Breathtaking French dance

May B
Maguy Marin
Aotea Centre
Until March 12

The world of May B is the world of Samuel Beckett, a world where the inhabitants respond to savage external forces and their own internal demons.

The work conjures up the absurdity, the pain and the loss of the human condition, relieved only by brief emotional and physical contact. We even meet some of the Beckett characters – Pozo, Lucky, Ham and Krapp. They continue to live in a state where the future always holds out hope but is never realised. The final coda of Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet from the Gavin Bryars song reinforces the notion of no redemption

That world may have a sound track of Schubert but the dancers do not necessarily engage with the music; they are buffeted and compelled by it. The music becomes a ferocious external force, which at times drives them, and at other times is an impediment.

May B is a work that might be loosely called a dance of the absurd. The characters we see on stage could be members of the Chareton mental institution performing one of de Sade's versions of Beckett in which they are lost souls only responding to outside forces, having lost their own desires.

In the opening sequences the dancers shuffle about, seemingly following the markings laid out for them on the stage, as though their dance patterns are programmed or that they are following unseen force fields.

Their initial dancing see them performing as though they are under the spell of the music and they behave as though they were atomic particles under huge magnetic impulses or flocks of birds following some primordial instincts; ebbing and flowing like a single organism.

In the sequences where martial music is played the dancers respond with regimental precision reminiscent of marching girls, cheerleaders and the pomp of American and Indian military routines.

The various ways in which the company responds to the musical soundscape ranges from total engagement where the music seems to impel them to a response which has them virtually under attack by the music.

Throughout the work the dancers display a rough elegance with their movements almost parodying the movements of classical and contemporary dance. They can move like a line of classical swans, can roll and race like modern athletic dancers but there is always an element of humour and novelty to what they do.

This is a wondrous performance of extraordinary engagement with music and other dancers. The audience held its breath for two hours, transfixed and transported by the evolving carnival of life.