German Ballet: A triple bill exploring light, sound and silence

Portrait Richard Siegal
Bavarian State Ballet Nationaltheater
Munich September 21

American choreographer Richard Siegal has had a successful career particularly in Europe and his recent triple bill in Munich featured work he has created over the past three years.

The enigmatic title may indicate that the three works provide a portrait of the choreographer but equally it could be a portrait of the dance company or maybe a portrait of the universal individual.

The unifying element of the three dances was light. It was an ever present force; it was the dual nature of light and dark and throughout the programme; it was the carefully directed light which illuminated the dancers as they passed in and out of the surrounding darkness.

This notion of light and dark was paralleled with another concept much used by the choreographer, that of noise and silence. These visual and aural aspects were the driving force behind much of the dance.

In the first on the programme “Unitxt” two long neon tubes – one blue, one red – descend onto the stage providing two nodes of light like force fields as though they were providing a reference and guiding point for the dancers.

In the second work “Landscape” a ball of light moves across the stage above the dancers. At times it raced about like a small meteorite, at other times it hovered and darted. It was both a mysterious dance of light as well as something of a metaphor for the idea of creativity and inspiration.

“Unitxt” featured a large screen filling the stage with a metre gap below the screen which allowed the dancers to enter and exit. The screen was blank for the most part but each sequence of the dance was begun with huge projected words which slid across the screen – noise, signal, silence. These three words gave a hint about the construction of the dance; the noise of the soundscape; the signalling of the dancers cutting through the silence of the auditorium; and, the silence existing between the participants.

The dance was accompanied by a soundscape by Carsten Nicola and Alva Noto which was the driving force of the work. Combining electronic music, white noise, club and rap beats, the dancers responded with a mixture of the robotic and the puppet-like. They appeared to follow a series of random, elaborate movements impelled by the music – marching, stopping abruptly, sauntering, posing – their almost ritualistic movement akin to the endless perambulations of figures in a video game and similar to the morphing abstract figures of Gregory Bennett's elaborate videos.

As with much in the programme, many of the sequences had a cinematic quality with references to films such as Metropolis. The music which was aggressive, sharp and fragmented was mirrored in the dancer’s angular postures and rapid changes in pace, the men parading with massive flexing of the shoulders. Classical poses intersected with taut modern movement and great emphasis was placed on backward movements. The duos and other combinations, where they existed, were taut mechanical meetings, eschewing any emotional connections and closer to acrobatic displays than dance.

In the second work “Landscape” the dancers initially appeared to be covered in full tattoo, but this was soon revealed as abstract body suits which could have been designed by Roy Lichtenstein. They danced as though they were primitive life forms or lizard-like creatures, every movement carefully considered and articulated. It was as though the dancers were taking inspiration from closely observing creatures in the natural world. The dancers seemed to exude an inner energy emphasised by the John Cage-like composition of Carstyen Nicolai and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The energy reached a peak half way through the work and then the dancers seemed to merely repeat their moves without any reflection or reworking, undermining the initial strength of the work. 

The final work “Metric Dozen” continued the theme of light with the dancers initially being randomly and briefly spot lit. They appeared to be figures in an abstract tableaux; some of them standing in the cones of light, others walking into or out of the cones, providing a dance about the spaces between events and dramatic moments. There was a cinematic quality, with the dancers’ pedestrian like gait interrupted, sometimes to freeze frame, speeded up and also rewinding.

At times it seemed that some of the dancers were responding to the music in different ways, some of them in time, others missing beats and rhythms, a technique which emphasised the relationship between music and movement. Much of the time the throbbing sounds seemed to electrify the dancers and there were dexterous and fluid sequences hinted at brief slices of narrative. At times the bodies twisted and gyrated, thrown and stretched creating a brilliant display of light, limbs and torsos.

The set for “Metric Dozen” consisted of two large white walls which were moved a number of times throughout the dance to create rooms, corners, passageways, interruptions. This meant the dancers were continually forced to move in different formations and directions.