Philippe Blanchard lets the audience come and go as they please
Updated 14.13 | Published 13.48
“The Upheaval” at the Art Museum in Kungsparken, Malmö
The audience comes slouching in the evening sun, about when it’s about to start. The place in front of the former Casino in Kungsparken in Malmö is slowly being populated. We sit down on the ground, remain standing or roam slowly. Who are among us performing? Who are we as an audience to watch, is the question. The guy sitting on the edge between the planting and the fountain bowl must be a dancer. No visitor would sit there. The girl leaning against a pole, the angle of her body is strange, hardly comfortable. The ladies who stand in the middle and talk, on the other hand, seem both unaware and unconcerned that they are actually in our focus.
It’s cool. The audience has been invited in advance to come and go as they please. However, we wait in silence with our attention at peak. Now the girl has collapsed in an excessively fractured position. Behind her, a guy sometimes sinks, sometimes clings to the Casino’s wall. I count six dancers but am unsure if there aren’t more. The bodily shifts take place unnoticed and extremely slowly, a kind of stop motion but without the redemptive flow of animation, but they draw us into expectations of what is going on.
Skåne Dansteaters “The Upheaval” starts outside and continues inside the huge and empty former Casino premises. It is a site-specific work and the atmosphere in the room is palpable, heavy as in a novel by Marguerite Durassaturated with poetic obscurity.
Every dancer is different. In silence and soundlessly on the all-covering dark carpet, sometimes changing the direction of the body. Arms and hands twisted from the body, into contorted positions of passion and suffering or simply outstretched. The audience moves as before, finds a place for an overview, moves closer, changes sides in the huge room with large windows facing the tall trees in the park.
Skånes Dansteater is an institution with a fixed stage in Malmö but which tours both in the region and internationally. Accessibility, inclusion and collaborations distinguish operations and repertoire. “The Upheaval” is a collaboration with Malmö Art Museum and Malmö Summer Stage and the French-Swedish choreographer Philippe Blanchards activism as an eco-artist is palpable in the aesthetics. No lighting, no props, no music or imposed sound. Only the dancers in the lavishly dimensioned room.
So grows and disappears time as we witness, and contribute to, a subtle movement through the room from one side to the other. Is this displacement the “upheaval” that the title “The Upheaval”, if ironically, refers to? A tossing that never takes place, that suffocates in each one’s solitude, that in the absence of context ends in dissolution and in us dispersing, each in his own direction? No, there is no irony here. Rather, the consistency and tightness of the choreographic approach arouses thoughts about the whole, which is about participation and the effects of participation, and those thoughts linger.
DANCE
» The Upheaval
by Philippe Blanchard
Choreography: Philippe Blanchard and the ensemble
Suit: Christina Neuss
Dramaturgy & lighting: Maika Knoblich
Cast: Tomáš Červinka, Samuel Denton, Hazuki Kojima, Facundo Ebenegger, Michael Marquez, Amanda Pang, Marion Rastouil
Scene: Scania’s dance theater at the Art Museum in Kungsparken, Malmö
Playing time: 3 hours
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