Surprise package
Giannandre a Poesio
Kammer Kammer, Ballet Frankfurt Sadler's Wells
William Forsythe challenges the common perception of what a ballet performance should be like. This talent remains one of the most identifiable and popular traits of his choreography. When his celebrated Steptext was premiered in Italy in the early 1980s, some viewers found it difficult to cope with a performance that had started before they entered the auditorium. Twenty years on, the amusingly chaotic curtain-up action that takes place while patrons take their seats does not puzzle or irritate any longer. On the contrary, it is almost expected.
Forsythe's new work, Kammer Kammer, portrays the usually tension-ridden, frantic last-minute preparations we make before watching a performance. Dancers mill around, now disappearing into, now emerging from, a maze of chambers with shifting partitions, while a stage manager keeps making all sorts of funny and irritating noises. When the lights finally go down, hinting at a possible 'traditional' beginning of the performance, it becomes clear that the difference between what went on in the pre-performance section and what goes on once the auditorium is in the dark is actually minimal.
Forsythe is arguably today's stereotypical renaissance man, for his works are a true interdisciplinary amalgam of different performance modes, which draw upon critical practice, literary theory, postmodernism, semiology, psychoanalysis, literature, chaos theory, physics, media etc. Unlike the stereotype, however, Forsythe manages to propose all of this in an intriguingly, and somewhat irritatingly, accessible way. Instead of overwhelming his audience with what could easily become a self-indulgent display of his vast knowledge, he jokingly offers some of the most cerebral concepts through images and situations of extraordinary immediacy.
Kammer Kammer stems from the combined adaptation of two recent writings, namely Anne Carson's Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My life As Catherine Deneuve (2nd Draft) and Douglas A. Martin's Outline of My Lover. Despite their different content, the two writings address similar themes of homosexual love and desire; the narrative rests cleverly on a continuous interaction between the two stories. The result is two plays within a play — one that started before the arrival of the public — in which the enacted text is complemented by some splendid dancing and by continuous projections. The numerous screens that appear as soon as the house lights go down provide close-up, bird's-eye and morphed views of both the performers and the performance, thus revealing what goes on in different and not always visible sections of the maze-like scene.
This device is clever, for it takes away the viewer's focus of attention by fragmenting the action itself, in a typically Forsythe way. Yet once the first 30 minutes are over, this process becomes tiresome, and it is only the now-comic, nowintense interwoven storylines that keep up the interest of the viewer. Indeed, much depends also on the utterly splendid and engaging performances of the two main actors. Dana Caspersen and Antony Rizzi, as well as the equally splendid contributions by the rest of the company.
To some people, all the acting, the filming (which is live) and the intentionally now-you-see-me-now-you-don't dancing might come across as an utterly infuriating hotchpotch of ideas. I also felt somehow betrayed by the occasional triteness of some of the ideas, which plunged me backwards in time to the good old days of the early European avant-garde. Yet I was also enthralled by the intentionally provocative impact of the whole work, as well as by its perfectly balanced combination of apparently carefree humour and artistic depth.
Kammer Kammer is not likely to leave anyone bored, for it manages to provoke a reaction — whether sheer joy or raging fury is not important. Call me a romantic, but to me that means good theatre. It is also the last work Forsythe has created under the umbrella of the Ballet Frankfurt, for his collaboration with the Frankfurt Oper and Schauspiel has come to an end thanks to a series of political, artistic and bureaucratic misunderstandings. Still it is anything but a swansong and makes one look forward ardently to what will come next.
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