Dance That Invites You to Join In

At the Festspielhaus in St. Pölten, the audience was treated to a dance celebration of a very special kind with Belgian director Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe. The Austrian premiere of Chapters of Celebration, which he brought to the stage together with musician and composer Wouter Deltour, as well as six different choreographies and six dancers, turned into an exuberant join-in dance session by the end.

In his brief introduction, Meirhaeghe radiated a great deal of warmth which, as it turned out, was mirrored and returned in equal measure by everyone on stage. It is rare to perceive an ensemble – especially one so large in number – as so uniformly likeable as was the case this evening.

The very first entrance came as a surprise: thirteen people entered the hall from offstage playing flutes and slowly making their way towards the stage. In an instant one felt transported back by millennia. True, they were not auloi being blown but delicate, single-pipe flutes, yet it was easy to imagine the sounds one might have heard in antiquity when festivals – whether theatrical or athletic in nature – were opened with them.

The seating arrangement was particularly intimate for the audience, with the rows placed directly on the stage, arranged in a square close around the dance floor, so that one found oneself in immediate contact with the dancers. The individual choreographies were by Michele Rizzo, Cherish Menzo, Lasseindra Ninja, Iker Karrera, Jeremy Nedd and Toni Jodar, who also danced himself that evening. They were announced by artistically designed, colourful boards which – like the round cards at boxing matches – were carried onto the stage by hand and held up there.

The director had invoked two fundamental points of departure for this production: first, to bring a kaleidoscope of dance from its origins to the present day onto the stage, and second, to take account of one principal musical motif in doing so: La Folia, a musical form of expression whose origins lie in Portugal as a dance and which above all inspired composers of the Baroque and afterwards to write pieces of their own. This original round dance, which builds up to the point of ecstasy, changed over the course of the centuries. Always, however – as was readily apparent this evening – this happened with the aim of intensifying the dance until it reached a point beyond which no further intensification was possible.

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The B’Rock Orchestra played corresponding compositions by Wouter Deltour, who acted as conductor and musician at the same time. In Andrea Jiménez Vásquez on percussion and Asako Ueda on guitar he can draw on two masters of their craft, who command their instruments at the very highest musical level.

In a quite unique way, the two women were also woven choreographically into the action on the dance floor. Asako Ueda physically pursued the dancers with her wild, rhythmically lashing sounds on the guitar, while Andrea Jiménez Vásquez, armed with castanets, delivered an intoxicating pas de deux with Emiel Vandenberghe. The classical ballet interlude he danced is without equal, not least because of the dancer's physical attractiveness.

He need not shy away from comparison with ancient statues whose depictions of beauty were regarded as idealised. Vandenberghe's physical condition, however, is not idealised but real, and therefore incredibly impressive. His control of his body and the chosen choreography, with many leaps in a confined space, were among the highlights of the production.

Eleni Ellada Damianou delivered a contrasting solo. Whereas Vandenberghe's pale skin positively glowed seductively out of the stage during his appearance, her solo was embedded in darkness. Mystical, enigmatic and as if in a dark cocoon, her dance with its many floor movements could be sensed more than followed.

A deliciously humorous intermezzo was achieved with a ballet of lights which, in the complete absence of dancers, delighted the audience. The sequence in which Patric da Cunha, Alphonse Eklou Uwantege and Eleni Ellada Damianou imitated cyber-beings to a hard techno beat picked up on current developments in robotics. At the present stage one can no longer be certain to what extent these artificial beings are also capable of feeling emotions. Frozen laughter at the beginning and faces contorted with pain at the end of this sequence pointed precisely to this problem.

Patric da Cunha's solo, with microphones fitted into the heels of his shoes and on one of his calves, likewise referred to AI, which is beginning to control human beings themselves physically. The way his legs took on a life of their own and forced contorted poses upon him touched the spectators almost physically. Marco Donnarumma worked with comparable technical means a year ago in Graz's Dom im Berg, where he too, as a cyber figure, triggered a strong sense of empathy in the audience.

The final appearance was introduced, as was the very first, by Toni Jodar, who drew the audience's attention in a highly mimetic manner. In his last solo he interacted as a mentor, guiding Guillem Jiménez onto the stage as if by magic. His solo performance was joined by his male colleagues and his female colleague, until finally, in a round dance, the audience too was invited to join in. Within moments many followed this ‘invitation to the dance' and thus experienced what Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe's chief intention for the evening had been: to create together something that is not possible alone. In dancing together one could experience that human beings need other human beings, and that in doing so energies arise which would not be possible alone. This was felt not only by those dancing exuberantly in a circle on the dance floor, but also by those who had remained in their seats. Applause that would not end amply proved as much.