there was a lot of interaction between the two. The dancers carried video elephants, balancing on string; they held up pyramids of giant nudes; they were chased across the stage by video lions and video rabbits - giant rabbits. The way the real and the video interacted was very well done - the performance was very cleverly staged, so that it appeared that apes crawled over the dancers.
But the cleverness may also have been the shows undoing. There was such a mixture of styles, so much going on at any one time, that it was dizzying, and I was sure I was missing something: wherever I looked, I thought something more interesting might be going on elsewhere on the stage.
In the ensemble pieces, the dance styles clashed - they lacked coherence. I craved simplicity. And it came: my favourite piece involved a dancer walking across the stage, and then through the auditorium, trailing a long line of horse-shaped helium balloons, which obediently followed him in orderly circles. It showed up the over-rich diet of the rest of the show.
The low point for me were the several spoken word sections. This was a dance show. Why were they talking to me? Doubly irritating is that they were telling me they were bad dancers. I could see they weren't. They may have been not as good as some of the others, but they weren't bad. And it annoyed me that they were telling me they were. And I really didn't want to know what drove them to dance - don't tell me, show me.
This was such an over-rich, busy performance that it waned quickly. Once the novelty of so many styles, so much imaginative video, so much to look at, had died off, it became boring. After an hour, I wanted it to end; I had another thirty minutes to wait. If it had stopped at forty five minutes, they'd have left me wanting more. As it was, I couldn't leave fast enough, which I think is rather sad.
Still, the giant nude trampolining looked fun.
A week later, I went to my next dance piece - the Royal Flanders Ballet, performing William Forsythe's ballet, Impressing the Czar. Dating from the late 1980s, this was danced to a soundtrack of Beethoven, treated Beethoven, and mechanical sounds. The dancing was exquisite - it was really beautiful to look at. The dance also mixed up styles, but they were all performed from a classical perspective, albeit with a modern twist.
The first half was also very busy - beautiful, but busy. And it had spoken word in it - two of the dancers, narrating their position and warbling on about Mr Peanut, a character on television. That jarred, obviously.
So did the music - well, some of the music. The Beethoven was lovely, though loud; but the treated sounds didn't fit - and why bastardise Beethoven? Did Forsythe really think he could improve on the original?
The second half was sparser - both the dancing, and the set - a bare stage with only white light. And the music was reduced to chords of noises set against a rhythm. The dancing was excellent - solo, duet and ensemble dances were wonderful, and exciting. True, I have no idea what it was about - the second half seemed much more abstract than the first, but I have no idea what the first half was about, either.
But the noise got to me, and half an hour into the second half, I had had enough. I left. I can't remember when I last walked out of a piece of dance - and it is true that had I not been close to the aisle - there was only one person between me and a walk to the cool air outside - I would have stayed in my seat; but I didn't. I got up and walked out. (Of course, I may have missed something amazing. But rather I missed it than I suffered a headache, frankly.)
[Indeed, reading reviews, it turned out I missed a whole other piece, a third part to the performance. But it really was time to leave.]
Finally, last Wednesday I went to the theatre. I don't often go to the theatre; I used to go a lot (indeed, I have spent a lot of my life working in [amateur] theatre), but I rarely go now. Usually, it is because I am lazy. And then I read about things, and I think “I must go!”, only to miss the final performance. But the Wooster Group are famous - at least, they are in my world; so I made an effort to see them. They were performing La Didone. It was only when I read a review in the paper ahead of the performance that I realised quite what the performance would entail: a mashing together of an opera of the story of Dido and Aeneas with an acting out of a 1965 B-movie, “Planet of the Vampires”. My heart sank. It rose when I saw the set - lots of scaffolding, white light, and screens - my kind of non-set.
It opened with some of the opera (I don't know much about opera, so I can't tell you much - I only worked out who the main characters were - Dido, Aeneas, and Iarbas), and then some cod-astronauts walked onto the stage. The action in the opera was played out against the B-movie - the actors on stage mimicking the movie on screens. It was very clever - the mimicking of the movie was quite precise, and the opera slotted together well. Occasionally, there was a cross-over between the two - the astronauts became the opera chorus, and Dido had a few lines of dialogue in the movie, too.
It was very high tech - there were surtitles for both the Italian opera and the American B-movie, and the movie played out on several tv screens whilst the actors mimicked it on stage. At times the actors were spookily in time with the movie - their hands dipping behind a monitor of hands manipulating the meteor reflector, for instance. And it was very enjoyable - there was a lot of humour.
But I couldn't get passed the idea that someone had thought this was a good idea - but they hadn't quite thought why. I didn't know what it was for - why mixing the two genres together would make for a good play.
The B-movie seemed mainly ironic - it felt like a 6th form play where the idea was much more interesting than the execution. The opera sounded gorgeous - to my untrained ears, all the cast (opera performers and astronauts) could sing - but the opera might have gained by being taken seriously.
So for me, ultimately, it didn't work - a fun, but rather pointless, experiment.